Their Story
Since 1929, Metro has been optimizing work environments to be as productive as possible by observing customers’ challenges and providing solutions. They strive to make your healthcare, food service, or commercial business more organized and efficient. They have the ability to understand their customers needs and match a solution to solve their problem. This has proven to have a positive impact on not only their business but their customers’ businesses as well.
They started with the industry standard for wire shelving and have evolved into a supplier of an array of products that focus on custom manufacturing products to match their application-specific solutions. For Metro, it is important to have a website that easily showcases these products.
The Problem: Catering to Three Different Demographics
Metro wanted a BigCommerce website design showing their brand focused aesthetics with clear messages of the Metro advantage. This website would also need custom functionality, so users would be able to select a preferred industry, create an account, and browse industry-specific products. One additional hurdle was that they wanted to provide customers with a quote for their order instead of allowing them to purchase directly through the website.
It was important to create a user experience that was tailored to their product offering, while still using a custom process of buying from Metro that was easy and enjoyable. The design needed to integrate well with various existing third party apps. The website had to show three industry experiences with clear call to actions, integrate a faceted search, custom blog and updated SEO content sections.
The Solution: A Fully Customized Unique BigCommerce Site
IntuitSolutions’ comprehensive Custom BigCommerce Design & Responsive Development Package included everything needed to implement a truly custom design on BigCommerce. We worked collaboratively with them to create a user experience that is specifically tailored to their product offering. One that speaks to their customer base while making shopping easy and enjoyable.
Three Sites In One
Since Metro caters to vastly different markets, the product offerings are split into three areas; food service, healthcare and industrial. The three industries are designed and customized into individual “mini sites”. However, each branch is not its own website, but is designed to feel that way to customers. The information for each industry is displayed in a highly functioning and modern design. The use of three different colors to represent each industry and interchangeable content makes the website more streamlined and user friendly.
Due to the split within the website, a custom mega menu was designed and implemented to change along with which industry someone is browsing. The colors stay consistent to the industry and the category headings change to fit the associated products. This is surely a one-of-a-kind mega menu to fit only Metro.
Faceted Search
Faceted search allows your customers to find what they need without too much guesswork by applying a series of filters to narrow down products. There was an overlap of some products, so faceted search functionality and site search functionality was carefully crafted for Metro.
If your website has a large amount of items, this search function helps your customers narrow their options and find what they’re looking for. Adding faceted search can boost your conversion rates and help your customers navigate through your website faster. With faceted search, you are able to ensure the right filters are available to customers which is exactly what Metro was looking for.
No Online Purchases
Purchasing functionality is disabled, so the site would need to rely on functionality provided by the QuoteNinja application. Metro’s choice to only allow customers to receive an online quote was motivated by their expertise in the field to ensure customers are choosing the correct products for their application. Since many orders tend to be large quantities, they as a company, feel safer and believe they can deliver a better quality service by not offering ecommerce goods.
SEO Improvements
BigCommerce has several SEO features right out of the box allowing you to reach your audience and sell more on BigCommerce. With SEO, you can rank higher on search engines, attract an audience, offer valuable content and improve user experience. Every page of Metro.com has an SEO optimized title tag, meta description, contains keyword targets, and unique crawlable content. Metro has done a great job taking advantage of these features and focusing on their BigCommerce SEO.
The Results
We combined our ecommerce, design, and search engine optimization expertise to create a unique design for Metro.com. These designs were tailored to fit their unique website with three “departments” and no ecommerce functionality. We optimized their site with customers in mind to ensure they have the best experience possible. After the launch of Metro’s new custom website, they have been receiving an increase in product interest which ultimately leads to more sales. Metro has continued to work with IntuitSolutions by signing up for BigCommerce Site Optimization & Support services where we focus on support with ongoing development projects.
As a leader in Custom Designed and Developed BigCommerce websites, IntuitSolutions is here to help you reach your dream website. It is recommended that websites be updated about every 2 years to keep up with the advancements in web and ecommerce best practices. So, if you find yourself starting to lag behind your competitors, contact us or call us at 1-866-901-4650 for a consultation today!
