Atwoods Sows the Seeds for Ecommerce Growth with Znode

Situation

Atwoods Ranch & Home is a leading farm and ranch supply retailer headquartered in Oklahoma. With 72 brick-and-mortar stores in five states, Atwoods aimed to increase the organization's online sales by 400%.

Challenge

To increase online sales by that magnitude, Atwoods needed to address core challenges in its existing ecommerce strategy. Atwoods needed to improve the customer experience with a more modern shopping experience featuring site search and search result filtering capabilities. Having a small ecommerce team, Atwoods also needed an efficient, scalable, and easily managed platform without needing multiple customizations. Furthermore, the retailer sought to expand its current SKU count with over 120,000 additional SKUs, a 150% increase to the product catalog, to boost sales opportunities.

To further enhance the customer experience, Atwoods wanted to expand its shipping options for customers placing ecommerce orders, including ship-to-home, in-store pick-up, and split shipments. To achieve such a diverse shipping offering integrations to third-party business systems was a necessity to the Atwoods’ ecommerce team. The retailer’s ecommerce team also utilized promotions to drive increased conversions, so a robust promotion engine was a necessary ecommerce platform requirement. 

Lastly, Atwoods needed product information management capabilities to streamline category buildout and product attribution within the ecommerce platform. Another critical requirement was delivering sub-1 second page load times and processing orders quickly to reduce shopping cart abandonment on its prior ecommerce platform. Ultimately, the retailer searched for an ecommerce platform with B2B functionality that was flexible, high performing, and easy to manage with a small, in-house ecommerce team.

Solution

Atwoods found the ecommerce platform to meet its complex challenges and to hit its growth targets in Znode. Znode’s native PIM system provided Atwoods with the configuration and flexibility to execute modern product data processes. It allows the retailer to quickly import products to achieve its SKU count goal. The configurability of the Znode PIM system also enabled Atwoods to manage product restrictions, like determining if products are available for sale online or offered in-store only.

The retailer achieved its multiple shipping option requirement with Znode’s ability to manage multiple shipping methods and easily integrate them into third-party business systems used for logistics management. Atwoods valued the ability to split orders and use its physical stores as warehouses for pickup-at-store products. Orders can also be shipped directly to customers from a centralized distribution center.

Furthermore, Atwoods utilized the Znode Commerce Connector to integrate multiple different business systems to extend the functionality of Znode to meet its requirements. Those integrated business systems include:

• Epicor Eagle for enterprise resource planning system
• PayEezy for payment capture
• Signifyd for fraud prevention
• Shipper HQ and ShipStation for shipping management
• Avalara for tax management and address validation

Finally, the small Atwoods ecommerce team appreciated the centralization of ecommerce management with Znode. Atwoods saw significantly enhanced storefront performance over its previous ecommerce platform and could easily manage promotions using Znode’s promotions engine. Znode’s native functionality and API-first architecture allow the retailer to address all business requirements without excessive customization.