PCNA promotes multi-channel ecommerce with Znode
Situation
Polyconcept North America (PCNA) is a leading supplier in the promotional products industry. The business provides decoration services and is responsible for 600,000 annual orders from over 20,000 distributors.
PCNA invested in digital transformation to better serve its customers and distribution partners.
Challenge
PCNA was on a legacy platform that lacked contemporary ecommerce functionality and had been highly customized over many years. The continued enhancements were costly, increasing the total cost of ownership and limiting the company's ability to grow at scale.
As PCNA approached digital transformation, the businesses' needs changed. The ability to manage multiple brands in one experience and under the PCNA brand became a priority. Additionally, the ability to empower distribution partners with stores and execute a B2B2X multi-store ecommerce strategy also became a priority. Of course, these priorities were in addition to modern merchandising tools such as site search and a business-friendly CMS.
PCNA also needed to reduce the total cost of ownership and the frequent, expensive, and complex upgrades common in monolithic ecommerce platforms. A flexible and scalable platform was desired to offer personalized customer segmentation for distribution channels and end-buyers, including unique catalogs by segment or account. The supplier required multiple accounts for customer users to toggle between to view product details and pricing associated with a specific account.
Solution
After assessing several ecommerce platforms against 150 different requirements, PCNA selected Znode as the enterprise ecommerce platform to manage its B2B and B2B2X business models.
Znode provided the promotional products supplier with advanced multi-store capabilities. PCNA could configure shopping for its primary B2B storefront and several thousand white-label storefronts. The white-label storefronts were optimized for distributors to spin up in minutes. White-label shoppers could conveniently view a personalized assortment of PCNA products and place a quote with the distributor for products of interest.
PCNA optimized the buyers’ experience through Znode’s native site search, simplifying product identification. Shoppers were given control over search filters to create multi-faceted searches, allowing all relevant products to populate regardless of multiple product title variations. Znode’s configuration capabilities were also maximized to create a streamlined digital purchasing process for all buyers, even with complex product customizations. In addition, PCNA integrated Artifi Labs, a product customization tool and sister product to Znode, to enhance the product display.
Site performance for PCNA storefronts improved with Znode’s API caching features. Increased logins, faster load times, increased pages per session, reduced bounce rates, and increased product page visits were just a few of the results PCNA experienced after transitioning to Znode.
Znode became the center of commerce for PCNA. The platform allowed the company to grow at scale and manage its B2B and B2B2X commerce sites centrally while allowing for future consolidation of platforms into Znode.