Tornado was established over 5 decades ago and are focused on high quality animal fencing. Tornado’s factory is on the edge of the English Lake District, with modern facilities and extensive manufacturing and warehousing space. They have the widest range of animal fencing and keep large quantities of stock.

They supply their products through a large network of distributors and dealers in the U.K., Europe and USA.

Tornado’s existing website was over 5 years old and needed to be modernised. The new site needed to:

• Be modern and visual.
• Cope with an enormous number of different SKU’s.
• Searching would need to work brilliantly as customers search by product, animal and application type to find what they need.
• Be easy to use for all customers who don’t usually search online for fencing products.
• Enable the very experienced partner network to order online what they want when they want it.

CEO, Peter Hogg hired Katie into Marketing and the mission to build a new website was launched. The accounting system also needed to be upgraded and moved to the cloud at the same time, a new catalogue of products created as well as lots of new content for the website.

Peter and Katie talked to the team at Julian Bowen who is also a  GOb2b™ customer about their experience of introducing a Gob2bTM portal…

To add to the complexity, this was to be GOb2b™’s first Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central integration and we also had a new, growing team.

We all understood we had a challenge on our hands and agreed that regular communication would be key to the successful delivery of this project.

But, with a good recommendation under their belts, Katie and Peter trusted that GOb2b™ would deliver.

Tornado chose GOb2b™’s unique eCommerce platform which gave them a very visual, feature rich website that makes it easy for customers to search across products, by animal and application type and filter these easily to choose what they need.

GOb2b™ is fully integrated with their Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central accounting software to sync orders, stock information, product data, customer records and pricing.

Katie says, “Some customers are used to purchasing online and are very high tech, but many of our customers don’t do this regularly so our search feature is a real benefit and works brilliantly.”

“We have used all the GOb2b™ templates and their content manager so we are in control of all the literature and products on the site and can do this ourselves which saves time and money.”

We had to create lots of new content and a new catalogue. We also launched a whole new product category of steel fencing posts during go-live as well. Being able to easily and rapidly upload our up to date products was key for us.”

SAVE TIME & MONEY

We rely heavily on our dealer network and they can now find the products they want when they want them. They can see their pricing and stock levels and can order online. Orders are then automatically placed into our accounts system and processed without the need for manual interventions.

Both GOb2b™ and our accounting system are hosted in the cloud so we don’t have to manage the infrastructure which saves us time and money and makes life much easier for us.

“We really like the GOb2b™ subscription pricing model which meant we didn’t have to put up a lot of upfront investment. Our online sales can grow progressively as our customers adopt this way of working.”

The site looks great and there is lots of literature to explain our products to our customers.

IMPROVED SEARCH FEATURE

Customers often search in different ways for our products, they search by application type, by animal type and by specific product type. The search feature on our site is great and our customers love how easy it is to use.

Searching by animal type

Searching by product type

BUILT TO GROW

The GOb2b™ platform creates sites which are built to last with regular updates as part of the monthly fee as well as support from our team of experts during the life-time of your site.

“Now the main site is live and our customers are using it, we are looking to add more features as we go. We want to use the GOb2b™ App so that our customers can use barcodes to scan and order even more easily. We’ve added our special products and pallet quantities since go-live and next will be an interactive ‘dealer map’ of where to buy for end customers looking at our products.”

“We knew this project was a ‘big ask’ for everyone involved. We wanted to create the literature and content first rather than the product catalogue and this is not the usual project method, so everyone had to be flexible on delivery in a different sequence.”

“With so many new systems to implement all at the same time, we certainly explored new horizons together, not everything fits into a neat round hole. The GOb2b™ team are absolutely great, took everything in their stride, we communicated a lot and got to know each other well on our many phone calls together.”

“Challenges make you stronger, but we always trusted that between us we would deliver.”

Tornado is on track with phase 1 with customers signing up in a controlled way but very happy with the new site.

Tornado will begin to use the powerful analytics on the site and will add promotions and sales alerting so that the sales team can see who is ordering and when.

Now, working with GOb2b™ they have plans to further the benefits of promotions, alternatives and suggestions throughout the customer ordering and checkout process.