Metro

Project Summary

InterMetro Industries Corporation (Metro) is one of the world's leading manufacturers of high-quality, commercial-grade shelving units, offering specialized storage solutions for the Foodservice, Healthcare and Commercial/Industrial industries. Prior to the redesign, Metro’s site functioned primarily as an informative catalog, offering information on how and where to purchase their wide array of products. Back in 2019, Metro wanted to improve upon their online catalog by offering a more streamlined quoting process with the implementation of B2B Ninja (formerly Quote Ninja, before being acquired by BigCommerce in 2022). They also wanted to improve upon the user experience by segmenting their catalog into the three specific industries they service.

Three Industries, One Solution

Metro’s product catalog is vast, offering specialized solutions for three distinct industries, Foodservice, Healthcare and Commercial/Industrial. They wanted to improve the shopping experience for users by segmenting their catalog by industry serviced . Metro’s branding guidelines assign primary colors that denotes each industry. Our team wanted to make sure we leveraged the industry specific colors strategically throughout the designs, in order to better indicate which industry a user was browsing at any given time.

The Best Deal Possible

One of the primary milestones Metro wanted to achieve involed streamlining the online quoting process. Metro does not allow products to be purchased directly from their eCommerce store. Since most buyers purchased in large quantities, Metro wanted to make sure buyers were confident in their purchase prior to committing. They also wanted to make sure buyers received the best price, by offering purchasing options from trusted third-party dealers.

Quoting, Like a Ninja

The old Metro eCommerce quoting process user flow was narrowed down to a simple form buyers would fill out in order to obtain a quote for the products they were interested in purchasing. My team observed a number of issues with this approach, as the form only allowed buyers to select the category of the products they were interested in purchasing, as opposed to the specific products. This resulted in more work for sales reps, as they would have to contact the potential buyer, then gain additional insight regarding the specific products the buyer was interested in purchasing, before reps were able to provide them with an accurate quote.

By building out their catalog on the BigCommerce platform and with the help of the B2B Ninja quoting solution, Metro was able to alleviate a lot of the roadblocks their sales reps and users were facing with the simple “quote form” approach. By following a more traditional and standard eCommerce user flow and thanks to functionality enabled by B2B Ninja, users and buyers were now able to:

• View up-to-date pricing for all products directly from the Metro eCommerce catalog.
• Add items to their cart/quote, which allowed buyers the ability to make adjustments prior to submitting the quote for review.
• View and adjust previously submitted quotes via an intuitive GUI.
• Ensure they were receiving accurate pricing based on their location, as Metro sales reps would work with preferred third-party dealers within the buyer's country in order to provide buyers with the most accurate quote pricing possible.

Custom Products, Custom Content

Full visual control of page content was possible for the Metro team thanks to the implementation of the FASTR Creator Studio (formerly ZMags Creator) content builder. FASTR allows eCommerce managers and users with seemingly little to no development knowledge the ability to create sleek and engaging content pages easily. My team researched the platform’s capabilities and limitations, and provided example content templates the Metro team could use as reference for their custom content sections.

Onwards and Upwards

It was a privilege to be a part of the talented team that assisted Metro with their revitalized eCommerce experience. Metro continues to see success and increased traffic thanks to our efforts and the recent implementation of a 3D product customizer. They were also still on an active design and development retainer with my previous agency years after the completion of this project. I’ve reached out to a contact at Metro regarding sales, conversions and traffic metrics spanning from 2020 to 2024. I will update this post as soon as I receive the data.