Custom Truck Equipment
Owning the store beats renting shelf space from Amazon.
A truck equipment dealer selling on marketplaces it didn’t control, and a headless storefront that put 16,023 parts, ten systems, and the customer relationship under one roof they own.
SERVICES:
eCommerce Strategy UX/UI Design Headless Development Systems Integration
THE PROBLEM
Custom Truck Equipment, the parts arm of North American Truck and Trailer, sells serious equipment: snowplows, toolboxes, hydraulics, the parts that keep working trucks working. But its online business lived on other people’s land. Marketplaces took their cut and kept the customer relationship, while the aging storefront converted less than a tenth of a percent of its visitors. Product data was scattered across the dealership’s enterprise system, distributor feeds, and fitment catalogs, none of which talked to each other.
WHAT WE DID
We started by picking the foundation with them, because this decision was the business: we evaluated the e-commerce landscape and chose a headless, open-source platform we could own and bend to their operation, instead of renting a template that would fight it. Same philosophy as the project itself: own the machine.
Then we built the store and wired it into everything. And “everything” is the story: the enterprise system their dealership counters run, their distributor’s product data, the industry fitment catalog, their inventory and order management, the CRM, transactional email, payments, chat, social sign-in, and the marketplaces themselves, with Amazon and eBay demoted from landlord to sales channel. Live feeds reconcile it all into one catalog; orders flow back out to the systems their staff already live in. Enter your truck once (year, make, model, trim, even axle rating) and the catalog filters to what fits; the snowplow selector walks you from vehicle to the right plow.
THE OUTCOME
The storefront sells like the old one never did. Monthly orders run 18 times higher, conversion 12 times higher, and in its first snowplow season the new store sold nearly double in two months what the old one had sold in its last year and a half. Fourteen months in: more than 1,800 orders and nearly $900K in online sales, on a machine they own outright.
Army of Bees has been with us since the beginning of our e-commerce website project. They helped us design the site, connect all our backend systems, and solve the complex issues that go into making everything work together. They have been quick to respond when we need support and are insightful with ideas to make our system run more efficiently. I recommend Army of Bees for any e-commerce or web development project.
- products in one catalog
- 16,023
- systems in one storefront
- 10
- sales in the first year
- $750K
- the old site’s conversion rate
- 12×
This could be your case study.
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