Mark Wilkinson, Florence Kelly, and Drew Mansur launched TileCloud in 2017 with the aim of transforming the Australian tile market and redefining home renovations as enjoyable passion projects rather than exhausting ordeals. The concept behind the online tile seller has since resonated with customers across Australia, with DIY enthusiasts and professional renovators alike buying their tiles from the brand.

Challenge

In the few short years since its founding, TileCloud’s business expanded rapidly, with the brand surpassing $1.2 million in monthly revenue. Wanting to sustain its swift growth trajectory, TileCloud decided to further optimize its website, which handled both DTC and B2B sales, while building out its B2B business to capture more wholesale customers. The team at TileCloud knew it needed to provide a more seamless customer experience for both its consumer and wholesale markets if it wanted to drive sales through both channels.

One crucial element in the optimization of TileCloud’s online retail presence was the ability to closely monitor the activity on its website with easy access to detailed metrics. These metrics were also critical in helping the business make the right decisions to drive growth. However, gaining such insight was a challenge for the brand.

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Solution

After upgrading to Shopify Plus in July 2020, TileCloud gained the ability to launch expansion stores – additional online stores with the same backend as its main store. Drawing upon this capability, TileCloud created a dedicated B2B online store for its wholesale customers. This meant the company could tailor its storefront to appeal specifically to B2B customers, with different prices for different wholesale customers, depending on their partnership with TileCloud.

With Shopify Functions, a feature enabling backend coding, TileCloud was able to customize its checkout process for a more streamlined user experience. One notable outcome was the ability to apply multiple automatic discounts at the checkout, giving both B2B and consumer customers the benefit of a more seamless discount experience.

With Shopify Plus’s ability for merchants to preconfigure website data, Tilecloud was also able to set up a custom view of its website activity reports. This gave the company greater visibility of key metrics, such as the average order value, to better gauge the effectiveness of its online promotions and customer experience – valuable data needed to further optimize its online sales channels.

Results

The customer experience efficiencies gained through Shopify Plus features, such as a more streamlined checkout process, have enabled TileCloud to push up its customer conversion rates and average order value. Moreover, with a dedicated expansion store tailored to the needs of its wholesale customers, TileCloud has been able to attract more wholesale customers and drive sales through personalized pricing for individual buyers, targeted messaging and special wholesale promotions.

At the same time, the detailed metrics provided by Shopify Plus have enabled TileCloud to improve its decision-making processes, leading to data-driven improvements to its online stores, sales campaigns, customer acquisition and retention strategies, and customer experience more generally.

Shopify Plus was like an Excel spreadsheet; we didn’t realize how much it could do until we started exploring its features. And with a combination of clearer access to our numbers and support of our merchant success manager, we have been able to make a series of changes, elevating our online experience for both retail and trade customers.

TileCloud

Drew Mansur — Co-Founder

With Shopify Plus, TileCloud saw results fast.

34%

year-on-year increase in average order value

28%

year-on-year jump in customer conversion rate

24%

year-on-year increase in

Note: The above case studies are a copyright of Shopify Plus.

Problem

Brooklinen began in 2014 as a bootstrap operation. Founders Rich and Vicki Fulop ran a very successful Kickstarter campaign on the idea that they could sell beautiful bed sheets at an affordable price. They knew their audience because they were their audience: millennials in search of quality bed linens they could buy online. Since then—and with significant growth and scale on Shopify Plus—the brand has become an important example of a new class of direct-to-consumer (DTC) businesses who appeal to digitally-native buyers.

Now the brand is looking to scale its B2B operations as more customers place large, wholesale orders. “The core of our B2B business is really the hospitality business. Right now all of that is handled offline. There’s no way for our customers to have a personalized experience like our DTC customers do online,” says Nicolas Lukac, Director of Emerging Channels at Brooklinen.

Traditional B2B selling is archaic; time-consuming, a manual process of taking orders over the phone. The Brooklinen team says they have been taking B2B orders for as long as the brand has existed, but continuing to do so manually, and ad-hoc, would be difficult to scale and bring to the success level of their DTC efforts.

Lukac added: “We weren’t customer-forward with this process. We were order-forward. There’s a lot of friction involved with that. We could be spending more time either helping our customers or acquiring new customers, so it limits the scale of our business.”

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Solution

Brooklinen sought the suite of powerful, flexible features of B2B on Shopify Plus as the solution to its problem. “When Shopify announced that they were going to be releasing B2B functionality, it was really natural for us to just opt in,” says Elizabeth Bell, Director of Product Management at the brand.

While Brooklinen’s old, manual process worked, it wasn’t efficient. Customers could not serve themselves and place their own orders. With B2B on Shopify, Brooklinen created a B2B site that was just as intuitive and easy to use as their DTC site without sacrificing the complexity they needed to sell B2B.

“B2B on Shopify allows us to engage with these customers in a new way—kind of like a typical DTC customer but for B2B,” says Kelly Hallinan, Senior Vice President of Emerging Channels.

With the proliferation of ecommerce in everyday life, buyer expectations have changed and B2B purchasing is expected to be available online. With Shopify Plus, Brooklinen can remain leaders in their industry by offering personalized buying experiences adapted for the needs of each of their B2B customers.

“Now, we can see that a large hospitality group purchased from us six months ago. We know the average amount of time in between orders, and we can say, okay, we’re at that point where we can send them an email asking about placing a reorder. It’s much harder to do that without Shopify’s back end system,” says Hallinan.

Result

With B2B on Shopify, Brooklinen added a second store exclusively for B2B buyers within the same admin they already use today. “It’s been great to have the B2B functionality in the Shopify Admin so we can use the functionality we’re familiar with to spin up our B2B site. We can have a site that looks and feels very similar to our DTC site but have it be focused on business to business,” says Bell.

Instead of placing bulk orders over the phone, B2B customers now have access to a personalized buying experience where they can place orders themselves. Customers have access to specific prices, products, and payment methods —just like they would while making any other purchase with Brooklinen.

This platform, according to Lukac, unlocks many doors for their team and how they think about the customer experience. It will also allow Brooklinen to automate back office tasks, so they can spend more time focusing on strategic initiatives to grow and scale their B2B business and less on manual work.

With Shopify Plus, Brooklinen saw results:

• Able to spend 80% of time working with customers
• Unlock self-serve for customers to manage account and orders
• Offers the same intuitive, branded buying experience for B2B customers as DTC buyers

“On Shopify Plus, our team has the liberty and the space to build relationships with customers, instead of just transacting with them. We spend more time understanding our customers and less on manual inputs. This allows us to provide exceptional experiences for our DTC, B2B customers and retail customers alike.”

Note: The above case studies are a copyright of Shopify Plus.