How Fisheries Supply Drove +15% in B2B Revenue per User with Constructor
INDUSTRY
Marine Parts
HEADQUARTERS
Seattle, Washington, USA
SOLUTIONS
Search and Browse
Fisheries Supply is a B2B marine parts supplier and one of the biggest distributors of marine products in the United States.
They serve boat yards, builders, commercial fishermen, and other marine customers throughout the nation. Finding themselves needing to accelerate digital adoption to meet customer demand, Fisheries Supply invested in improving their tech stack and product discovery platform to drive their bottom line while enhancing the online customer experience.
The Challenge
Fisheries Supply is a B2B marine parts supplier and one of the largest distributors of marine products in the United States.
They serve boat yards, builders, commercial fishermen, and other marine customers throughout the nation. Finding themselves needing to accelerate digital adoption as their customers became more digitally savvy over the years. So they invested in improving their tech stack and product discovery platform to drive their bottom line while enhancing the online customer experience.
The Challenge
Fisheries Supply was quickly outgrowing their previous product discovery platform. They were constantly coding manual workarounds within their B2B ecommerce platform, which created inefficiencies within the team.
Due to the complex nature of their B2B catalog with hundreds of thousands of SKUs, their legacy product discovery solution couldn’t keep customer experience up to par either. When customers performed what should have been a routine search for best sellers — i.e., “bilge pumps” — they were constantly returned accessory parts such as bilge pump control panels, or no results at all.
Having to constantly optimize their system stretched their small team to capacity, being one of the leading reasons why they pursued an out-of-box product discovery replacement to do most of the heavy lifting.
“If we were going to go out and pay for an off-the-shelf product discovery solution, we needed to have something that’s truly AI-first,” says Kyle Sutter, VP of Technology at Fisheries Supply. “The marine industry has a lot of slang and jargon (‘head’ for toilet, or ‘hookit’ for sandpaper with a Velcro backing). We needed a solution that could learn these terms so that we didn’t have to manually update content and add synonyms to help buyers find what they were looking for.”
Fisheries Supply was quickly outgrowing their previous product discovery platform. They were constantly coding manual workarounds within their B2B ecommerce platform, which created inefficiencies within the team.
Due to the complex nature of their B2B catalog with hundreds of thousands of SKUs, their legacy product discovery solution couldn’t keep customer experience up to par either. When customers performed what should have been a routine search for best sellers — i.e., “bilge pumps” — they were constantly returned accessory parts such as bilge pump control panels, or no results at all.
Having to constantly optimize their system stretched their small team to capacity, being one of the leading reasons why they pursued an out-of-box product discovery replacement to do most of the heavy lifting.
“If we were going to go out and pay for an off-the-shelf product discovery solution, we needed to have something that’s truly AI-first,” says Kyle Sutter, VP of Technology at Fisheries Supply. “The marine industry has a lot of slang and jargon (‘head’ for toilet, or ‘hookit’ for sandpaper with a Velcro backing). We needed a solution that could learn these terms so that we didn’t have to manually update content and add synonyms to help buyers find what they were looking for.”
Where Constructor Comes In
One of the first requirements for Fisheries Supply was a solution that was fully API-driven. Running on a home-grown ecommerce platform, they needed a product discovery partner that could easily integrate and be up and running fast. At the same time, Fisheries Supply worked with millions of different price possibilities as both a B2B distributor and B2C retailer, and the system would need to update the current inventory and pricing in near real-time.
“We were internally debating about which vendor could deliver the value of being API-driven while also being AI-first. That was the determining factor for why we chose Constructor. They were more AI-first, while other competitors had text-based search with some AI bolted on after the fact.”
So the Fisheries Supply team began the Constructor Proof Schedule™, a straightforward and foolproof way to validate initial claims in revenue lift with easily reportable metrics to share with various business stakeholders.
Step One
Install beacon and send product catalog
Step Two
Opportunity analysis on your site, with your data
Step Three
Evaluation and business case
Step Four
AI dashboard with your insights
“We were able to implement the Proof Schedule quickly,” Kyle recalls. All we did was put a little JavaScript on the page and then send over a quick feed so the Constructor team could prove that their system was actually doing what they said it would do.” From that initial code integration during the Proof Schedule to implementation with Constructor’s APIs, the Constructor team was flexible and helped set Fisheries Supply up for success.
“We had three developers and technical Constructor team members who were always there to write code, hop on calls, or answer directly on Slack. We could ping them directly without having to route through some ticketing system. We also felt Constructor did a really good job of providing guidance and best practices for integration. There were certain points where we broke out of the recommended mold due to the inner workings of our ecommerce platform, but the Constructor team did a really good job of adapting to our priorities.”
The Results
+15%
in revenue per user
+8.5%
in conversions per user
+6.5%
in sessions per user
Fisheries Supply achieved a double-digit lift in overall revenue across their customers.
The team was expecting a system that would improve customer experience, but weren’t sure about whether it would increase their revenue for wholesale customers. But when they A/B tested the system, they found to their surprise that those wholesale customers were also buying more products than before. It turned out that improved product discovery didn’t only bring efficiency improvements for Fisheries Supply, but actually led to buyers finding more products they needed and higher revenue — an increase of 15%.
“If you searched for bilge pumps with our old search engine, people could scroll to find the bilge pumps, but they were buried way down on the page,” Kyle says. “With Constructor, we didn’t do anything, and now all the bilge pumps appear in search results automatically with our best sellers right at the top.”
To prove that Constructor’s products would positively impact users from companies of all sizes, Fisheries Supply ran A/B tests on customer subsets for more accurate results reporting. They found that not only did Constructor Search and Browse automatically return better products for customers and improve the overall customer experience, but that conversions and revenue actually went up across the board.
With the improved search experience, Fisheries Supply is consistently serving attractive results and providing an improved B2B customer experience on top of revenue lifts.
What’s Next for Fisheries Supply
Now Fisheries Supply can now focus on strengthening their positioning in the marine industry and expanding their presence across the nation, not just the Pacific Northwest.
Constructor’s AI-powered, API-first architecture paired with a supportive CS team now gives the Fisheries Supply team a base upon which they can comfortably build for years to come.
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