Lower Implementation Time
Average Deployment Cost Savings
Reduction in Number of Integrations
Coastal Construction, one of the largest independent distributors of caulking and sealants, waterproofing, concrete repair, and fire protection products in the US, was seeking a modern commerce solution to handle their complex needs and integrate with essential systems. Partnering with Kibo and Ignitiv, Coastal Construction was able to implement a new system that can be easily managed by business users with minimal IT involvement and create a B2B buying journey that mimics B2C components.
The Challenge
With more customers embracing digital channels for purchasing, Coastal Construction aimed to provide a seamless online buying experience that matched their physical stores. However, they faced several challenges, including the need for an API-based pricing engine, restricted integrations, a high-maintenance eCommerce solution, inadequate integration between their ERP, eCommerce platform, and order management system, and the inability to effectively manage and display comprehensive product details.
Additionally, Coastal Construction sought to enhance the fulfillment experience by implementing an order management system that allowed buyers to view available items based on their location, choose the most convenient fulfillment option, and calculate shipping costs before finalizing the purchase.
Addressing these challenges was crucial, with the most pressing issue being the replacement of their outdated Magento 1 cart and checkout system. Failure to do so would render their system non-compliant with PCI standards, making it susceptible to cyber attacks.
With this solution, we wanted to establish and sustain digital leadership in the construction industry. Our goal was simple – deliver real and unique value to our customers through a tool that puts their needs first.
Coastal Construction realized the advantage of implementing an eCommerce platform and order management that has overlapping functionality, is built on a unified data model, and has a single UI. With these systems working seamlessly together, Coastal Construction has a scalable platform that can handle massive amounts of data, scan millions of price lists, and cross-reference inventory to surface the cost of a product in seconds.
Kibo’s flexible platform made it easy for Ignitiv to integrate Coastal Construction’s ERP system, Epicor Prophet 21, to the order management system and eCommerce operation. Coastal Construction uses Epicor Prophet 21 to manage job quotes, basic product data, and fulfillment logic.
With 16 branch locations and two warehouses, Coastal Construction can provide customers with convenient, fast, and cost-effective fulfillment options while driving traffic to their physical stores using Kibo Order Management.
Coastal Construction uses Kibo Order Management to set up complex order routing rules that prioritize inventory locations based on the customer’s location, preferred hub locations, and store locations.
Using Kibo’s inventory visibility capabilities, customers can see inventory availability based on a specified location or nearest locations.
Ignitiv integrated Freight and USPS to ensure customers see real-time, accurate shipping costs before completing their checkout.
Coastal Construction has a complex pricing structure — the company customizes pricing at the customer, region, and industry level — and manages prices in Evergeen, a pricing database. Ignitiv built a middleware that feeds hierarchical price lists to the Kibo platform from Evergreen.
With Kibo’s flexible pricing engine, Coastal Construction centrally manages pricing with the ability to offer targeted price lists for specific account users. Additionally, the construction company uses the admin to configure complex discount criteria and delivery.
With Kibo’s out-of-the-box product catalog, Coastal Construction can configure core features of products while using product variants and slicing for granularity, use attributes for unique product descriptions, and tailor product descriptions through variant properties.
Unified Cart & Checkout
Within six weeks, Coastal Construction was able to use Kibo’s unified cart and checkout to solve for the immediate PCI compliance need as Magento 1 cart & checkout was reaching end-of-life. Coastal Construction uses the Kibo Admin to manage all aspects of the purchasing workflow, inclusive of pricing, tax, discounts, currencies, and checkout behavior.
Based on customer feedback revealing the desire for Amazon-like experiences, Coastal Construction improved the site search and navigation to meet customer expectations. These enhancements allow customers to quickly narrow down their search and find the products they need.
Kibo’s managed extensibility gives Coastal Construction rich access to modify microservices without the cost. 100% API cover ensures the dev team retains a deep level of control without learning new languages or using unfamiliar tools. For example, with Ignitiv, Coastal Construction was able to extend the Kibo platform with Freight integration, USPS integration for additional address data, and job quotes. Going forward, Coastal Construction will be able to make changes to the customer experience without a complete overhaul or fear of shutting down the site.
We are in a very different space inside construction; our materials are very specialized products that many people know how to use. We really wanted a system that gave our customers a clean user experience. Kibo looked too good to be true. Flexibility and functionality are needed. Everything that we’ve wanted to do we’ve been able to accomplish and tested it out.
Modern, microservices-based, API-first technology powers our unified commerce platform. See how Kibo can change the way you deliver unified customer experiences.