London Tile Company Designs a Top-Tier Site with BigCommerce

Discover how customizable, cost-effective and reliable BigCommerce is and why we built it that way.

Case Study Device Laptop Customer London Tile Co

62.6%

increase in site visits

30.9%

increase in customers

15.4%

increase in average order value

Performance metrics compare data from 2022 to 2023.

From humble beginnings to a thriving company.

Hampshire Tile Warehouse started as a family-run business with a passion for distributing premium tiles and unmatched customer service. Since its launch over 60 years ago, the business has evolved into the parent company for three ecommerce brands — one being London Tile Company.

London Tile Company is Hampshire Tile Warehouse’s flagship brand, known for its uniquely curated tile collection and world-class service. While the majority of its business comes from B2C transactions, the company prides itself on catering to all types of customers — from your average homeowner to tile shops.

Even though the brand has been successful, it encountered challenges with its bespoke ecommerce solution that limited it from scaling to its full potential. To grow the business, London Tile Company knew it needed a flexible and user-friendly platform.

CHALLENGE

Searching for an intuitive ecommerce solution.

Before hosting its site on BigCommerce, London Tile Company used the bespoke platform — Kryptronic. 

While the company saw success using this platform, it required a developer to maintain and update. This caused difficulties when the company lost full-time access to its developer, creating a backlog of work that the team was unable to complete due to the technicality of the platform.

“The bespoke platform we were on before was quite limiting in what you could do if you weren't basically a full stack developer. Something as simple as changing a product image would mean updating databases and running scripts and things. It wasn't usable for scale, which is what I wanted to do,” explained Jon Lett, Ecommerce Manager at Hampshire Tile Warehouse.

This led the team to partner with the agency 9xb to advise them on the best platform to transition to and assist with the migration. After assessing several ecommerce solutions, London Tile Company landed on BigCommerce.

“And at the end of the day, BigCommerce won out because of the accessibility for everybody using it and the features that were native to it. And just generally as well, the BigCommerce onboarding team was much more knowledgeable than perhaps some of the other vendors were, and it felt like quite a guided process,” said Lett.

“And at the end of the day, BigCommerce won out because of the accessibility for everybody using it and the features that were native to it.”

Jon Lett Ecommerce Manager, Hampshire Tile Warehouse

SOLUTION

A user-friendly platform with endless native features.

One of the primary reasons London Tile Company chose BigCommerce was due to its user-friendly interface and the number of native features available.

BigCommerce’s intuitive dashboard allows the London Tile Company team to easily navigate the site’s back-end and make adjustments without the support of a developer.

On top of this, the team takes advantage of several native tools that weren’t available to them on the bespoke platform. Specifically, they use the customer group and price list features to set pricing based on their types of customers. This allows London Tile Company to seamlessly provide special discounts and pricing for its trade shoppers and grow this customer base. 

“Customer grouping allows us to quickly apply discount rates to certain trade customers. The price lists feature is vital for quantity break discounts,” explained Lett.

London Tile Company also enjoys the ability to effortlessly create product variants that display different sizes and colors of the items it offers. Particularly, it likes the freedom of having no limitations when it comes to the amount of product variants it offers.

“One of the main things I like is not having limits on variant products, which is something I'd run into in the past while using other vendors. They would really limit you to what you can do, and then you have to end up splitting things out into different products, and it really just confuses the user journey. So that was a big selling point for me,” said Lett.

BigCommerce’s user-friendly interface and native functionalities give London Tile Company the power to create the best customer experience through an easy-to-use platform — eliminating the need for a developer.

Freedom to optimize the customer experience.

In addition to the native features available, London Tile Company enjoys the freedom to create customizations that enhance the user experience.

With the help of its BigCommerce Customer Success Manager and 9xb, the brand created a way to offer free tile samples to shoppers. This feature lets customers add free samples directly from one of the category pages or a tile’s product page through the click of a button.

When developing this custom feature, 9xb built parameters that limit customers to three free samples. “We created custom scripts so people could only order three samples, and that's done with certain characters within a SKU. That's all the same for the samples and their weight and price threshold. So there's three checks it goes through for that,” explained Lett.

When creating this feature, 9xb ensured it was optimized for mobile shopping to provide the best user journey. Since offering a way for shoppers to order samples by simply scrolling and tapping on their devices, London Tile Company has noticed a significant increase in customer satisfaction.

To further improve the customer experience, London Tile Company also built a bundle kit feature that lets shoppers buy everything they need for a specific project with just one click.

“We created a page layout where we can build a bundle product, and that's all done again with custom fields. It links the products together and does all the math. So all the customer has to do is one button click to get a five-meter DIY wall tile kit, and it'll just add everything to the basket for them,” explained Lett.

This feature not only creates a more seamless shopping experience but also encourages product upsells.

Maximizing efficiency with third-party apps.

In addition to BigCommerce’s native features, London Tile Company takes advantage of the variety of third-party apps available to minimize back-office tasks.

Specifically, the company uses Printout Designer and PrintNode to generate invoices, packing slips, and labels. This saves the team ample time when it comes to preparing orders.

“We set up an automation using Printout Designer and PrintNode so as soon as somebody orders a sample, it prints a label that we stick on the back that's got all of the information and a QR code — like a quick order. That's really helped us, and it basically does all our admin for us now,” explained Lett.

Additionally, the team uses ShipperHQ to handle shipments. This ensures products are seamlessly delivered, alleviating the team of having to manage shipments. “ShipperHQ has become so valuable to ensure that we are profitable on all shipping, which sounds really basic, but when you’ve got loads of different items — it’s essential,” said Lett.

“Customer grouping allows us to quickly apply discount rates to certain trade customers. The price lists feature is vital for quantity break discounts.”

Jon Lett Ecommerce Manager, Hampshire Tile Warehouse

“One of the main things I like is not having limits on variant products, which is something I'd run into in the past while using other vendors. They would really limit you to what you can do, and then you have to end up splitting things out into different products, and it really just confuses the user journey. So that was a big selling point for me.”

Jon Lett, Ecommerce Manager, Hampshire Tile Warehouse

Case Study Device Tablet Customer London Tile Co

Record conversions and satisfied customers.

Since launching on BigCommerce, London Tile Company has noticed a drastic improvement in customer satisfaction. Specifically, after launching features designed to improve the user experience, the brand saw a jump in conversion rates.

“We saw conversion rates shoot up from the free tile samples. There's a lot more interest, not just for tiles but for sales in general. The whole thing kind of lifted,” said Lett.

The team has also saved a significant amount of time when it comes to managing the site due to its user-friendly interface. This has allowed them to re-focus their efforts on providing the best customer experience to shoppers.

“BigCommerce saved us so much time and allowed me to put so much more time into developing new ideas to improve the customer experience,” remarked Lett.

In addition to enhancing the customer experience and improving team efficiency, London Tile Company was named a winner of the 2023 Make it Big Customer Awards. Due to unique features like the free tile samples and its aesthetically pleasing design, the brand received the Innovation Award.

“We saw conversion rates shoot up from the free tile samples. There's a lot more interest, not just for tiles but for sales in general. The whole thing kind of lifted.”

Jon Lett Ecommerce Manager, Hampshire Tile Warehouse

Strengthening its ecommerce presence one tile at a time.

London Tile Company has seen great success since moving to BigCommerce. This hasn’t gone unnoticed by Hampshire Tile Warehouse, and the parent company has big plans in store for this umbrella brand. In fact, one of the other online stores underneath Hampshire Tile Warehouse will soon migrate to be hosted on the London Tile Company site.

“We’re going to migrate one of our additional stores into the London Tile Company site. That's going to save us a lot of time and allow us to push a lot of our resources into that one store. I can just see that growing and growing through more stuff we do with BigCommerce,” explained Lett.

With the help of BigCommerce, London Tile Company knows it will continue to see online growth.

“I don't think there's been a bad communication with BigCommerce in the three years we’ve worked with them and I’m excited to keep growing with them,” remarked Lett.

“BigCommerce saved us so much time and allowed me to put so much more time into developing new ideas to improve the customer experience.”

Jon Lett Ecommerce Manager, Hampshire Tile Warehouse

Published: May 2024

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