About Valken
As a worldwide manufacturer and distributor serving the worlds of paintball, airsoft, and defence protection, Valken supplies a full range of products across the United States and Europe. Established in 2008, Valken is committed to quality, dedicated to trustworthy service, and invested in positive growth. Valken’s “Whatever it Takes!” motto echos its customer-centric philosophy to sales and service.
The Problem
The previous site was dated lacking key features and functionality to propel the business forward and make good on its customer-first approach. The ecommerce website was connected to Netsuite’s backend to manage inventory and other various operations. With immense growth plans and the need to launch various country-specific websites as well as a B2B division all under one roof, Valken needed a comprehensive technology solution to satisfy several operational and business strategy requirements.
The Solution
Valken ultimately selected Workarea Commerce Cloud because of its native B2B and B2C functionality. This would enable its ecommerce team to support its expansion into B2B while migrating its existing ecommerce operations all within a single more user-friendly platform. Additionally, because the team was heavily investing in content marketing, they were drawn to Workarea Commerce Cloud’s robust content management system (CMS). Finally, there were several native features to the platform such as bulk and tiered pricing, multi-site, native search, and buy online, pick up curbside, that met the team’s requirements.
B2B
The majority of Valken customers are business-to-business (B2B). As such, Valken wanted to provide its dealers, or sales reps with the ability to enter orders through the ecommerce platform. Using Workarea Commerce Cloud’s native Customer Impression tools, they are able to seamlessly achieve this goal without additional integrations or plug-ins.
Another project requirement was the ability to provide B2B customers with better-targeted marketing as well as a gated, secure login. Workarea Commerce Cloud’s native segmentation feature gives the ecommerce team an easy path forward to building personalized shopping experiences as it relates to supporting Valken’s current and future strategic needs.
Bulk Pricing/Tiered Pricing: With Workarea Commerce Cloud’s native pricing features, Valken was able to configure and offer tiered and bulk pricing options for B2B buyers.
BackorderingTo maximize ecommerce sales, Valken needed the ability for customers to secure backorders for products currently out of stock. This default setting within Workarea Commerce Cloud enabled the team to set up the functionality.
Stock Notifications For certain products where backorders were not disabled, Valken set up stock notification through Workarea Commerce Cloud to alert users when the product was in stock available for purchase.
Content Management
Valken’s old website experience lacked the necessary rich product information and a fully-fledged SEO implementation. The scope of the old website had been crafted around its B2B customer segment with bare the minimum requirements for traditional B2C, or business-to-consumer online shopping.
The website needed to facilitate both B2B and B2C shopping experience as well as satisfy multi-site capabilities as the brand expanded into new international territories. In addition to improving the overall shopping experience, the Valken team planned to develop and deploy educational content using a multi-media approach that included blogs, YouTube videos, rich product descriptions, and customer reviews.
Buy Online, Pick up Curbside
Like many online retailers, Valken relies on omnichannel selling to satisfy its business goals. With multiple touchpoints for ordering and fulfillment, Valken needed to support a number of functions to fulfill the end-to-end customer journey. The native BOPIS features gave Valken the ability to track and expose inventory for any product in any store. Valken provides customers with a store/curbside pickup option by letting the customers select the nearest store as the pickup location while placing the order from website or mobile. The seamless integration with backend Netsuite order processing system routes the order for fulfillment in the selected store. The customer is notified for pickup once the order is packaged and labelled giving customers least amount of waiting time.
Robust Native Search
Valken leverages Workarea’s native search engine to give customers an enhanced search experience. Keyword matching autosuggestions display complete product information as well as featured imagery. Customers can also add the product directly to their cart directly from the autosuggestion. Apart from searching catalog data, Valken’s search experience indexes the blog content showing content results separately. This gives customers a unified commerce and content experience.
Customer Segments
Valken has three (3) main customer segments. Each of which has unique product catalogs. Valken wanted to offer a unique customer experience to each of its segments as well as to identify each customer by their respective sports type. The flexibility of Workarea Commerce Cloud’s native customer segmentation tools enables the ecommerce team to achieve this high level of customization based on past purchases, searches, and customer preferences.
Conclusion
Seeking to launch a global digital channel to expand B2C ecommerce regionally, and B2B sales over time, Valken partnered with Trika for a full Workarea implementation to align with industry standards and competitors and enhance online user experience. Trika worked with the brand to innovate their current B2C site, as well as build B2B channel with future-looking ecommerce integrations planned.
One of the overarching project goals was focusing on user experience, as opposed to solely visual design to provide a simple yet intuitive shopping experience. Trika developed a strategy connecting B2C customer journeys from discovery, engagement, purchase and post-purchase. Trika team implemented Workarea Commerce Cloud and integrated it with Valken's Netsuite backend enterprise system enabling seamless ordering, fulfilment, customer data analytics, and interactions – nurturing leads across all touch-points and empowering the operations team. As well as all the above, Trika’s powerful solution design and implementation methodology enabled the launch of the new site on Workarea commerce cloud in less than 16 weeks.