I am very pleased to launch the new website package for IBS Boat Supplies.
IBS are a well established trade supplier of spare parts and repair materials for Rigid Inflatable Boats (RIB’s) and Inflatable or GRP boats.
The company has realised the necessity to adapt to changes in the marketplace within which it operates. Shop customers who used to shop within a retail store are increasingly using a retail shop as a showroom and then making their purchases with internet retailers. For distributors such as IBS boats, this means smaller stock orders from shops and internet retailers pushing ever harder for discounts. The best way to gain advantage of this trend it to improve workflow and therefore costs, by making stock buying more efficient and easier buy using an online ‘shop’ for the trade showing discount levels immediately whilst also offering retail customers an opportunity to purchase items directly at recommended retail prices.
Prestashop was used as the E-commerce platform which has proven to be the most effective system providing the best balance of features, performance over and above other open source systems such as Magneto or paid for systems such as Actinic. IBS Boats unfortunately suffers with very slow internet connectivity making web-browser based shop updates a slow and tedious process. Magneticone’s Prestashop Store Manager was deployed to manage this issue. The Store manager desktop application effectively feeds a stream of information at the fastest pace available in the background, letting the user get on with editing without waiting for images or content to upload before getting on with the next process. The result is a very fast practical workflow.
The benefit to retail customers are shorter delivery times and the benefit to trade is an easier way to order stock.
In addition to this, a ‘brochure site’ was also created to showcase products, provide practical information, support a bulk emailing system running trade and retail mailing lists and provide enhanced search engine visibility by using WordPress as a CMS which is crawled more frequently by Google as it is considered to be a frequently changing blog.
I wish IBS every success with their venture and look forward to working with Keith and Graham providing ongoing support and advice.