Speed Ahead with the New ColeParmer.com

With a sleek new look, an enhanced engine, and premium features, the new ColeParmer.com can take customers farther than ever before. From searching for products to finding technical resources to reviewing an account, customers’ experience is designed to be a smoother ride: quicker and easier. After nearly 30,000 hours of research and reprogramming, the new web site responds to what customers voiced as needed upgrades.

“Customers shopping on our web site stated in surveys that finding products was challenging,” said Dave Trebacz, Director of Global Customer Experience and eBusiness. “So we listened and reevaluated every page on the site.”

Internet Designer Laura Santucci reviewed comparable sites of similar scope and tested their navigation. She also conducted a card sort by soliciting 100 customers to organize the primary components of the site into four menus. “Their task was to choose what items should fall under the top menus,” she said. “Their responses determined how we organized these menu items. For example, the Masterflex® Pump Configurator now resides under the ‘Shop By’ menu. Customers wanted easy access to the tool while they were shopping for pumps.”

Getting there faster

For many customers, the primary pain point was search and navigation. “We replaced the on-site search engine,” said Mike Mayer, Manager of Internet Development. “We now have major product categories along the left column with fly-out menus to quickly find a relevant category and drill down to an item faster. Previously, users had to click through potentially ten parent categories to arrive at their desired product. With the new site, they can see all major product categories at once.”

An enhanced filtering capability is likely the functionality that will be most apparent to ColeParmer.com shoppers. “Customers can choose what product characteristic is most important to them, then use the filters to narrow their selection,” said Web Merchandising Manager Scott Linne. “For example, those who can only buy products that are CE-compliant have to click just once to get to qualifying products. With fewer layers to sort through, products appear faster.”

As Mayer summarized, “We added thousands of additional filters to enhance navigation. Simply put, shoppers can search for a product by dimensions, price, or various other specifications.”

Accelerate through

While the overall navigation and search functions are improved, a larger font size also makes viewing more pleasing. With just a mouse-over, product images appear larger. Quick views enable shoppers to expand on product details without navigating further.

These nice-to-have features are supplemented with time-saving user functionality to streamline the shopping experience. “The ‘My Account’ area was completely revamped. A simplified “My Transactions’ screen displays orders clearly with summary pages and a dashboard,” said Mayer. “Anyone within an organization who uses the same account number can view all the orders within that account, including transactions made by others and those placed online or by phone, fax, or e-mail. Also, customers who gather orders from several different colleagues can now copy product numbers and quantities directly from an Excel® spreadsheet into the order form and the items will appear in their shopping cart.”

Checking out is speedier than ever. “Registered users go through an express checkout process. Once items are placed in the shopping cart, checkout can be completed in seconds,” said Mayer. Customers can also choose how they wish to receive communication about their orders in Communication Preferences.

Of course, several popular features remain unchanged: customer-written product reviews, product ratings, product Q&As, and Live Chat.

A clearer path: research-ability

The technical library on ColeParmer.com houses hundreds of articles, white papers, case studies, manuals, and more. While it has typically been information-rich, it lacked the search functionality necessary to make it a truly valuable research tool. Now, that has changed.

“Articles are searchable and sortable by name, best match, or date,” said Santucci. “The filters on the left navigation menu offer topical categories, resource types, and industry types. How-to videos are included in technical resources, as are the compatibility databases—some of our most used tools—and links to professional reference sites.”

The technical resource searchability delivers potentially huge time savings for researchers seeking to find out, for example, how to reduce pulsation in Masterflex® pump systems or what the importance of impellers is in effective mixing—or hundreds of other topics.

Drive the new ColeParmer.com

“Our greatest challenge in redesigning the site, in addition to the overall scope, was keeping our own biases out of the way,” said Trebacz. “Instead, we focused on customers’ needs. Then we eliminated the extraneous.”

This singular focal point—to increase speed of use, make navigation easier, enhance a customer’s experience—helped deliver a cleaner, simpler yet higher octane site. But the true test belongs to the person in the driver’s seat.

Take a test run and give Cole-Parmer your review.