Some products available for purchase online aren’t particularly glamorous. Take adhesive (aka 'sticky') tape for example. It's essential to many industries and can be found in nearly every Aussie home, but just how popular is it? And what does it take to set up a sticky tape shop online?
We found out first hand that adhesive tape is in exceptional demand, as proven with the thriving ecommerce website we recently developed for Adhesive Tapes Australia – online supplier of specialty adhesive tapes and packaging products.
Background
With over 30 years of experience in the industry, Adhesive Tapes Australia knows that the right kind of tape can spell the difference between the success of an application... or its failure. That's why they wanted to make available for purchase online every variation of tape available for any type of project – big or small, commercial or personal.
Looking for a way to present and sell their dizzingly large range of products online, Adhesive Tapes Australia asked us to build for them from scratch an ecommerce site to match their particular business needs.
One of their top priorities was to make it easy for people to search their site for specific types of tape within their extensive range, be it different lengths, widths, colours, materials, textures, thickness, grade of adhesiveness and type of adhesive used. Double-sided anyone?
Another variation to consider was all the different brands of each type of adhesive tape they stocked, such as Tesa, Hi-Tech Tapes and Tenacious Tapes.
They also wanted to be flexible enough to adjust their pricing for large-scale clients making wholesale bulk orders of adhesive tape, while also keeping tape affordable and easy-to-buy for one-off individual purchasers.
Add to that, Adhesive Tapes Australia's requirement to be able to offer and manage regular sales, discounts and other promotions to all their customers, our brief for building their online store was now starting to become quite detailed.
Approach
First, we sat down with Adhesive Tapes Australia's huge product inventory to learn how their pricing system worked. We quickly worked out that behind this seemingly simple product lay a very interesting and complex pricing matrix, incorporating volume discounts, type of product, quality of tape, width, length, colour, and regularly changing prices, which proved quite a challenge for our web programmers when writing custom scripts. Our choice of framework to build the site was Laravel / PHP.
In terms of designing the visual aspects of the site, the focus had to stay on the tapes. Adhesive tape might not be anything special to look at, but over time, we built up a great database of well-photographed, nice-looking images that accurately highlighted all of the unique features of the different types of tape on offer. We also collaborated with third-party graphic designers for certain elements, such as the banner ads, that gave the site a lot of life and appeal.
We also built a highly customised content management system to give Adhesive Tapes Australia control over every aspect of their ecommerce website, including the ability to create customer coupons and promote them via their marketing activities.
Result
Digital Bridge has had a lot of positive feedback about the Adhesive Tapes Australia ecommerce site. People love using it to buy their adhesive tape; sales have been great for our client, who also loves being able to easily manage and update their own site; and we're proud of having built another successful ecommerce website. Win–Win–Win!
Want to build your own ecommerce website? Get in touch with Digital Bridge – ecommerce is our specialty.
Digital Bridge designs, develops and manages powerful websites and web-based applications for Australian businesses. Our office is in Fitzroy, Melbourne.
