MKM Building Supplies is one of the leading home improvement purveyors for both commercial and DIY customers throughout the United Kingdom, known for its personal touch and localized offerings. But when it came to serving customers online, the company was decidedly behind the times.
“As a business, MKM is very traditional; people like to go into their branch, have a cup of tea, have a bacon roll, have a bit of banter,” said Craig McLaren, Head of Digital at MKM Building Supplies in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “We’re not trying to change that as an organization, but we are trying to get the organization ready for the next generation of builders. There are a lot of builders retiring, there are a lot of branch directors retiring, and the younger generation are coming in, so more and more builders and tradesmen are using online to buy their stuff.”
To meet this new generation of customers, MKM decided it was time to take their old, poorly performing website and replatform to a more modern ecommerce framework that would lay the foundation for future success. In January 2023 the company made its move with a trio of tech partners — BigCommerce, Vue Storefront (recently rebranded as Alokai) and Bloomreach.
The results were almost instantaneous. Just four weeks after going live with the new site in early 2023, MKM saw a 42% increase in traffic compared to the previous year, a 75% improvement in page load speed and a 77% bump in average time spent on page, and that impressive growth has continued since.
Here’s how they did it.
A Chance Phone Call Leads to New Beginnings
For McLaren, who has spent over 30 years in ecommerce development, the MKM project presented “the opportunity to do a greenfield project at a very mature, brownfield company.” It all started with a chance call from an old colleague, Andy Pickup, who now serves as MKM’s Digital Director.
“Andy phoned me up out of the blue and said, ‘We’ve got an old, crappy website — give me some advice on how to build a team, what are the things I should do and look out for,’ and we just got chatting,” recalled McLaren. “Both of us swear that we never set out in the conversation for me to have a job at the end of it, but I was so taken aback, in a positive way, with what he was up to. It was going to be headless and composable, which I had never done before, but I knew was pretty cool.”
Cool? Definitely, but also challenging, not least because of MKM’s unique business model.
A National Business Operating Locally
MKM operates 125 branch locations across England, Scotland and Wales, each with its own inventory and pricing. “When you log in, you’ve got to pick a branch, because we’ve essentially got 125 websites in one,” explained McLaren. “Depending on the branch you pick, that might bring up different imagery. It also brings up different products — we’ve got about 25,000 products online in total, but each branch has about 3,000 or 4,000 of these because we sell products for the local market. Scotland sells different bricks and timber to Scottish buyers than down in the south of England.”
Additionally, MKM operates as a franchise model of sorts, with the branch managers each having a share of their business. This gives them flexibility to operate their location in the way that works best for their market, including setting their own prices. While the head office (which deliberately isn’t called that, but rather Central Support) sets pricing parameters, since it buys many materials in bulk, branch managers have the authority to shift prices around as the market demands.
Adding to the complexity is the fact that each product, at each branch, has three separate pricing tiers for different types of customers: good (the default retail price for customers without a trade account), better (for smaller tradespeople) and best (for medium and large trade customers).
These kinds of variable pricing dynamics would present a challenge for any ecommerce team, but MKM had additional hurdles as well: a tight turnaround time and some internal cynicism.
“[The old website] was a ‘burning platform,’ which is a phrase we use in the UK that means it’s on fire, it’s going to end,” said McLaren. “Customers were turning up at branch to get their stuff, and the branch hadn’t even received the order, so things were falling between the cracks. But the big thing was that the front end was provided by this old legacy system that wasn’t going to be supported anymore.”
One advantage McLaren and his team had was that, given the state of the current ecommerce operation, “the bar was quite low,” he said. “The old website was a combination of nine or 10 years of building on legacy systems and failed attempts to replatform. [The company] had attempted to replace [the platform more than] three times, so there was a bit of skepticism in the business. But I had a good idea of what it took to get a project like that over the line. The leap of faith and the unknown was the composable commerce [aspect] and building all of that together with three technology suppliers.”
MKM engaged media, marketing and technology company Brave Bison to help pull the pieces together, which included BigCommerce’s composable ecommerce platform, front-end solution Alokai (which was called Vue Storefront at the time) and personalization technology from Bloomreach.
Completing the Project…On Time
The construction business isn’t exactly known for sticking to its timelines, but McLaren and his team bucked the stereotype and launched the new site on schedule in January 2023. The whole process of design, development and testing was completed in 11 months.
The new site includes personalized product recommendations and search results, custom pricing by store and customer, up-to-date inventory across all stores and online invoice payments, along with much more. And that’s just the beginning.
“One of the reasons we got live on time was that we went for an MVP approach,” said McLaren. “We took what we had before as basic functionality and replicated it, but made it faster, neater and improved the user experience. But we didn’t complicate it with a lot of bells and whistles. I’m an absolute firm believer in the idea that you’ve just got to get it out there and online, then you can add to it.”
Which is of course one of the biggest benefits of a composable platform. As MKM’s online business grows and its customer base evolves, the company can now easily add and remove functionality to the site to accommodate those evolutions.
A Foundation for the Future
The results from the first year are encouraging. As of January 2024, online orders were up 133% from the same time in 2023, and revenue was up 125%. Conversion in the last quarter of 2023 was also up 57% from the same quarter in 2022. But as McLaren points out, while those gains are impressive, “at the end of the day, online is not a big part of our revenue. They are good numbers, and we’re absolutely delighted with it, but we could be doing a lot more than that, so we’re nowhere near finished.”
Of critical importance as MKM continues its digital journey is serving two very different types of customers: individual DIYers and trade accounts. While it’s hard to determine exactly how big each group is (and tightening up the customer profiles is one of the big action items for McLaren and his team going forward), at the moment about 70% of MKM’s online traffic is coming from non-registered or cash customers, who are assumed to be primarily DIYers, versus 30% from registered trade accounts. But trade customers spend more and more often, so adding tools to draw in the commercial crowd, like cost estimation calculators, repeat ordering and wish list functionality are all on the road map for the future of the site.
The company is already gaining traction with this cohort, with credit account orders up 120% year-over-year, McLaren shared. And total site visits also are up significantly from Q4 2022 to Q4 2023, with traffic increases as high as 123% during some weeks.
“We’ve now got over 25,000 products online,” said McLaren. “On the old site we had 4,000 products. And we’re enhancing the content of these products as well, because before you had some pages that basically just said ‘This is a nail.’ So there’s more traffic going to the site, conversion’s up, sales are up, but there’s a lot more to be done because the revenue is still a small part of our overall business.”
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