Ecommerce, custom logistics software and ongoing optimisation for the UK's largest steel lintel stockist.

Challenge.

UK Lintels came to us with a landing page and an ambition. Everything since has been about staying ahead of their own growth.

1. A landing page in a market that was ready to buy online. In 2021 the business had no ecommerce presence at all. The opportunity was obvious and the head start was there to be taken.
2. Products that refuse to sit on a standard product page. Custom lengths, arches, bays, corners, specials. An off-the-shelf ecommerce platform cannot sell a made to order structural component, and pushing customers to phone up for anything non-standard would have surrendered advantage.
3. Growth outrunning the back office. As sales volume and product ranges expanded, the operational side stayed manual. Coordinating orders, deliveries, the fleet and customer communication by hand puts a ceiling on how far and how fast a business like this can go, and moving into new markets was not realistic on that footing.

Solution: the eCommerce platform

From landing page to a new sales channel. The first site launched in 2021 with a deliberately simple interface and the ability to specify custom lintel lengths, which nobody else in the market was offering online. It found its audience quickly and has grown steadily since.

Configurators that sell the difficult products. Special lintels, arches, bays and corners can be designed on the site and delivered next day. That combination does not exist elsewhere in the industry, and it turned the hardest part of the range into a competitive advantage rather than a phone call.

A checkout built for how trade actually buys. WooCommerce's default checkout is functional and not much more. We researched the best performing B2B checkouts across a range of sectors and rebuilt the experience to cut friction, save time and convert more of the traffic already arriving.

Improvement as a standing arrangement. UK Lintels run on one of our website improvement plans, so functionality, performance and user experience are upgraded continuously rather than in occasional bursts. Alongside that, ecommerce focused SEO has kept visibility climbing and pulled customer acquisition cost down.

The whole stack looked after. Hosting, security, maintenance and support sit with us, which means the commercial conversation is about growth rather than about whose job it was to renew a certificate.

Solution: the back office application

Custom software from order to doorstep. We designed and built an application that manages the full operational journey: orders integrated straight out of WooCommerce, through processing and fulfilment, out to SMS delivery notifications and live driver tracking via Webfleet. The customer knows where their delivery is, and the team knows where every order sits.

A workflow shaped around the products, not around the software. Off-the-shelf order management assumes off-the-shelf products. UK Lintels sell made to order structural components on their own fleet with next day promises attached, which is not a workflow any packaged system handles well. Building it properly meant a custom build.

The platform that unlocked the next stage. With operations running on software rather than relying on people and paper, UK Lintels have been able to extend into new sales channels. Neither was achievable on a manual process, and both open revenue that was previously out of reach.