Revamping the frontend and boosting online sales for one of North America’s largest distributors in the woodworking industry.

Since joining the Würth Group in 1997, Würth Louis and Company (Würth LAC), has supplied professional woodworkers across the West Coast with quality products from renowned brands. They are supported by a highly trained sales force, a comprehensive product range, and a network of 22 locations across the region and counting.

Following a major modernization effort for Würth where we transitioned from their existing monolithic system to a decoupled one run on microservices (that you can read more about here), the client team worked on unifying the backend so Villvay could focus on building a modern frontend and configuring the middle ground so the two can work together efficiently.

The Challenge

The client’s major issue was the current platform’s lack of SEO support. This meant the website was not prominently featured in relevant search results, reducing organic traffic, making it harder for new businesses to find them. This positioning also made the site appear less credible than it was.

B2B eCommerce calls for a much more complex order process than its B2C counterpart. And for Würth’s existing customers, being able to define only very limited parameters in terms of shipping, payment methods, etc., meant they opted for other means to make their orders or other suppliers.

Website features, such as the search and product discovery experiences, were very basic: it could not consider anything outside of the specific keyword/s entered, nor was it able to effectively recommend additional, helpful items. In B2B especially, this can make a world of difference. Configuring the site's product discovery feature to showcase popular items, or in contrast, slow-moving items, discounted items, etc., was not possible. There was a better way.

The website’s existing platform couldn’t support adding the processes necessary for a smoother buying experience, and with this, the general time to market for any new features before this was much too long to be feasible for the future.

Objective

Upgrade Wurth’s frontend, with a revamped UI/UX to boost the site’s SEO ranking and customer buying experience, bringing in more website sales.

Development

Villvay approached this project with the principles of MACH (Microservices, API driven, Cloud and Headless) architecture. We went composable by adopting Next.js on React, enabling greater flexibility and modularity in our frontend—and a much faster time to market for new features and updates

Next.js provided server-side rendering and static site generation out of the box, which made for faster loading times, making it easier for search engines to index.

Going composable also allowed us to integrate a more advanced product discovery and search tool—Villvay’s own search solution—along with a headless CMS that supports SEO-friendly content. Everything being connected through APIs removed the limitations of a single platform. With this shift, we could craft and layer faster, more customizable buyer-friendly experiences that would drive more conversions—both now and in the future.

This headless CMS allowed the client team to easily update elements such as images, text, and pages, while the website was set up to automatically pull and display the lahttps://villvay.com/case-study/wurthlac2test content without needing manual updates from our team. To educate the client on this new feature, Villvay hosted training sessions and demos for the system.

All this meant new clients could now register their businesses with Wurth themselves, not requiring a member of the sales team to assist them (as was the case before), streamlining the process. And they, along with Wurth’s existing customer base, could take full advantage of the more easily configurable shipping and payment specifications.

And additionally, we developed the brand’s first mobile app, building on the omnichannel experience they could offer their customers.

The Result

• A win streak for Wurth LAC’s online sales.
• record-breaking percentage of sales made via the company's site.
• Further relationship building and projects with the Würth Group in North America.