Crafting a Seamless B2B Experience: Deniau Strategic Consulting’s Shopify Transformation

About Deniau Strategic Consulting

Deniau Strategic Consulting was established in 1977 as a company in Japan, which is passionate about helping foreign brands succeed in the Japanese market. Deniau’s business features mostly in representing and consulting. Moreover, they handle implementing and managing the business if required.

When cooperating with brands, the company offers a multifaceted approach. As a representative company, it can help other foreign companies with Sales, Marketing, PR, Logistics, and Communication. Simultaneously, while acting as a consulting company, Deniau supports brands with Sales, Marketing, Human Resources, Finance, Research, M&A, and Events.

Deniau Strategic Consulting has successful collaborations with many brands, many of whom are from France. Currently, the company works with brands specializing in high-quality cooking products, including Bragard, Forge De Laguiole, Mauviel, and many others. Also, the project that Deniau Strategic Consulting and BSS Commerce have cooperated on is in this field.

Deniau Strategic Consulting company website

The Challenge

Lacks of Automatic Features

Deniau managed several websites to sell products in the cooking field, specifically chef and kitchen appliances.

The old website – Bragard

The old website – Forge De Laguiole

However, their new business strategy is to support B2B customers and these websites lacked features to handle it. The reasons are:

#1. The old websites did not require customers to log in to purchase products. While Deniau valued their customers, especially B2B customers, they wanted to gain a better understanding of their client base to establish more effective sales, marketing, and customer support strategies, ultimately providing their customers with the best shopping experiences. In return, it will drive increased orders and revenues for Deniau and their partners.

#2. Since Deniau has a large number of products, they needed flexibility in pricing and delivery rules based on specific customer profiles, locations, products, and spending amounts. Thanks to these features, they could create personalized customer experiences for each customer group, which is an essential part of customer experience (CX). According to McKinsey & Company, 71% of consumers expect personalized interactions, and 76% get frustrated when this doesn’t happen. Unfortunately, Deniau’s current websites lacked these automatic personalization functions.

#3. The old websites served various customer types, including personnel customers who bought in small amounts and B2B customers who purchased in large quantities. However, B2B customers often seek better prices and discounts for large numbers of orders through a quote request process, which the existing websites did not support. Thus, Deniau needs a tool that allows customers to contact easily and quickly ask for a quotation.

Hard To Find For Customers

Additionally, Deniau was concerned about the difficulty restaurants and hotels (B2B customers) in Japan faced in finding and accessing chef and kitchen appliance products that Deniau’s old websites provided. The reason was that these old websites were scattered across different websites with different link access points.

Project Objectives

The Demand for a B2B Website

As Deniau’s business continues to grow and the increasing buying demand from B2B customers, corporations, restaurants, and retail stores in Japan; however, the existing websites were made for general consumers, and lacked the capability to capture and maintain specific data related to their B2B clients. To address this need, Deniau sought to build a new eCommerce website dedicated only to their B2B audience.

This new website would not only be created exclusively for business customers but also offer advanced B2B automatic features, including product comparison, wishlists, price hiding, and more (detailed in the project requirements below).

Specific Goals

Deniau had several specific goals they wanted to achieve with the Shopify development project. First, they aimed to build a dedicated Shopify website to serve their B2B customer base as an organized system. This site would allow them to have comprehensive customer information and manage website functions flexibly and automatically.

Additionally, the new website would be tailored to sell high-quality products of chef and kitchen appliances in various product categories like wearables, cutlery, spices, pans, and many more will be expanded in the future.

The Solution Provider Seeking

After exploring various solutions and detailed research, Deniau found BSS Commerce – an eCommerce development firm with 11+ years of experience and decided to book an appointment to discuss their needs.

When going on the new website development project, Deniau meticulously evaluated many factors, such as technical expertise, cost, timing, and support. Fortunately, BSS Commerce not only met but exceeded all the requirements, ending with Deniau’s decision to collaborate with BSS Commerce in their new Shopify development project using BSS Commerce’s Shopify store development service.

Though finding a domestic Japanese technology company had more advantages for Deniau in communication and operations with the same language and culture, BSS Commerce still convinced Deniau with its solution and professionalism.

Below is the sharing from Deniau:

Project Requirements

The Deniau company specially required 7 feature points that were needed to have in the new website. They are:

#1. Product Compare: Enable customers to compare different products on a single screen without going to another page. They can view product pictures, descriptions, prices, and specifications of 2 to 5 products from the same category.

#2. Wishlist: Show an icon to allow logged-in customers to add any product to the wishlist from the product page and product card. This list can be stored customer by customer.

#3. Hide Price: Display public prices to everyone, but once logged in, users would see B2B prices. Also, certain products would be hidden from users who have not logged in.

#4. Registration & Admin Approval: Control who can view B2B prices by requiring users to register the following information: company name, company name in furigana (Japanese alphabet), office/store, postal code, address (two fields), phone number, fax number, person in charge name, email, and password.

#5. Request for Quote: Implement a quote request flow like this: customers add products to quote > submit quote > both admin and customers receive confirmation email > admin edit price > admin resend email > customers receive an email with updated price (their quote page will not show this new price). If the quote is agreed upon, the admin can click convert to order and process the order. If the quote is not agreed, customers simply dismiss the quote.

#6. Custom Pricing: For certain items, the client can select options with a different price based on the client base. For example, knife prices may vary depending on the finishing (polished or satin). If a client is set up to buy at 80% of the public price, the price of the items with the option to be at 80%. For example, the public price of the polished knife is 100 dollars, and the satin version is 150. If the client can usually buy at 80%, their price will be 80 dollars for polish and 120 for satin.

#7. Embroidery Options: For some wearable products, if customers want embroidery, they are able to choose the font, color, and number of lines. A text field would be provided to enter the desired text. The price of embroidery will always be the public price for all customers.

The Ultimate Solution

In this project, BSS Commerce provided a full-service solution, taking responsibility for consulting, designing the website interface, and developing the website with the required features and functionalities.

The new Shopify website was developed using the Eurus theme, with the required features provided with high-rated B2B Shopify apps from BSS Commerce. BSS Commerce took the reins to start from scratch, ensuring a seamless journey for the client. From concept to execution, every aspect of the website was meticulously crafted to integrate the client’s vision flawlessly, delivering a polished final product that exceeded expectations. BSS Commerce’s commitment to seamless integration ensured that every element functioned harmoniously, providing an exceptional user experience.

Shopify theme and apps solution for Deniau’s Shopify store development

Detailed Solutions Provided

For each customer request, BSS Commerce researched and implemented suitable, cost-effective solutions, based on the preconditions:

• The site requires a lot of theme customization, which can pose conflicts when there are 3rd-party apps and services, so code customization is preferred to app integration; and
• They need to minimize the development and bug-fixing time.

With the seven features and functionalities that Deniau requested above, here are the detailed solutions that BSS Commerce implemented to meet their needs.

#1. Products Compare: The BSS Commerce team used JavaScript and custom CSS/HTML to edit theme code directly without using any other 3rd-party apps, saving lots of costs. Also, this solution thoroughly utilized BSS Commerce’s experience in theme development and prevented 3rd-party conflict.

#2. Wishlist: The team implemented the Wishlist Hero app which is already compatible with the Eurus theme.

#3. Hide Price: For public prices, BSS Commerce used metafields to add custom public prices for each variant/product, along with JavaScript to customize the strikethrough style for the price when customers logged in. To optimize the customer journey, BSS Commerce also suggested modifying the default theme login flow by adding a login popup, allowing customers to login without leaving the current page.

Login to see product prices – Login popup

#4. B2B Registration: The Japanese business sector requires a lot of custom fields compared to the default register form, so BSS suggested the client use the B2B Wholesale Solution app by BSS Commerce, which has a Registration Form function. The app team helped to customize the app to allow auto-filling Japanese addresses based on valid postcodes and fix some minor issues along the way.

B2B registration form – auto-filling Japanese addresses based on valid postcodes

#5. Request for Quote & Company Account: The client only requires basic quote flow, so BSS Commerce recommends the B2B BSS: B2B Portal, Quote, Net 30 app – the most cost-effective app with the built-in Company Account, and can integrate with the Registration form.

Request for quote & company account

#6. Custom Pricing: With the B2B Wholesale Solution already in use in the registration form, BSS Commerce recommended the client use the same app for the Custom Pricing feature to reduce the risk of conflict between apps. The strategy has proved to be effective, as there are very few issues that arose between apps and the app team took a little effort for it, saving both development time and cost.

#7. Embroidery Options for Wearable Products: BSS Commerce considered this request quite challenging due to:

• The default variants system cannot add options like the sample site. The prices of different numbers of lines embroidered in the product are different.
• Some products have more than 100 variants, which exceeds the limit of Shopify.
• The UI needs to be customized in popup style, with custom HTML.

To tackle this, BSS Commerce has implemented a set of suggestions: Customize theme code to add customizable options and custom CSS to show options in popups, while instructing the client to break down the products into different sub-products to avoid exceeding 100 variants capacity.

Product variants & popup

The Development Process

The project’s success typically lies in the strong collaborative approach between Deniau and the BSS Commerce development team. We have had close cooperation and effective communication during the project. Diverse tools have been used for communication and project management.

Communication & project management tools

As the client is familiar with technology and communication platforms like Trello, the process of communication and project management between the two was smooth.

During the development process, the BSS Commerce development team was focused and dedicated to meeting the deadline and providing quick and enthusiastic support. Therefore, there are no controversial issues arising during the project implementation.

Key Milestones

The project lasted for 6 months, carefully covering each stage from discovery and design to implementation and testing. The process begins with a thorough discovery phase, where we delve deep into understanding the client’s brand identity, target audience, and objectives.

Throughout the execution, there had been various new requirements and modifications to the website, resulting in a longer-than-usual timeframe for a Shopify project. Also, the differences in timezone and language partly extended the response time at the beginning of the design discussion and the initial stages of UAT. However, both Deniau and BSS Commerce had overcome all these things and got the work done in time as expected.

Three main milestones:

• Milestone 1: Requirement clarification & Design consulting: 2 months, from October 2023 – December 2023
• Milestone 2: Project implementation: 3 months, from December 2023 – March 2024
• Milestone 3: UAT, improvement: 1 month, from March 2024 to April 2024

And finally, the new Deniau’s eCommerce website – Chefs’ Island by DSC successfully went live on April 24, 2024.

New Shopify website – Chefs’ Island by DSC

What Deniau Says After The New Launched Website

“After one month of using the shop, we are grateful to BSS Commerce’s development team. The adaptation to our market and Japanese language required a lot of effort to adapt the theme and the app we used. If we couldn’t meet our first expectations for the launch date, the development team found the best solutions to meet our needs at a reasonable cost. After the launch, some bugs that we didn’t see during the UAT happened and the team response to solve them was really fast. If we need help with further development on the website we will certainly ask BSS Commerce and can recommend them for other projects.”

Future Plans

As the business expands and the brand’s cooperation grows, the range of products and target customers will become more varied. This leads to the need to develop more features to give customers the best purchasing experience.

With the seamless cooperation in the project above, Deniau has outlined additional features to be implemented soon in their new website and connected BSS Commerce as the first-think-of partner in Shopify store development. Here are the quick plan for the next steps:

• Hide Product
• Referral Program
• Recommended Products
• Company Accounts

Challenges Overcome & Lessons Learned

#1. Dealing with budget limitation: Since the client had budget constraints, but many new functions and change requests were raised during the project, the development team had to carefully study and measure the solutions to not only meet the customer’s requirement but also provide the most cost-effective method.

#2. Overcoming language barriers: This website was built using Japanese, which brought many difficulties for the team to work on. In some specific cases, like a bug reported, the team could not immediately detect where the configuration was, or which parts the client was referring to. It would partially impact the project development progress and take more of the team’s effort. However, we have tried our best to give the best and quickest solution for any issues raised by our client Deniau.

#3. Learning the Japanese client working style and eCommerce ecosystem: Every customer comes to us, and there are many things we can learn from them. It’s the same with this Deniau Japanese client, we had a chance to work with them to build a site from scratch, and the team was able to discuss the requirements and understand the characteristics of Japanese customers in-depth, getting many valuable insights.

Summary – Deniau Shopify Case Study

Through this project, BSS Commerce Shopify demonstrated their expertise and efficiency in crafting tailored Shopify solutions that meet the unique needs of clients. By overcoming challenges, embracing a collaborative approach, and leveraging their technical advantages, BSS Commerce successfully delivered a tailored B2B experience for Deniau Strategic Consulting’s new website, partly contributing to the growth and success of Deniau’s business in the competitive Japanese market.

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