Collegiate Awards is the Midwest’s premier source for high-quality and fully customizable awards, trophies, and plaques. They offer an extensive list of personalization options including laser marking and engraving, laser cutting acrylic, glass and crystal etching, and sublimation printing. Their products are used to celebrate and honor the recipients and they pride themselves on creating a simple and enjoyable experience for their customers.
Challenges
For Collegiate Awards’ customers, it is essential that the customization of products is user-friendly and simple to navigate. Their current site needed a refreshed interface that would easily allow users to upload images, provide static and variable text, and explain special instructions that may require modifications to the products.
In addition, Collegiate Awards was looking for an updated site that would provide a lower Total Cost of Ownership for their team. They wanted to focus on order reliability to reduce the amount of manual work required. They needed a platform that would natively include some of the baseline features that their existing site could not deliver, creating the ability for them to scale as the business continues to grow.
Objectives
There were a few key objectives that Collegiate Awards needed to accomplish with this project. Their team needed the ability to edit bulk pricing with ease. Due to the high volume of products they offer, and the fact that a large portion of them utilize bulk pricing, it was important for the team to manage bulk pricing for multiple products at once. This component required a custom solution as there wasn’t an existing third-party solution to meet this need.
Product management was a significant pain point for Collegiate Awards with their previous site. Their industry requires a large amount of product options. The way their product customization worked, there weren’t native options for customizing these products, especially in bulk. It was also critical to create functionality for connecting like-products together in order to create “Product Variations” on the front end. Utilizing native BigCommerce functionality for this allows them to take advantage of ongoing updates and future changes, without the limitation or fear of being stuck to old scripts.
What We Did
The Classy Llama team worked with Collegiate Awards to create a new custom app that allowed them to filter product view specifically by SKU, product name, and category. This application also enabled them to view products in their catalog and select as many as needed to edit at once. This provided the ability to see and edit bulk pricing for the selected products, allowing them to choose what type of discount is applied, based on percentage, a fixed dollar amount, or a specific dollar amount off each unit. Having access to view current bulk pricing settings when you select a product was key for their product management team.
The UI for this custom app is accessible directly within the BigCommerce admin, rather than through the front end like you previously experienced. The Classy Llama team also added custom logic to display the tiered pricing on the PDP, with functionality to properly display the total cost based on the quantity or tier that the customer has selected.
We were able to meet many of Collegiate Awards’ needs by utilizing many of the native BigCommerce features. For image and file uploading to customizable products, they are now able to access and download them from the orders section within the BigCommerce admin panel. Our Senior Design team worked with Collegiate Awards to create an updated design and workflow for these options, implementing the use of an accordion-style flow, revealing each steps within the customization process.
By implementing many of the BigCommerce marketplace solutions, we were able to simplify the amount of integrations and configurations within their internal process. We utilized Quickbooks Online, Quickbooks Payments, and the native BigCommerce Tax Calculation and Shipping Rates tools.
How It Made a Difference
Collegiate Awards is now able to offer an easy-to-navigate user interface for their customers. The steps to customize and preview their products are now streamlined, with the uploaded files and personalization details passed directly to the order fulfillment section on the backend. Accessing the many native features that BigCommerce has to offer allowed Collegiate Awards to greatly reduce their website costs and created a scalable solution that will be able to support their growth for years to come.