Canadian Life Science Creates an eCommerce Webstore with commercebuild

Interview with Todd McCall, Marketing Manager at Canadian Life Science

Who is Canadian life Science?

Founded in 1997, Canadian life Science is now a leading Canadian supplier of LC & GC columns as well as chromatography and dissolution accessories. Canadian Life Science serves various industries such as pharmaceuticals, research and development, agriculture, environmental, oil and gas, and forensics. The company supplies a wide variety of products to a variety of different industries across Canada.

How did you sell to your customers?

Traditionally we sold through a salesperson perspective. We offered a one-to-one interaction to supply products and technical support. Most orders were originally done through purchase orders from as far back as faxing, but now we have an integrated eCommerce platform where our customers have everything at their fingertips.

What business challenges were you having that led you into needing or wanting to build out an eCommerce platform?

We wanted to be current and have something always available to our customers. Having a basic webstore is simple, but having a very dynamic webstore where you can create different tasks, as well as the ability to research and find products is really quite key. Over the past 12-14 months, we really expanded our website in terms of how a customer can navigate through the site as well as their entire experience. Not only can they find a product they are looking for, but they can filter, keep favorites, and see frequently purchased items. We have been able to relabel products, which is a great thing about the platform because we can make it work for our business needs.

“The goal for everything is to make it easier for the customer to buy anything.”

– Todd McCall, Marketing Manager at Canadian Life Science

How did you hear about commercebuild, and why did you choose commercebuild over other eCommerce providers?

Our ERP is a Sage system, and we were at a Sage conference and met with commercebuild. As a Sage partner, they offered a great system that we looked into, and it was exactly what we were looking for. The updated integration between our Sage system, real-time inventory, real-time accuracy, pricing updates, and naming updates was key.

How has the webstore affected your core metrics?

We have seen a drastic uptake in user login requests, and requests from our sales staff creating frequently purchased items for customers. In the past 4 months, we have seen an increase of 240% for new users compared to 2018, so now we are seeing a massive spike in customer requests for webstore logins. It creates real ease of purchase and takes the weight off of our sales staff and procurement staff, but most of all offers ease of use for customers.

If you had some advice for somebody who was considering building out a webstore and using commercebuild, what would it be?

Building the site is easy; putting everything in and navigating the site is also easy. Being organized before you build the website is the hardest part. It is hard to know all product groups and complete thorough brainstorming sessions to know the navigation of your customers when finding products. When you have the organization and product categories, that is the most important part. We have over 63,000 different SKU’s, and we have over 80,000 with inactive and active older products. Therefore, organizing products is challenging and adding metadata to every product is really time-consuming. However, if you are a customer that has 10,000 SKU’s it would be a bit easier, but you still have a lot of data to start working with. So if you don’t do the due diligence in advance, you need to prepare before the webstore. If you’re very organized with your products which most likely you are, it’s pretty easy.

Download a PDF of the Case Study here: Canadian Life Science Case

Watch our video interview with Canadian Life Science: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b23I9X2Z5Dg