Bishop Company drives up growth and profitability

Founded in 1946, the Bishop Company is the industry-leading distributor of top-quality tools and equipment for professional arborists and landscapers. The company’s clientele ranges from private tradesmen to authorized retailers across the United States.

Challenge
Bishop Company was no longer able to find technical support to improve and enhance its outdated e-commerce platform. Confronted with low online sales and a lagging economy, the company knew it was time to take action to revamp its e-commerce platform.
“We weren’t able to bring products to market fast enough,” says Keith McCormick, President of Bishop Company. “We’ve long held a position as a market leader in our retail sector, and in order for that to continue, we realized that we had to bring our e-commerce platform up to date.”

Bishop Company also wanted to end its reliance on paper processes, in particular expensive catalog production. “We stock over 2,500 different products, so our catalogs were extremely expensive to produce, both in terms of time and money,” continues Keith McCormick. “We had to employ a number of staff to take telephone orders. Compared with online sales techniques, it was quite inefficient, but our e-commerce platform wasn’t up to the task.”

Bishop Company wanted an e-commerce site that could meet the expectations of the younger generation of tech-savvy online shoppers, convince long-time print catalog customers to place their orders online, and reinforce the company’s status as an industry leader. In order to achieve this, the company needed to refresh its legacy e-commerce platform to provide its online customers an intuitive, informative, and intelligent shopping experience.

A powerful e-commerce platform
Bishop engaged IBM Premier Business Partner Zobrist to implement eZcommerce, a complete e-commerce solution based on IBM WebSphere Commerce software. “We liked the way that the WebSphere solution empowers business users,” says Keith McCormick. “One of our key requirements for the new platform was long-term support and scalability, and Zobrist’s offering ticked all those boxes.”
Earlier this year, Bishop Company launched the new www.bishco.com website, which has swiftly become a go-to destination for an extensive line of professional arborist and landscaper products. The quick-to-market development capabilities of eZcommerce, combined with its sophisticated marketing and merchandising capabilities, enable Bishop Company to efficiently promote key products and react with greater agility to market trends.

“The new e-commerce site has many new features that we’re really excited about,” comments Keith McCormick. “There’s now an easy-to-access ‘compare’ box that allows customers to drag and drop the products they’re interested in buying. We’ve also streamlined the checkout process to minimize card abandonment and drive up customer conversion rates.”

eZcommerce is highly flexible, allowing Bishop to customize the site according to the needs of different types of customers. Authorized retailers can see the wholesale price for all products once they are logged in. The platform also provides the ability to intelligently showcase the products and special promotions that are most relevant to each customer segment.

“We are very pleased with the work that Zobrist has done. While many contractors wanted to simply build us a website, Zobrist took a whole package approach that provided us with the e-commerce store, access to technical expertise, a marketing plan to boost our online presence, and ongoing 24/7 support,” says Keith McCormick. “Their ability to deliver on all of these areas was a major factor in our initial decision to work with them, and is the main reason why we continue our relationship with 24/7 support and maintenance.”

Driving business growth
After the implementation of the solution from IBM and Zobrist, Bishop Company has seen how a professional e-commerce website can be a key enabler of business growth.
“Within two months of the new WebSphere platform going live, we saw a 200 percent increase in online sales,” says Keith McCormick. “The majority of this custom was from customers who’d only placed telephone orders in the past; they’d simply been waiting for an e-commerce site that was easy to use. The remaining 25 percent of that sales increase was from completely new customers, which definitely demonstrates the potential of a marketing strategy that integrates all aspects of the business.”

Today, Bishop Company’s 2,500 products are all catalogued online, and the company has full visibility of orders and customer interest. “When I factor in the cost of the staff required to process catalog telephone orders, I anticipate that the e-commerce channel substantial long-term cost savings,” says Keith McCormick. “The response to the site redesign has been tremendous, from long-time catalog customers and brand new customers alike. We definitely think we’re moving in the right direction.”

Planning for the future
Based on the immediate positive impact of the new e-commerce platform, Bishop Company is investigating the possibility of enabling authorized dealers to promote their own branded versions of www.bishco.com as an alternative to turning customers away when an item is not carried in their brick-and-mortar store.
“The site would be branded for each dealer, with sales processed through the bishco.com ecommerce system and commissions issued to the dealer who referred the sale,” says Keith McCormick. “With eZcommerce, we’re well-positioned to realize this vision, making our extensive product assortment even more widely available and easy to shop for.”

Bishop Company remains fully satisfied with its IBM solution. “Now we have the professional e-commerce platform we need to take our business to a new level,” concludes Keith McCormick. “Thanks to Zobrist and IBM’s investment in Smarter Commerce, we’ve gained a commerce roadmap that’s helping us to increase our profits and ensure that we’re well-placed to realize our future goals.”