BigCommerce Raises UPLIFT Desk to New Heights

Work better. Live healthier.

It was in 2002, at the crossroads of pain and innovation, that Jon Paulsen, a Certified Professional Ergonomist, designed a height-adjustable desk for himself to alleviate pain and make work, whether sitting or standing, more comfortable.

That single desk evolved into UPLIFT Desk, a business that has become one of the largest and fastest-growing manufacturers and retailers of standing desks, ergonomic chairs and other office accessories.

CHALLENGE

Down on Yahoo

UPLIFT Desk first entered the world of ecommerce on Yahoo. Unfortunately, the platform did not meet the company’s expectations in performance, affordability, reliability, scalability and customization.

“We learned early on that the desk needs to match the customer and the workspace. Customers want to customize everything,” said UPLIFT Desk Chief Operating Officer Bryce Bowerman. “Yahoo did not provide what we needed. We needed an ecommerce platform we could trust and had the capability to deliver a unique customer experience. We didn’t get it with our previous platform, so we looked for a platform that could.”

SOLUTION

Up with BigCommerce

Several providers were evaluated – Magento and 3dcart, but UPLIFT Desk found in BigCommerce the affordability, reliability, scalability, ease-of-use and the ability to incorporate personalization into the customer experience. And, in 2016 the company launched on BigCommerce.

“Our customers are able to design their desks with a huge number of options and accessories on BigCommerce. Purchasing a desk is a sizable investment and customers have a natural preference to see, touch and experience the product before buying it,” said Bowerman. "To give online customers a type of in-store experience, we leveraged BigCommerce’s flexibility to stand up a state-of-the-art desk configurator. It essentially lets customers pull from our large catalog to see their desks being virtually built with various product option combinations like desk frame, color, desktop materials and more.”

When it comes to functionality and performance, UPLIFT Desk's content development team spends most of its time in the backend of BigCommerce tweaking the website, optimizing templates and activating resourceful features on the site.

“One such feature is BigCommerce’s native Abandoned Cart Saver. With it we can send automated emails to shoppers who add a product to their cart but fail to complete the purchase,” said Bowerman. “It literally has helped bring in thousands of dollars and hundreds of orders every month that we would not have seen otherwise.”

UPLIFT Desk uses Mailchimp to market its products to a large newsletter subscriber list. “Through the BigCommerce/Mailchimp integration we are able to easily segment the list, share relevant promotions and offers and automatically track the effectiveness of our outreach. All this activity syncs back to BigCommerce’s analytics and gives us the data we need to know how things are going,” said Bowerman.

BigCommerce’s integration with ShipperHQ has also equipped UPLIFT Desk with a powerful engine to manage complex shipping rules, pricing and a variety of product configurations. ShipperHQ is configured with all of UPLIFT Desk’s various product weights and dimensions, so automated logic can determine in real time if shipments should go via ground delivery or freight.

The team has seen a marked improvement in online operational efficiencies and accuracy fulfilling both single and high-volume orders, with the latter being inherently more complex. “Our BigCommerce integration with our [Oracle NetSuite] ERP changed things tremendously for our sales team. At one point the team had to enter orders manually with lots of time-consuming verification steps. Now, we can enter orders directly into BigCommerce, the data then transfers into our ERP, enabling all order data to originate from the same place,” said Bowerman.

RESULTS

A growing business on the rise

“What’s nice about BigCommerce is that it enables us to offer both our B2C and B2B customers the same shopping experience and benefits. They get product information in a digestible format, an extreme level of personalized customization and the ease of checking out online,” said Bowerman.

The ease of checking out online is evident in the company’s 226% increase in orders when comparing YoY 2021 to 2019. And, for the same time period, a 61% increase in conversions and a 203% increase in customers were realized.

LOOKING AHEAD

Moving up and out

As the year progresses, UPLIFT Desk will focus its attention on expanding its website capabilities and working toward a headless environment.

“Delivering a highly differentiated shopping experience to our online customers is what we’re striving for,” said Bowerman. Our website is critical to the success of our business and growing on BigCommerce remains a big part of our strategy.”

Published: October 2022