Car & Van Mats Revs Up Ecommerce Sales With Help of BigCommerce and DeeperThanBlue

Small Family Business Looks to Optimize Processes and Scale

In its early stages, Car and Van Mats — a family-run business based in Sheffield, England — sold a wide selection of mats for cars, vans, motorhomes, and trucks on a single marketplace channel. The business was steady, and the existing strategy had served the company well for several years, but the Car and Van Mats team eventually saw the business’ potential and had big dreams to grow it beyond a simple eBay store.  

To get its expansion plans rolling, Car and Van Mats built out a standalone WordPress site set up on WooCommerce but quickly realized that in addition to slow load times, it just wasn’t capable of supporting Car and Van Mats’ large catalog. With most purchase abandonments happening at checkout, Car and Van Mats’ WooCommerce site did not match the caliber of service it wanted to provide to customers on its online store. And with sales on the rise, the company knew it was time to step it up to craft a more scalable business.

Car and Van Mats selected leading digital agency DeeperThanBlue to jump in and help manage its large catalog and high-growth site. The company prided itself on customer satisfaction in its business and wanted the same for its ecommerce site, so DeeperThanBlue helped Car and Van Mats evaluate top ecommerce solutions including Magento, Shopify, and BigCommerce. In the search for an easy to use, reliable, secure, and affordable platform, Car and Van Mats found all of that and more in BigCommerce.

Slow WooCommerce Site Speed Leads to More Abandoned Carts

As told to BigCommerce by Jane Green, Director, Car and Van Mats.

With the sheer size of our catalog, we knew we wouldn’t go anywhere without a more robust solution. Our catalog includes various makes, models and years, different qualities of carpet and rubber, and trim colors, and our WordPress site just wasn't quick enough to handle it all. It would take up to 25 seconds for a page to load, whereas on our BigCommerce site, pages load in less than two seconds. It’s great because all of the people who dropped off the site before are now finding it only takes a few short seconds to go from cart to checkout.

We looked at a couple of other platforms before landing on BigCommerce but were turned off by the fact that they required web developers to add tools. We wanted something we could edit and customize ourselves, and it’s quite easy to do that with BigCommerce. The fact that we’re getting so much value for a lesser cost is what ultimately swayed us to build our store on BigCommerce.

BigCommerce Elite Agency Partner DeeperThanBlue to the Rescue

As told to BigCommerce by Jane Green, Director, Car and Van Mats.

When we were first brainstorming our site design, we had several meetings with DeeperThanBlue, showing them photographs and explaining exactly what we envisioned. They helped us decide theme colors and main page design. We also discussed in great depth all of the process flows and how we wanted each page to work.

When it came time to launch, we had already received thorough training from DeeperThanBlue on how to do everything on our BigCommerce site ourselves. DeeperThanBlue migrated our site from WooCommerce and WordPress to BigCommerce in just 12 weeks, and we had our first sale within half an hour of the site going live. We also utilize DeeperThanBlue’s online marketing services for organic SEO and PPC marketing with Google Ads, and our site has ranked well.

Our experience with DeeperThanBlue has been absolutely brilliant. Once we sat with them and explained our preferences, they went ahead and put together a very clean looking and well-functioning site for us. We’ve had fantastic support from DeeperThanBlue, as they’re always an email or phone call away.

Shipping and Fulfillment Made Easy

As told to BigCommerce by Jane Green, Director, Car and Van Mats.

With our newfound ability to reach a wider audience, we wanted to simplify our order management processes. LinnWorks is an especially crucial app for us because it does everything we need to manage our orders efficiently. When the orders come in, we don’t have to sift through them and manually collect information. LinnWorks saves us time and money by automating all of the different steps of our selling processes.

Because BigCommerce integrates with LinnWorks, we can process multiple shipments faster and more easily. LinnWorks sends all of the necessary information, such as tracking numbers, into the site, eliminating the need to employ extra staff. We love that our team can be self-sufficient and manage everything ourselves.

LinnWorks also plugs into our fulfillment partner ParcelHub, which integrates with our sales channels (eBay, Amazon, and BigCommerce). I can print all the labels I need and send delivery information to customers with the touch of a button. One feature we enjoy is Parcelhub’s SMART Notifications, which helps us minimize delivery failures by keeping our team updated on shipping status. Since we began working with Parcelhub, we have significantly grown our volumes and we now ship thousands of orders each week.

With LinnWorks and Parcelhub, we now spend less time on tedious labeling, processing, and shipping, and more time actually running our business.

BigCommerce and DeeperThanBlue Give Car and Van Mats a Competitive Edge

As told to BigCommerce by Jane Green, Director, Car and Van Mats.

It’s exciting for us to have an inside look into the analytics of our BigCommerce site. We can see people coming on and off the site in real time, our most popular products, when there is high traffic, and so much more. The speed of the site, the ease of use and looking so clean is what we believe is making us stand out against our competitors. Every day, our site is getting busier and busier, and we love watching it grow on a platform like BigCommerce.

We’re constantly moving forward, innovating, and looking for new products to put on our BigCommerce site. As a company, we are very passionate about what we do, and with BigCommerce and DeeperThanBlue, we’re making our mark on the future of the automotive industry.