By Bridget McCrea
Since September 2013, Frost Supply of Maryland Heights, Mo. has been working with DATAgility, developer of data quality scorecarding program DATAFirst, to clean up its catalogue data and upgrade its corporate website. In this series of tED Magazine articles, we followed Frost Supply through the process of improving its data quality and its e-commerce presence. The project is now complete and the distributor is already seeing the benefits of its 9-month-long investment. In this article, we’ll wrap up this series and discuss what’s next for Frost Supply as it begins to see the rewards of its efforts.
Keeping it Clean
The last time we checked in with Frost Supply, the company was coming down the home stretch of an intensive project that kicked off in September. In early-June, the distributor officially launched its new website – knowing full well that there would a few bugs to work out of the system (which was previously in beta testing format).
“As with any new launch, we had a couple of issues to deal with on the first day that the site went live,” says Nick Arb, marketing manager. “Not everything was processing correctly, but we worked out those problems and everything has functioned properly.”
In assessing Frost Supply’s initial expectations from its data cleansing and website overhaul projects, the results have more than met the firm’s expectations in terms of performance. “I think we would have liked the timeline to be a bit shorter, but it was a major undertaking,” says Arb. “When all is said and done, we’re happy with how the process went.”
Meeting and Exceeding Expectations
Frost Supply’s customer base is also pleased with the new look, feel, and reliability of the distributor’s website. “We’ve received positive feedback from a lot of our local customers that use our site heavily,” says Arb. “They’re very happy with the change and find the site a lot easier to use than our previous version.”
“There are definitely some complexities to having a fully-functioning ecommerce platform,” says Arb, who reveals that Frost Supply is now interested in launching a mobile version of its website. “We know that a lot of our customers are using smartphones and tablets, in a month or so we’ll have a user-friendly mobile site that will have the look and feel of a mobile app.”
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McCrea is a Florida-based writer who covers business, industrial, and educational topics for a variety of magazines and journals. You can reach her at bridgetmc@earthlink.net or visit her website at www.expertghostwriter.net.
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