Case study · Trades & construction

Drillcut: a B2B eCommerce website overhaul.

Drillcut has grown from selling drill bits and cutting blades out of the back of a car in 1988 into an independent, family owned frontrunner in Melbourne’s building services industry. Its website needed to keep pace.

Sector: Trades & construction
Service: Website design and development
Channels: Shopify

Website projectDigital experience

Workers walking through a distribution centre.

The challenge

What needed to change.

Drillcut’s story is that of a family determined to make a difference in an industry dominated by one or two major suppliers over many years. That independence carries an obligation: trade customers who choose Drillcut expect service the big suppliers cannot match. The B2B eCommerce website had to support growth while reducing the manual internal tasks that were absorbing the team’s time.

Ordering for a building services customer is rarely one person buying one item. Accounts span branches, projects and approval chains, and the website had to handle all of that as naturally as a single purchase.

Mobile mockup for the Drillcut homepage & menu.

Approach

How the work took shape.

We worked with the Drillcut team on a more premium, responsive B2B eCommerce website and portal. For the development we chose a headless React front end with a Shopify Plus backend, which gave us the freedom to design the customer portal around Drillcut’s own workflows while relying on Shopify Plus for the commerce engine underneath.

The new platform required a customer portal with role-based access, alongside administration tools for the Drillcut team to manage the portal and its users. Ordering meant more than a catalogue. The portal needed to support account roles, permissions, projects, branches and assigned users, as well as quotations, submittals and requisition approvals.

So before any interface work began, we mapped roles, permissions, projects, teams and branches, so that the responsive experience would support real ordering and account tasks rather than a generic checkout. Integrations were planned the same way: MYOB EXO for payments, Algolia Search for product discovery and 8x8 Online Chat for customer support, each connected so the portal would be one place to work rather than several.

The shift

Mapping who orders, who approves and who pays came before a single screen was designed.

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The work

The work, up close.

MYOB EXO, Algolia Search and 8x8 Online Chat were integrated to connect payments, product discovery and customer support to the one platform. The result is a premium, responsive B2B website where a customer can find a product, order it under the right account and get help without leaving the portal.

The portal was designed around the tasks. Because roles, permissions, projects, teams and branches were mapped before the interface work, the responsive experience supports real ordering and account tasks on any screen. On desktop, an account administrator can move between projects, approvals and price files. On mobile, a customer on a job can reorder, check product history or progress a saved cart to checkout.

The same portal serves both without hiding functionality on the smaller screen, so nobody has to wait until they are back at a desk. Algolia Search makes product discovery fast across the catalogue, and 8x8 Online Chat puts customer support inside the same screen as the order.

Drillcut B2B eCommerce website on a desktop screen.

Role-based permissions, account approval and multi-price controls support the different levels of access required across a B2B customer account, from a single buyer to a company with many approvers.

It is one connected portal. Customer and internal administration were brought into the same platform, linking ordering, account and supporting operational systems, so the Drillcut team manages users and orders from the same place its customers use.

Customers can organise orders across branches and projects, while requisition workflows give administrators and website managers a clear way to review, approve or decline requests.

Administration and access sit in the same environment. Account teams have invoices, credits, price-file exports, company details and user management to hand, which removes a good share of the manual tasks that used to land on Drillcut’s staff.

The portal brings together quick order creation, quotes, saved carts, Drillcarts, projects, product history and submittals, with tools to export, email, archive and progress work to checkout. Together they turn the website from a catalogue into the place where Drillcut’s customers run their purchasing, on whichever device is closest to hand. Work can be started on one device and finished on another, because it all lives in the account rather than in a browser tab.

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