Record sales were reported by Irish builders’ merchant TJ O’Mahony after launching its first online sales platform.
The website, supplied by the eCommonSense team, saw revenues exceed £100,000 in the first three days with server capacity having to be boosted hourly to cope with the unforeseen demand.
The merchant was said to be delighted with the early results from the soft launch, especially considering the limited marketing activity expended in advance of the launch.
Managing Director Dennis O’Connor said: “We are delighted with the response to our new website. Sales on day one exceeded all our expectations and they just kept increasing over the next two days.
“We continuously focus on ways in which we can look to improve the customer experience, and whilst it might sound a little cliched it is the experience that determines whether the customer turns into our Branches or our competitors. We didn’t want to go online for the sake of going online, we saw companies make that mistake. We wanted our online platform to add to the customer experience.
“When researching online solutions we looked at various platforms, we chose the one provided by eCommonSense as they weren’t just another e-commerce solution, we saw that it was built bespoke for builders’ merchants. That is exactly what we wanted.”
TJ O’Mahony joins a growing list of merchants opting for the eCommonSense website and product management solution, such as Inter-Line, who won the 2019 Best Website and Digital Initiative in the Builders’ Merchant Awards.
Many merchants have been bringing forward their online launches in response to the Covid-19 crisis and the social distancing rules.
Going live recently on the eCommonSense platform were the merchants JT Dove, Colchester’s Collier & Catchpole, Leamington-based Building and Plumbing Supplies and London’s civil’s merchant, George Lines, who join their sister company Lords in using the eCommonSense website solution.
They will be shortly followed by Northern Ireland’s Haldane Fisher which will use the integration into the Kerridge ERP system.
eCommonSense Managing Director Andy Scothern said that he was amazed at the response following the TJ O’Mahony launch.
“We never anticipated that we would see such a huge response – we have never seen anything like it before. We had to scramble all of our resource to increase server capacity, but we could never have anticipated such activity for a soft launch with no marketing. It sets a new benchmark and a new record.”
