“This project had an extremely aggressive six-week timeline,” states Davy. “Everything had to be coordinated perfectly to meet the deadline and deliver the level of sophistication Unisource customers are used to.”

Two principal differences between the FORDIS and Unisource sites were established to address the specific needs of the FORDIS target markets of large volume purchasers and redistribution companies. The page templates were redesigned, branding the FORDIS site to match the division’s fresh corporate identity, and specific product segments are filtered, displaying only a fraction of the items available on Unisource.ca. “While the Unisource site offers both fine paper AND facility supplies, the FORDIS site only lists the supply products,” explains Davy. “This gives distributors streamlined access to thousands of products they are interested in, without the thousands of product listings they don’t need. It’ll really help gear targeted marketing initiatives towards high-volume clientele.” Both systems are integrated with the company’s ERP to process pricing and product changes as they come in, and send customer orders straight to their system.

This is not the first such project for Unisource Canada, having developed PaperOnly in 2006 to meet the specific demands of printing companies. “Unisource is way ahead of many B2B companies in their Web strategy,” comments Davy. “These satellite sites are an excellent way for them to provide the best online ordering experience for their clients, while maximizing the return on their investment in IgnitionWeb.”

To read more about the evolution of the Unisource website, consult our case study or read about the launch of PaperOnly.