David Yadzi started Filtrous from his rundown garage, where he only sold laboratory syringe filters directly to other businesses. Over the last 10 years, it has grown into a global multi-million dollar laboratory supply company that caters to customers worldwide, from small laboratories to esteemed institutions like UCLA.
To stand out in a traditionally antiquated industry, Filtrous sought to build a modern wholesale experience that delivers a frictionless buying experience, faster checkout, and streamlined order fulfillment. However, Filtrous’ progress was hindered by their outdated ecommerce platform, which added unnecessary complexity to their B2B order process.
Since transitioning to B2B on Shopify, Filtrous has:
- Launched their wholesale storefront in just 63 days
- Saved 10 hours of manual work per week for their customer service team, and an additional 2 hours of manual work per week for their sales team
- Increased their organic conversion rate by 27%
The challenge: A stagnant ecommerce platform that did not scale with Filtrous’ growth plans
Before transitioning to B2B on Shopify, Filtrous relied on BigCommerce to power their B2B ecommerce site. However, they quickly realized that they couldn’t give their customers the buying experience they were looking for on their current platform.
"We did a full year of custom development for our site, but walked away unhappy with the way the site looked and performed,” says Yin Fu, Director of Ecommerce at Filtrous. “BigCommerce lacked the flexibility for us to fully control our site, and managing the customer experience was time-consuming.”
Yin added that the team quickly grew frustrated by the lack of new B2B features and slow innovation on BigCommerce. He also noted that the platform always seemed to break whenever they attempted to make a simple change. Not surprisingly, the customer experience wasn’t what Filtrous hoped to deliver. Customers often found the website difficult to navigate, which prompted them to contact customer service to place orders instead of using their online store.
Consequently, Filtrous experienced a significant loss of time and resources, as grappled with a surge of manual orders. As their user experience fell behind the competition, Filtrous decided it was time for a change.
The solution: Migrating to Shopify and leveraging their best-in-class buying experiences and innovation
After careful evaluation of multiple platforms, Filtrous made the strategic decision to part ways with BigCommerce and move to B2B on Shopify. Yin tells us the choice was driven by Shopify's unparalleled dedication to innovation and flexibility, as well as the dozens of B2B features released in the past year.
The constant updates to B2B on Shopify have left us pleasantly surprised. It seems like these releases are highly tailored to the needs of B2B merchants, and makes us feel like we’re being heard.
With access to dedicated launch support and an intuitive admin experience, Filtrous found onboarding to be seamless, which enabled them to quickly configure features such as customer-specific catalogs, custom discounts, and payment options. Using Shopify’s suite of core features, like Shopify Flow, and vaulted credit cards, they’ve also been able to automate more of their back office operations, like the emailing and payment of invoices. Filtrous launched their storefront quickly—and received their first B2B order on the new site just 63 days after signing on with Shopify.
“Being able to launch the site in about two months was a notable win,” Yin says. “We switched to Shopify to make our dollar go further, without compromising on what we need.”
Results: A better buying experience that dramatically boosted Filtrous’ conversion rate
Shopify empowers Filtrous’ customers to self-serve, which not only frees up more of their sales team’s time, but also drives business growth. Basic tasks such as gathering basic customer information, order taking, and accepting payments can now be conveniently managed online by their customers themselves and automatically reconciled within their ERP and CRM.
“Everything is more streamlined with Shopify. I have so much more time to focus on marketing and growing the business,” Yin says.
Yin says that Filtrous’ organic conversion rate has jumped a whopping 27% since migrating to Shopify. Filtrous’ transition to B2B on Shopify also freed up their customer success and sales teams to focus on the jobs they were hired to do. Now that Filtrous’ customers can place their own orders and manage their accounts within Shopify’s intuitive platform, Yin estimates that the migration saves their customer support team 10 hours per week.
On the sales side, Yin estimates that Shopify saves sales reps an average of two hours per week by streamlining their ordering process. Using Shopify's Companies staff permissions, sales reps can place orders and access account information directly in the admin, only for their assigned customers. In addition, Filtrous uses Shopify's first-party automation tool, Flow, to automatically notify the sales team when prospective customers submit an account request form.
Thanks to an exceptional self-serve experience and features like Shopify Flow, the team can spend more of its time selling.
Going forward, Yin believes that the biggest benefit of switching from BigCommerce has been gaining peace of mind knowing that Filtrous can scale their business with Shopify's constant improvements and global infrastructure.
“We’re confident that no matter how big we grow, or how many orders we get on a given day, that Shopify could handle it,” Yin says.
Shopify’s rate of innovation has also allowed Filtrous to actively participate in early access programs for upcoming features, and contribute feedback directly to the product team building B2B on Shopify.
“The constant updates to B2B on Shopify have left us pleasantly surprised. It seems like these releases are highly tailored to the needs of B2B merchants, and they’re always delivered on time. It makes us feel like we’re being heard,” Yin says.