Background
Wolseley is the UK's premier specialist in plumbing, heating, cooling, and infrastructure services. The focus was placed on creating an online presence that stands as the essential resource for trade professionals. The mission involved not just enhancing the digital customer journey but ensuring it complemented the physical store experience, with recognition given to the unique challenges faced by independent contractors and traders.
Understanding that time spent away from the job is potential income lost, a commitment was made to streamline the process of sourcing materials and managing administrative tasks. By optimising the online experience, an effort was made to alleviate these time-consuming efforts, allowing clients to focus more on their work and less on logistics.
Key Technology Used
Next.js:
Was employed to build a fast, SEO-friendly website that enhanced the user experience with server-side rendering and static site generation capabilities. This framework was crucial for creating a scalable, responsive interface that could handle Wolseley's extensive product catalogue and customer interactions efficiently.
React:
Was utilised to facilitate the development of dynamic, engaging user interfaces that made navigating through Wolseley's vast selection of products seamless and intuitive. The component-based architecture of React allowed for the building of reusable UI elements, making the platform more consistent and easier to maintain.
React Query:
Was used as a key tool in managing the application's state and asynchronous operations, ensuring that data fetching, caching, synchronisation, and updating were handled with efficiency. The user experience was enhanced by React Query by keeping the interface responsive and up to date with the latest data, crucial for keeping independent contractors informed and efficient.
Nx:
Was leveraged as a powerful monorepo tool, enabling the streamlining of the development process across multiple projects within Wolseley's digital ecosystem. By leveraging Nx, code sharing, library development, and application building within a single repository were efficiently managed. This not only improved the development workflow but also ensured consistency and reduced redundancy across projects, making the development process more efficient and scalable.
Material-UI:
Was integrated to provide a comprehensive suite of UI tools and components based on Google's Material Design principles, enabling the crafting of a visually appealing and highly usable interface. Material-UI provided a consistent design language and a wide range of components that enhanced the user interface, making it more intuitive and accessible for Wolseley's customers.
Outcome
The launch of the new website successfully expanded Wolseley's active online customer segment to over 40% of their trading clientele, a remarkable achievement considering that half of their customer demographic is over the age of 50.
The platform also received significant industry recognition — being awarded Best B2B Site of the Year 2023 at the UK Dev Awards, as well as the Best Site Migration accolade.
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