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What we do
Sint-Niklaas based furniture fittings expert Van Hoecke has a special proposition: achieving sustainable personal growth for employees, clients, suppliers, and partners. The secret ingredient: sustainable, innovative furniture fittings. To support this, Van Hoecke went off to pursue a 100% digital intake, using a platform that seamlessly integrates experience and tools, e-commerce, and content.
A multi-site, digital platform
Strategic journey
User-friendly CMS
B2B & B2C e-commerce
Technological self-service
Van Hoecke is a true family business that focuses on cooperation above all. That is why they are committed to achieving sustainable personal growth together with employees, clients, suppliers, and partners. In this way, the company wants to create veritable well-being for all its stakeholders.
We built an innovative e-commerce platform for Van Hoecke, granting users direct access to the Van Hoecke product range, pricing, and product configurators. Today, everyone benefits from a fully automated process of ordering innovative furniture fittings, from selection to ordering, production and delivery.
To realise a 100% digital order intake, innovative and user-friendly.
A sleek, versatile B2B e-commerce platform with the best of B2C.
As a distributor of functional furniture fittings, Van Hoecke is a household name, both in its home base of Sint-Niklaas and far beyond. Van Hoecke has a distinct B2B approach and mainly supplies kitchen manufacturers – resulting in 16,000 unique products every week, 9000 active clients per year and an annual turnover of 112 million euros.
How do you transform a predominantly manual order process into 100% digital order intake? Van Hoecke, a manufacturer of functional furniture fittings, approached iO with this question. In this video, you will discover how our experts developed a new B2B e-commerce approach — and continue to support the company year after year.
Expertise and craftsmanship are key at Van Hoecke. A great asset, but a significant challenge, nonetheless. Especially when top-notch quality and a no-nonsense approach are combined with manual order systems and high expectations in terms of customisation and logistics. Van Hoecke’s experts think and act as partners for each client and proactively deploy their expertise.
To keep this up – as opposed to 'simply' filling orders – Van Hoecke decided to actively pursue a 100% digital order intake, assisted by iO as its technology partner. Together, we decided to develop an online platform that reflects Van Hoecke’s position as market leader. A platform that seamlessly integrates experience and tools, e-commerce, and content.
However, research comes first and foremost. Together with Van Hoecke, our experts embarked on a strategic journey. By relying on research into both the customer journey and the needs of the target group, they determined the best way to extend Van Hoecke's offline quality to the digital realm.
Van Hoecke's experts' mission was to become full-fledged partners in customers' lives, which is why customer processes were also in need of a thorough digitisation. For this reason, the team toured Van Hoecke’s clients during this phase, carrying several mock-ups and always posing the same, vital questions. What do you need as a customer? What works efficiently for you? What feels logical and what doesn't?
The result: an innovative e-commerce platform and digital ecosystem, unburdening users and sellers alike.
For the new website, we picked Drupal 10 as our trusted CMS with plenty of functionalities for a case like this, such as dynamic menus, multilanguage set-up and media options. The API platform works by grace of Symfony 6, as a sparring partner for Drupal 10 for shopping baskets, products, customers, communication with external services and much, much more.
Using VueJS, we took care of the interactive dimension of the platform, think customer dashboard, shopping basket plug-ins and the delivery time calendar during check-out. With RabbitMQ, we ensure the shopping baskets are kept neatly in sync with Van Hoecke's system and we use Mercure to send socket-related messages to the front-end. This way, we notify users if something needs to be changed in their baskets, without the need for a page refresh. For example, if a product in a basket is no longer compatible with a drawer the user has just modified.
Finally, we rely on Redis for data caching and ElasticSearch for search using custom configuration and queries.
Today, Van Hoecke’s clients benefit from a fully automated process, from selection to ordering, production and delivery. Through the e-commerce platform, they have direct access to the Van Hoecke product range, pricing, and product configurators.
Customers can use personalised configurators to order individual products and customised products, straight in their browser environments. With a few clicks, visitors can work out self-selected products down to the smallest details, via dimensions and materials, real-time and in 3D – even complete with a 360 degrees view. A dynamic price indicator adds value. With every adjustment, the visitor sees the effect of his or her actions on the price in real time.
It is striking how many tried and tested B2C components are part of this result. The Van Hoecke platform provides support for multiple shopping baskets (projects), a quotation wizard, reference management, favourites, (sub)user management and an extensive real-time customer dashboard.
"Today, we still maintain a sustainable cooperation with iO. They provide permanent added value through their expertise in digital transformation, from strategy to implementation. They continuously build new features and guarantee the service and maintenance that a platform like ours needs. They think with us, manage to work their way into our very core business and even share the burdens of the challenges we face ourselves."
Dries Tindemans, Project lead & Experience-architect Van Hoecke NV
What did the effective iO-Van Hoecke partnership provide customers with? Not only did we manage to (jointly) realise the requested 100% digital order intake, but we also provided personalisation options in a versatile e-commerce platform and online catalogue. We built various tools and configurators to guide customers efficiently through the funnel, as well as a real-time dashboard to track orders and deliveries.
Van Hoecke employees were also freed from mundane tasks, such as order entries, and can now use their extensive knowledge and expertise to further raise the level of customer service.
For any European business today, a CMP (Consent Management Platform) is essential. But how do you tackle that when you have more than 20 online e-commerce platforms to reach different target groups? We helped Van Hoecke select, implement, and optimise the right solution - CookieHub.
In that case, go to the source by clicking the button!
What we do
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Do you also want to work on innovative, digital platforms that put your target group in control of its own journey? Contact iO – our specialists can’t wait to hear your story.