Fluitek has been helping customers with their filtration needs since 1975, and sells their US-manufactured industrial filters to factories, plants, commercial buildings, and suburban homes in the US and internationally.
In this highly competitive market, where parts sold for a few cents less can be a competitive advantage, Fluitek continues to thrive. Why? Not only do they have one of the largest catalogs of filtration devices, they are also one of the earliest adopters of Internet-based (e-commerce) sales.
Utilizing E-commerce Allowed Fluitek to Established Itself as a Leader
Fluitek isn’t new to selling online- they’ve had an online catalog for over 20 years. However, in 2015 they realized they needed an e-commerce solution to make it easier to transact with their B2B customers. Specifically, they needed a way for these customers to quickly and easily find OEM products without needing to know the corresponding Fluitek replacement products. After an exhaustive search for the right e-commerce platform, Fluitek determined that Magento 1 Community was best suited to handle a massive catalog (240,000+ SKUs) and connect the complex relationships between Fluitek’s replacement filters and the OEM filters they replace. With their e-commerce solution and marketing services partner, ArgonDigital, Fluitek was able to:
- Modernize their servers and technology stack to significantly improve their website performance
- Optimize existing custom Magento code to improve the search, browse and checkout experience
- Implement Google Shopping campaigns through an automated feed from Fluitek.com that prioritizes part numbers to ensure the Fluitek catalog ranked well for customers searching OEM part numbers
- Develop and execute a marketing strategy that included the implementation of a marketing automation solution to automate follow-up with customers to replenish filters needing replacement. At the same time, this automated solution also captures information about new visitors and those who abandon their carts to in order to continue nurturing them to a point of conversion.
Make It Easy to Buy While Expanding Your Market Presence
In 2020 Fluitek was ready to take their e-commerce site to the next level. With ArgonDigital’s guidance, Fluitek outined a 3-5 year plan that would further improve the overall customer buying experience, reach more prospective buyers, and provide the ability to grow their e-commerce catalog to over 1MM products. From that outline the next big question was HOW to make that vision a reality.
The answer was to migrate to the NEW Magento 2 Commerce platform in order to leverage all the great features and improvements like unique B2B features, marketplace integrations, high scalability, and more.
The ArgonDigital implementation team went straight to work identifying and extending many of the Magento features that would help them achieve their goal that included:
- Implementation of a quoting mechanism to streamline the ordering process that often include requests for rare filters that can only be recognized by customer-submitted images
- Introduction of a quick order form to easily purchase multiple products without having to visit multiple product pages
- Leveraging Elasticsearch for improved site search allowing customers to more quickly and easily find parts based on either the OEM or Fluitek part number, filter attributes, brand names and more
- Implementing a wider selection of payment methods to allow customers to use the payment option that works best for them
- Introduction of a subscription module allowing customers to create automatic reorders on filter products, resulting in increased customer loyalty and repeat orders
- Integration with B2B marketplaces to extend the product catalog discoverability on other platforms such as Amazon B2B and other industrial marketplaces, allowing Fluitek to grow their customer base
- Utilizing Magento 2 to allow them to expand their online catalog to 1MM products, and utilizing the Amasty product feed module to support those products to being available on Google Shopping and other 3rd party marketplaces
Together with ArgonDigital and Magento, Fluitek has become the leading resource for businesses and consumers to buy industrial filters online!
