Aligent and TradeTools break new ground with business agility and online customer experience

TradeTools lays the digital foundation for success

TradeTools is a leading Australian supplier of industrial tools and equipment. Since first opening doors back in 1987, TradeTools has provided Australia’s tradespeople and the trade industry with the widest range of top-quality industrial air, hand, power and cordless tools and industrial equipment. These same tools have been used to build roads, businesses, schools, hospitals, homes & many other projects. 

With such an important role to play in helping build Australia, TradeTools demanded an outstanding online experience to continue leading the industry. Aligent’s ongoing partnership with TradeTools (first established during the challenges of COVID) has delivered significant growth for the key channel to market.

In late 2023, TradeTools partnered with Aligent to transition their backend eCommerce technology to BigCommerce while preserving the existing front-end experience (previously built by Aligent as a Headless PWA), dramatically cutting down on development time compared to a full rebuild. This project truly embodies the essence of the MACH movement.

🔧 Website is tightly integrated to ERP (Pronto) so that customers can view live inventory, pricing, customer account information and loyalty program status.

🔨 Complex shipping calculations to fulfill products ranging from “Big and Bulky” (e.g. air compressors weighing up to 800kg) through to lightweight consumables, also dangerous goods and indent/pre-orders.

🧰 Website is built using Progressive Web App technology ensuring lightning fast user experience, future flexibility, SEO benefits and underpinned by Aligent TakeFlight's accelerator. 

⚙️ Full visibility of order history online and in-store. 

🔐 Utilising BigCommerce hosting frees Aligent from regular security and maintenance tasks, allowing a focused delivery of enhancements.

Our B2B customers make up a considerable component of our total business. In a very competitive environment, we are often competing against significantly larger businesses so our service and knowledge of the customer can be a differentiating factor in our success. In this context, creating a seamless buying experience was essential for our B2B buyers. Our website sales are a substantial % of our overall business, continues to grow and works in parallel with our store success.

Ensuring the successful integration between our ERP and eCommerce platform was integral to the success of the overall project. Product pricing, stock levels, order information (online and offline) and customer data were all functionality which need to be integrated. Product pricing complexities stands out as an area of particular challenge. TradeTools have a number of rules that are affected by numerous variables. Aligent worked with us to create a customised rule set that works exactly how we need online, as it does through our ERP.

The microservice-based integration approach is highly scalable, cost-effective and extensible, providing a welcome alternative to vendor lock-in associated with the legacy "ERP plug-and play" ecommerce solution before Aligent's engagement, or to expensive iPaaS solutions. 

Innovative UX for highly competitive female athleisure brand

Aligent developed an innovative technology stack to showcase intuitive UX

Rockwear PWA shows outstanding performance

Development, Integrations, B2C Commerce, PWA, Marketplaces, Adobe Commerce

Rockwear set out to create a website that reinvigorated the customer experience. Understanding how customers shop and use the products in their lives drove the process, from navigation that provides multiple paths to suit the customer's need, Guides and Finders to inform the selection process, and complementing the information with engaging video.  The result has surpassed expectations, delivering commercial results and significantly increasing the operational efficiencies. 

A key capability for Rockwear to improve customer experience is dependent on seamless and scalable integration to backoffice systems including ERP and POS. This microservice-based connection enables real-time visibility of inventory across almost a hundred stores. The integration also supports confident selling of Rockwear products across numerous popular marketplaces, underpinned by powerful PIM content management. 

With a significant proportion of Rockwear's customers browsing from the gym, chilling after a workout, or at the cafe with friends, ensuring the website was not only mobile-friendly, but mobile optimized was essential. Aligent's TakeFlight accelerator provided the ideal platform to create a Progressive Web Application that is extremely fast and interactive, "installable" without needing Apple App Store or Google Play Store hassles, and enables incremental addition on new functionality. 

The headless performance was resulted in significant SEO benefits, with outstanding Core Web Vitals, and the user conversion rate increase has realized the hoped-for benefits.

A rewarding blend of intuitive user experience, exclusive product availability, and crafted customer pricing!

Joval Wine Group uncorks Digital Transformation with Aligent and Bigcommerce

The latest vintage of the Winesource website has delivered outstanding results for Joval Wine Group, delighting customers with its ease of use, speed and functionality. The collaboration between Aligent, Bigcommerce and Joval Wine Group has overcome significant complexities in the wine distribution business at scale, to bring a carefully designed user experience to life, driven in real-time by sophisticated integration. 

Utilizing Bigcommerce's B2B Edition as a framework, with a React-based PWA frontend, and powered by a modern integration to Microsoft D365, the Winesource website sets a new standard for B2B ecommerce & portal functionality.

🍷 Bespoke, UX-led design underscoring the unlimited flexibility of the headless user interface

🍷 Rich product content including tasting notes, winery profiles, expert reviews, vintage and varietal - underscoring BigCommerce’s flexible data model

🍷 Sophisticated B2B capabilities, including:

 📦 Capped purchasing for in-demand products;

 📦 Omnichannel order and invoice history & payment;

 📦 Complex customer-specific pricing driven by ERP;

 📦 Multiple UOM (bottle, 6 pack, dozen, etc);

 📦 Reserved quantity for selected Products (“allocations”) ensuring a guaranteed minimum quantity available for preferred customers;

 📦 Visibility of order status including dispatch date & ETA;

🍷 Stunning performance thanks to BigCommerce, Aligent’s TakeFlight and AWS, delivering cost-effective, highly available, and scalable peace of mind for Joval and rapid experiences for their customers.

Customers can access comprehensive, industry specific attributes for ease of discovery, not to mention reviews from wine industry experts such as Halliday, James Suckling and more. Downloadable tasting notes and images make it easier to incorporate the products into their own businesses. 

For in-demand products, Joval Wine Group implemented customer-specific quotas and resevations, ensuring that no-one customer could exceed their allowance, and providing assurances for VIP customers that their requirements would always be met.

The combination of complex B2B scenarios along with wine industry specific nuances presented major technical challenges to overcome.  This included multi-location inventory, sales channel limits, and customer specific reservations. Pricing complexity included over 400,000 discount lines factoring in individual SKU, customer, brand and customer group levels

Customers particularly appreciated the ability to navigate by Brand, Vintage, Varietal, Price, Country and Region, and more, navigating the complex word of wine in a manner that suits their needs, ranging from a sommelier at a hatted restaurant to a cafe owner through to boutique wine stores. Listening to the needs of the customer was the starting point for this project. 

Similarly, the convenience of 24/7 access to an omnichannel view of their account standing, ultimately enabling the payment of invoices and hassle-free transactions was a relief for customers. Rather than manually requesting statements by phone or email, customers can download whenever it suits, while also checking on delivery timings for upcoming orders for extra peace of mind.

Winesource is a differentiator for Joval in the B2B fine wine space – all key competitors are reliant on email/phone call based ordering or basic D2C style websites that don’t offer a compelling solution

Delivering happiness, nutrition and customer satisfaction via an industry-leading web portal

Development, Design, B2B commerce, Adobe Commerce

The Fruit Box Group delivers milk, fruit, coffee and other workplace essentials to thousands of sites around Australia. Customer expectations are high since no-one wants an office suffering caffeine withdrawal! The Fruit Box Group pride themselves on keeping teams happy with the highest quality of produce. Keeping office administrators and finance departments happy is equally important with easy to manage, flexible and transparent systems. 

As a supporter of local producers, The Fruit Box Group selected Aligent to implement a step-change in their online capability. Aligent's team designed a user experience to navigate the complex options involved in combining subscription and once-off purchases, while managing multiple delivery locations. 

A few notable custom features to highlight are:

Subscription functionality can be a daunting challenge at any time, and when it is combined with multiple stakeholders on the end-customer side, dispersed physical locations, and the ticking clock of perishable produce, it really challenged Aligent, Adobe Commerce and the Fruit Box Group's team to bring out the best in the flexible toolset selected. 

Diverse user role capabilities and permissions, with self-service administration;

Minimum order requirements and rules regarding once-off versus standing order products;

Multi-location subscription/standing order editing;

Ability to apply temporary changes and temporary holds for standing orders for set time periods (e.g. Christmas office closures).

Complex business rules regarding pricing, product availability across state borders, and deliverability were simplified for the end-user, and backed by a seamlessly connected ERP, including implementation of a web service to manage product prices in 15,000+ locations.

Other technical accomplishments included:

Seamless integrations include NetSuite ERP, Rudderstack, and Customer.io;

Full Headless PWA implementation using Aligent's TakeFlight accelerator;

Swift and smooth deployments - thanks to our split PWA/Adobe Commerce architecture - achieving zero downtime during front-end deploys, enabling rapid feature releases.

Advanced features like AI-driven search and recommendations for intuitive product discovery;

Enhanced user experience and contemporary design;

Ad-hoc product checkout with a mobile-optimized layout;

Invoice portal to allow viewing, downloading and payment of invoices;

Rapid delivery of a seamlessly-integrated B2B experience is music to the ears!

Design and Development, Discovery, Integrations, B2B Commerce

As Australia's leading distributor of Audio Visual equipment for professional lighting, staging and audio, Jands knew they needed to wow their customers with the next generation of their B2B ecommerce offering. A previous "plug and play" website framework proved their customers were keen for digital touchpoints but severely limited the ability to personalize and delight. With an ERP modernization program in-flight, Jands chose Aligent and Adobe to create a tailored and extensible platform, to be seamlessly integrated into the Dynamics365 backend. 

Five months later, out in the world is a brand new PWA, with fresh designs by the Aligent team and an exciting approach to account management, it truly represents the modern online experience the B2B customer has come to expect!

Jands undertook an ambitious position to build and implement our transition to Adobe at a time when we are also implementing a new ERP system ... The Aligent team have been exceptional partners, and the success of our project is directly attributable to them as a partner

Streamlined dashboard showing overview of users actions and key figures

Fully customisable user purchase permissions and a simple approvals process

Account Purchase Credit facilities available

Accounting statement breakdowns for easy account reconciliation

Quick order functionality for customers who have consistent orders

Combined with a careful communications plan to manage the change for customers and internal stakeholders, the functionality and ease of use has already delivered significant increase in usage by customers. 

Industry-leading subscription service for coffee lovers.

B2C Commerce, B2B Commerce, Development, BAU, Consulting, Performance

Guide consumers step-by-step through the coffee buying process to eliminate confusion and complexity

Allow incremental changes and additions as the range expanded with new product

Provide full control for consumers to pause, edit and redirect subscriptions

Support extensive social and paid media campaigns with targeted landing pages

Guided shopping journey enables acquisition of customers more efficiently

Scaled seamlessly to absorb spike in demand during pandemic that yielded over 110% overall gain in customers

Personalised customer experiences increase satisfaction and loyalty


The Aligent team’s familiarity with Adobe Commerce, technical expertise, proactive mindset and responsiveness have all helped contribute to … our overall growth and success.

Industry-leading composable commerce for a personalised Omnichannel experience.

Development, B2C Commerce, BAU support, Loyalty, Omnichannel, Performance

Kathmandu were undergoing a full re-branding and digital transformation.

They wanted a solution that reflected and enhanced the new branding to provide the best possible customer experience.

They had a skilled in-house team, but wanted to ensure they were delivering an industry-leading solution led by an award winning partner.

The solution needed to connect and enhance the online-offline business capabilities for an Omnichannel customer experience.

Multi-national (AU, NZ, US, UK, FR & DE) store fronts.

Scalable architecture for new country and brand additions.

Full PWA using leading development principles.

AAA accessibility focussed design and implementation.

46% increase in online sales Year-on-Year

World-leading combination of features and technology

Headless CMS for flexible, rich content creation

Multi-currency and multi-region (with varied ‘feature flags’ per region)

Click and Collect (in checkout and PDP) and Find In Store

Loyalty Program and other pricing complexities

A polished and intuitive user experience for styling the perfect bedroom and bathroom

Bed Bath N’ Table’s brand is built on modern and contemporary products which lift a household’s aesthetic while providing comfort and quality for the customer.

They needed a highly usable website to help visitors navigate a surprisingly complex data model and to pair the perfect combination of linens, towels and accessories.

Aligent’s UX team was tasked to collaborate with BBNT’s in-house designers to bring together the best of UX and UI.

Weaving of lifestyle content from the blog and social media to provide inspiration into the site experience

Rewards members needed clarity of their loyalty benefits including discounts and VIP offers.

Beautiful and Clean layouts that showcase desirable products.

“Grouped” product architecture to enable ease of selection

Multi-national (Australia, NZ, Singapore) store fronts.

Luma template based design with tailored enhancements.

Consistent, strong growth in online sales Year-on-Year over multiple years

Top SEO rankings including #1 for target keywords including Flannel Sheets, Throws, Homewares Online

Outstanding UX for customers to navigate matching sets and related products to “Complete the Look”

High scores on Google PageSpeed & Core Web Vitals 

Showcase for beautiful imagery and interactive “flippable” catalogs

Multi-currency and multi-region extensibility (with varied functionality per region)

Our Work

A selection of our client's success and the breadth of our experience.

Industry

Tech