A new website for Elektroplate, an industry leader

Elektroplate is the go-to automotive supplier for trendsetters, providing superior quality products that add pizzazz to any ride. Their wide range of personalized products helps individuals stand out on the road with chrome emblems, hitch covers, license plate frames, and interior accessories.

In addition to servicing individual customers, Elektroplate provides wholesale products for brick-and-mortar stores like AutoZone, Walmart, and others. Corporations and nonprofits also use their products to support employee and donor events with fun, personalized, or branded emblems.

Since 2012, Elektroplate has partnered with Foster Commerce for its various web development needs. Foster Commerce demonstrates knowledge of the Elektroplate brand and does site development that supports content management, making marketing more manageable.

Under Foster Commerce's leadership, Elektroplate successfully migrated its website from ExpressionEngine to Craft CMS. Foster Commerce also redesigned Elektroplate's website, adding new product lines and ordering capacity for personalized products. This led to an expansion in sales and a streamlined fulfillment process.

Lastly, Foster Commerce developed a custom sales report that gives Elektroplate much-needed customer insight.

Working as their trusted development partner for over a decade, Foster Commerce helps the Elektroplate team stay successfully one step ahead of its competitors.

When Elektroplate was ready to make significant changes to its website, its leadership had a good idea about what it wanted.

Elektroplate prides itself on providing products with a "cool factor" for its customer base. Yet they felt something missing when providing the same experience on their website.

Elektroplate wanted the site design to be modernized and reflect its brand better. The company also needed to add hitch covers and personalized license plates as new product lines.

Fundamentally, Elektroplate wanted a site to:

• Provide a better user experience

• Increase sales for the business

• Better communicate their brand's trendy, professional personality

Foster Commerce's CEO, Stephen Callender, discussed website options on a series of conference calls with Elektroplate leadership. Eventually, ideas for the new website design and re-platform crystalized.

To help Elektroplate reach its goals, the Foster Commerce development team suggested a re-platform from ExpressionEngine to Craft CMS. And for Elektroplate's online store, the Foster Commerce team added Craft Commerce.

This move to Craft allowed a more professional, modern, trendy website in Elektroplate's look, feel, and functionality.

The redesign and re-platform better communicated Elektroplate's brand identity and improved customer experiences, helping shoppers find products quickly.

It also improved the user experience for the Elektroplate team. For example, the Foster Commerce team kept the marketing and content authoring experience (AX) front and center in their development priorities.

This focus on AX meant that Elektroplate team members wouldn't need to rely on the Foster Commerce team to make needed changes to the site in the future.

One of the most significant challenges for online merchants is attracting qualified leads, and Elektroplate was no exception.

Elektroplate successfully attracted individual shoppers looking for the perfect emblem for their beloved car or boat. However, it wanted to find a better way to service buyers seeking quotes on bulk orders for corporate and nonprofit giveaways and events.

To help Elektroplate be responsive to this particular customer, Foster Commerce developed new lead forms for each best-selling product. The lead forms included fields to gather rich information about shoppers, their needs, and their creative vision.

Elektroplate's marketing manager, Erin, could direct ads and social media links to the new lead forms. And she was also able to develop new segmented customer relationships using the lead forms, which was a game changer.

New and existing corporate and nonprofit customers received an immediate quote on customized bulk orders of 300 or more items. And Elektroplate had the information they needed to follow up with this valuable customer.

Erin had this to say about the lead forms' impact:

A year after experiencing success with the re-platform and adding a lead form, Elektroplate wanted a refresh of the homepage.

The Foster Commerce team made several key enhancements, including simplifying the website menu, adding places to feature Elektroplate's top sellers on the homepage, and creating an area to highlight custom bulk orders.

Lastly, they added messaging that established Elektroplate as an industry leader. Erin loves the authoring experience, saying,

One of the ways the Foster Commerce team provides unique value to its clients is by building just about whatever a customer needs to do better business.

So when the Elektroplate team wanted a way to generate a sales report detailing what customers ordered and what products were most popular, Foster Commerce readily took on the challenge.

The result was a new sales reporting plugin that the Foster Commerce team called Commerce Insights.

Commerce Insights details which letters, numbers, or symbols are a part of any Chrome Emblems order, giving Elektroplate much-needed insight into customer preferences.

This plugin has been a powerful tool for Elektroplate, enabling them to get up to the moment on data on what customers are looking for and purchasing.

Always looking for new ways to stay one step ahead, Elektroplate returned to Foster Commerce in 2022.

The Elektroplate team wanted to add the ability for customers to personalize products.

Moreover, they wanted to streamline processes for their fulfillment center to make it easier for customers and staff to place and receive orders.

At the time, Elektroplate's best-selling product was the personalized license plate frames. These are decorative frames that customers put on the front of their cars to add some character.

Elektroplate wanted to increase the number of existing choices for personalization to include not just letters and numbers but symbols, too.

Further, Elektroplate had other products that could be personalized, like decorative hitch covers and metal plates.

Finally, to improve the customer experience and streamline operations, Elektroplate wanted to enable shoppers to place orders online instead of speaking with an Elektroplate employee.

In response, Foster Commerce scoped two new pages and proposed an update to the license plate page.

To help shoppers find and personalize the chrome item of their choice, Foster Commerce designed the page so users can easily toggle between each product (License Plate Frames, License Plates, and Hitch Covers). After selecting the product of their choice, users can effortlessly add letters and symbols.

To inspire and delight customers as they shop, Foster Commerce also added a link to examples of personalized products created by other buyers.

With a new platform, a redesigned website, interactive lead forms, and a new page dedicated to their personalized products, Elektroplate experienced an uptick in sales. Their product fulfillment team also experienced increased efficiencies in processing online orders.

Erin says of Foster Commerce's work, "It was a major change from the old website. We loved it!"

The Elektroplate team continues to work with Foster Commerce as their go-to partner for updates to the existing site. They also anticipate more work together to implement ongoing improvements to the brand, SEO, and interactive features.

When asked what it's generally like to work with Foster Commerce, Erin has this to say:

Foster Commerce enjoys helping customers see around the next corner by anticipating needs and providing valuable creative solutions. The team is excited to continue to serve Elektroplate's growth with strategic development and design work now and into the future.

We're passionate about taking websites to the next level. Contact us to discover what we can do for your business.