The Howarth Story

Howarth Timber & Building Supplies are associated with many of the UK’s top construction and home product manufacturers.

With over 180 years of trading experience Howarth has the expertise and knowledge you can trust. Their services reflect their business goals which pull from their original working values of strength, determination and loyalty.

Howarth is the largest privately-owned timber company in the UK, they expanded from a one-man company to an employer of over 1,000 specialists.

Under the direction of the Howarth family, Howarth Timber & Building Supplies has matured into the industry leader we know today.

Objective

With a network of 33 timber and builders’ merchant branches spread across the country. Howarth required an eCommerce site that seamlessly deals with stock levels across multiple branches. This site needed access to an automatically adjustable database and back end that could deal with these demands allowing the website to maintain correct stock levels and alleviate the strain on the call centres.

Along with this complex stock task Howarth also wanted to modernise their existing functions and improve the user experience across the site. With this update to their website, Howarth wanted to increase traffic to the site and improve their sales and profit for the company.

Process

To start the ball rolling on this project a workshop involving staff from both Howarth and DTB occurred in the DTB offices. This workshop allowed everyone involved in the project to meet face-to-face and ensure their vision for this project was aligned with the customer’s needs.

Fixing legacy integration issues in the site’s backend allowed Howarth to reduce the burden on staff doing repetitive administrative tasks. These are now dealt with by backend systems such as SOAP and WSDL as well as REST APIs and GraphQL.

Outcome

By simplifying the website's navigation and reducing the strain on old legacy systems the new Howarth site has enhanced the overall user experience and customer buying journey.

The site using updated backend systems has saved the business over 1000 hours a year in manpower allowing Howarth to re-allocate administrative workers to other tasks.

After implementing the abandoned cart automation through the website's back end, Howarth saw an increase of over 300% of abandoned carts being picked back up and purchased.

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