Silk Commerce Creates a Site that Meets FallTech’s Rigorous Standards

falltech.com

FallTech is a leader in fall-prevention technology used at construction sites to keep workers safe. The company manufactures an extensive range of products including anchorages, bodywear, connectors, confined space systems, dropped-object prevention, and rescue and descent kits. If a worker slips or accidentally drops a tool, FallTech’s products protect the worker to prevent a tragedy from occurring. Given the high stakes, FallTech maintains an effective ISO 9001:2015 Quality Management System and has its own ISO 17025:2017 accredited Test Lab to ensure every item in its product catalog meets the company’s exacting standards.

FallTech doesn’t sell directly to end customers. Construction managers and safety experts research products on FallTech’s site and are referred to a regional sales manager or distributor when they’re ready to make a purchase. FallTech needed to migrate its existing site to BigCommerce and, not surprisingly, had strict standards for quality. To begin, every product is supported with an abundance of content, including features, specs, document downloads, and safety videos. Due to the complexity of each product page, the FallTech team creates them in its Vesta-Jasper PIM system, which must then synch with its site. Additionally, FallTech has a large product catalog and an extensive library of training materials and videos. A key goal was to make it easy for customers to find the products and training materials they need. Filtering by a wide range of attributes — including compliance, use, primary material, and many others — was table stakes.

Finally, FallTech’s internal video team created a stunning and vertiginous aerial video of workers putting its products to good use. The company owner was keen to feature it on the homepage, but the high-quality video was so large that it had negative impact on page load speed.

KEY FEATURES

PLATFORM MIGRATION

Silk redesigned the FallTech site and migrated it to BigCommerce. The project, including all necessary integration pieces, was completed in 6 months.

UX CUSTOMIZATION

Silk designed custom category landing pages and an enhanced search feature to enable users to find the products and training materials they need quickly and easily.

INTEGRATION

Silk integrated FallTech’s Vesta-Jasper PIM system with BigCommerce so that all product details were complete and up to date. Silk also integrated Shogun and InstantSearch+ to support FallTech’s custom requirements.

Silk Commerce helped FallTech solve a big challenge: enable the construction managers and safety experts to pinpoint the products and training materials they need quickly and easily via unique mega menus and enhanced search and filtering.

OUR SOLUTION

The Silk Commerce team migrated FallTech’s website to BigCommerce and redesigned the site in order to impart the company’s high-tech expertise in fall prevention technology. To aid users in pinpointing the products and training materials they need, Silk designed category mega menus that include additional data, category images, and up to three product sub-categories. As a result, users can drill down to the products from the mega menu in one step. BigCommerce’s default pages were unable to accommodate FallTech’s requirements, so Silk built the mega menus and category listing pages in Shogun, a third-party landing page builder.

FallTech’s search and filtering requirements also needed to go beyond BigCommerce’s native capabilities, so Silk integrated InstantSearch+, an advanced search product that allows for up to 40 search filters. Users can now filter by a variety of attributes, including category, product, compliance standard, and usage, among many others. All filters are accessible from the search results and product listing pages.

Silk also integrated FallTech’s Vesta-Japer PIM system with BigCommerce. The integration required custom code to ingest the data and ensure that all of the custom fields created in PIM are inserted correctly on the product detail pages.

Finally, the homepage video integration proved to be one of the more confounding challenges to overcome. Silk tried a variety of solutions, including hosting the video on YouTube, Vimeo, and BigCommerce WebDav, but the performance was poor. Silk ultimately solved the challenge by hosting it on a video CDN and optimizing the video size. Today, the video loads instantly and delivers the impact FallTech envisioned.

Silk’s design team created a site for FallTech that is as beautiful as it is functional. The homepage features a high-quality video that loads instantly and has zero impact on site performance. The clean design sends a message to visitors that they’re in safe hands with FallTech.

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