Cost Less Bolts – Sourcing & Preparing Product Data for eCommerce

• 31,000 products listed through Vesta and more added each week

• $32,000 saved in initial set up and automated systems saving two weeks of work per month

• 4x return on their investment

Cost Less Bolts is a specialty retailer in Australia with an extensive range of fastening, construction, industrial and safety products. They had a website providing them with an online presence, but it did not include an eCommerce store. Cost Less Bolts wanted to start selling online to increase their sales by reaching a wider audience and having online ordering available for the growing number of people who prefer this option. Vesta helped them to achieve this through sourcing and preparing their product data for eCommerce.

Cost Less Bolts got in touch with VTH, an eCommerce agency specializing in the timber and hardware industry, who had created their initial website. With their broad and complex range of products, VTH recognized from the get-go that Vesta eCommerce would need to be included in the project to overcome the challenges of collecting, cleansing, and preparing the product data to stock the shelves of the new eCommerce website as quickly as possible. 

Vesta eCommerce provided the following services:

• Onboarded supplier product data and set up automated workflows to receive updates over time.
• Created categories and classified products into these categories, to be fed through to BigCommerce.
• Created parent level products, parent-child product relationships, and option sets with sort orders. 
• Product Codes were added to Search Keyword on BigCommerce for optimized onsite search. 
• Created a warranty field with variant product information. 
• Automate the syncing of product data, including future updates from suppliers onto their BigCommerce store.

Cost Less Bolts have recently launched their new eCommerce website, with 31,000 products listed and more added each week.

Engaging Vesta to automate the sourcing and preparation of product data for eCommerce has saved Cost Less Bolts 1,333 hours of work if they had chosen to collect, clean, and upload their data manually to their site. This productivity gain represents $32,000 of saving in the initial set up of their website.

On-going, through Vesta, supplier updates will continue to be collected, cleaned automatically, and synced to their store, saving them two weeks of work per month and a 4x return on their investment. 

The addition of this new sales channel will no doubt deliver a step-change in growth for the already successful Cost Less Bolts business.

“Without Vesta, we wouldn’t have been able to get over 30,000 products onto our store. We had neither the manpower within our team nor the knowledge to do this ourselves. Vesta has been a key component in enabling us to get our business online in a cost-effective way.” - Marita Anderson & Lauri Birthisel, Cost Less Bolts