Sector
Construction

Location
Essex & Suffolk

Established in 1963, Sibbons is a large, independent third generation family firm offering quality plant hire, tool hire, industrial work wear, and machine servicing. They value and maintain long-lasting relationships with customers across the UK. Recent growth has enabled the expansion of the business through further development to their workshops and road-side shops.

Sibbons were looking for a bespoke, highly responsive ecommerce website that improved the quantity and quality of online transactions while staying true to the Sibbons brand. Their existing site was difficult to manage, inflexible, and limiting the business’s growth, hence the need for a solution that satisfied a range of business and customer requirements.

Brand Facts

Established in 1963, Sibbons is a large third-generation family business that has grown substantially in recent years.
Located in Essex, Sibbons are the official dealership for some of the top market leaders in their specialist fields, and are known to be one of the largest independent businesses in the Colchester area.
Sibbons provides plant hire solutions for North-East Essex and supports the nationwide sale of tools and work-wear.

Project Facts

Sibbons needed a highly responsive website that is easy to manage and able to generate quality leads and purchases from customers.
By working collaboratively with Sibbons, we were able to identify their specific business requirements, as well as the need for solutions to unique challenges often posed by ecommerce websites.
The newly developed and bespoke website improved usability and future-proofed the site, giving the business the ability to grow and adapt to the future needs of customers.

Sibbons - Responsive Ecommerce Website - Mackman Case Study

THE CLIENT

Supplying tools to market leaders

Located in Essex, Sibbons is an official dealership for some of the market leaders in their specialist fields, including Draper Tools, Footsure Footwear and Snickers Work Wear. In recent years, the business has expanded into a three acre site in Elmstead Market, with a workshop extension and new shop on the existing site.

Sibbons’ existing website was based on a platform that was difficult to manage, inflexible and as a result was limiting the business’s growth. It had achieved some success but was limited by the website platform and processes. The Sibbons team recognised that they needed to develop a new ecommerce website that could handle the pricing structures and complex rules for calculating delivery charges required by clients.

The Challenge

As well as being able to calculate specific values based on customers’ precise requirements, the new Sibbons website needed to integrate with distributors’ inventory feeds to provide accurate and up-to-date stock availability information.

OUR PROCESS

Creating a brand for the future

Following insight sessions with Sibbons to identify their specific business requirements, we developed a responsive ecommerce solution based upon WordPress and WooCommerce.

We created bespoke migration tools to import and clean data from JShop, overcoming as we did the unique challenges posed by the requirement translation of product categories and attributes, such as colour and size.

As a third-generation family firm, it was important to Sibbons, and us, that their heritage did not get lost during the process of producing their site. We worked closely with Sibbons to seamlessly align their heritage and branding; ensuring that branding was consistent and identifiable across the website.

What does this mean for Sibbons?

From working with staff and customers, we really got to know the people, why they deliver the services they do, how they do it and why people buy from them.

The Results

The project produced a bespoke, responsive ecommerce website that saw a 35% increase in website transactions from previous years. We created a user-friendly site that encapsulates the Sibbons brand and its rich heritage. The new site is also compatible across different platforms, meaning that users can shop seamlessly on desktop as well as mobile. We also future-proofed the website – in line with the growth of the business and a new shop opening, we ensured the site could be integrated with a new EPOS system in the future.

The improvements in usability we implemented for users gives them greater exposure to Sibbons’ full range of more than 4,500 products, and by building their new site using WordPress allows Sibbons to have complete control over the content of their site in an easy and manageable way.

This was a challenging but very rewarding project, as we had to develop our own system to translate the restricted category and brand structures of JShop into the highly flexible solution offered by WooCommerce. It was great to work with such a successful and well-established family brand and we’re delighted to have made such a positive impact on their ecommerce.
James Royce, Technical Director – Mackman

Mackman helped turn our outdated, un-intuitive website into a modern, easy to use, responsive site. Everyone at Mackman was extremely helpful and attentive through the whole build process, no problem was too big or small with their team, and they all had the knowledge and experience to get everything done efficiently and effectively.
Ben Sibbons, Sales & Hire Executive – Sibbons

Responsive ECommerce website – siBBONS