Background

Founded in 1999, Euroffice is the UK’s largest online office stationery retailer. Operating in an industry that is notoriously difficult to market to, Euroffice are proud to be a 100% online business and drive traffic to their sites through intelligent e-marketing. This allows them to regularly achieve annual turnover figures in excess of £20m.

By stocking an exhaustive catalogue of over 27,000 products – featuring anything from laminators to laptops – Euroffice have been able to build a loyal customer base whose stationery requirements are more than catered for. This repeat business accounts for 80% of Euroffice’s revenue.

Rather than selecting one of the many e-commerce systems available on the market today, Euroffice have avoided costly licensing fees and feature limitations to instead focus on engineering an innovative e-commerce platform that is perfectly tailored to the needs of their business and their customers.

Having invested heavily in their technology platform, Euroffice realised they could further monetise their business operations and technology by offering their e-commerce platform to smaller office supplies firms. The resulting system – Office Power, was jointly developed with Priocept and launched in 2014.

The Challenge

It is estimated that the small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) office supplies market is worth in excess of £1 billion to the UK economy. A large proportion of this can be attributed to the many thousands of individual dealerships who provide a local presence in their area. Due to the recent economic uncertainty, these individual office supplies businesses have been challenged with matching their larger competitors’ ever-falling prices and greater purchasing power.

In an attempt to reduce the amount of time that these dealerships spend on administrative duties, handling financial overheads, and customer relationship management, Euroffice sought to create a new e-commerce platform which would allow dealerships to continue to run an efficient business that offers great customer service, but would free up their time to focus on more critical objectives such as acquiring new business.

Priocept were selected by Euroffice as the development partner for the new Office Power platform and related customer-facing web systems. The platform was to be built by creating a white-labelled version of the technology, operations, fulfilment and other processes which were present in the existing Euroffice system.

Office Power was to be a fully-managed e-commerce and customer service solution for the office supplies industry which would deliver products and manage logistics on behalf of dealerships. It would also provide marketing and reporting tools that would utilise the same integrated software as market leaders in the industry. This new platform would then be offered to stationery retail companies seeking an alternative, lower-cost operating model.

The Solution

Priocept provided Euroffice with software engineers and consultants to oversee the development of the Office Power platform. The existing Euroffice web application was redeveloped and enhanced to provide a new set of features required to support dealerships.

The main features of the Office Power platform include:

Customer Website – This gives each SME dealer the ability to create their own website with fully-featured e-commerce functionality that allows users to create an account, order products, and process payments. The customer website is fully customisable so that each SME dealership can apply their own brand and better reach their target audience.

Dealer Portal– The Dealer Portal allows each dealer to easily administer their business operations. This includes:

• Key Performance Indicators – graphically represented within the Dealer Dashboard
• Product Catalogue Management
• Customer Data Management
• Pricing Control – including promotional and customer specific activities
• Content Management – including banners, information and promotions
• Customer Order Management
• Email Marketing
• Integrated Reporting – including product, customer and financial data
• Support for mobile, tablet and PC platforms
• Support Centre – A fully managed and branded Support Centre to be used by both customers and SME dealerships alike

Results

In the competitive marketplace of stationery supplies, the Office Power system has delivered real benefit and return-on-investment to Euroffice and their affiliated dealerships. Euroffice has seen a steady uptake of the system which has been reflected in their sales and contributed to their net worth increasing by £2m since the new platform was introduced.

There are now over 15 office supplies businesses live on the Office Power platform and Euroffice have also now migrated the core euroffice.co.uk and ukofficedirect.co.uk sites onto the platform to reap further economies of scale.