Tooled-Up.com is an online retailer of all major brands of hand tools and power tools. They are owned by Lee Industrial, who were established in 1976 and were traditionally a supplier to local manufacturing firms in and around their Lee Valley (Enfield) location.
When we were first approached by Jason Chance of Tooled-Up back in 2003, they had a transactional website but it wasn’t performing as they had hoped in terms of the number of orders the website was generating for them.
Working closely with their newly appointed in house marketing team we rebuilt the website, and at the same time developed a basic offline content management and sales order processing system from the ground up in less than six weeks. The first Fairfax Computing constructed Tooled-Up site was launched in mid March 2003.
The initial iterations of the website and system were linked directly to Microsoft Dynamics Great Plains. All data transfer was automated by way of direct SQL queries and triggers, and also by custom developed SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) packages.
The website started to meet and then far exceed TU expectations, and quickly became the focus of the entire business, far surpassing the traditional business B2B / Trade Counter business.
Extra functionality was built into the SOP system, such as automated credit card charging using CommIdea software to cope with the increase in demand.
Tooled-Up's product range is very extensive with currently around 65,000 live product lines on the website, so custom built Catalogue Management (CMS) Tools were provided to enable the mass update of data.
In 2006 Tooled-Up had to expand their warehouse floor space 4 fold to cope with the extra stock required to service the levels of business that the site was now generating - testament to the success of the site indeed.
Tooled-Up are now on the fourth generation of website that Fairfax Computing has designed and built for them. The current site is built using Microsoft ASP.Net MVC and SQL Server, and is a mobile friendly responsive design.
The most recent version of the website was launched in 2017, and we have integrated the website with a whole new back office platform, which consists of Microsoft Dynamics AX, Omnica Multi Channel Reatil (MCR) and a warehouse solution called RF-Smart. This platform has enabled real time updates between the back office and the website.
The new website has a very different structure, allowing for multiple versions of a product to be selected from a single product page, by way of Product variations - for example you can choose a product by size and colour, and get instant price and availability information. Payment via the website is now offered via integration with Sagepay and Paypal.
Integrations between the back office system and online marketplaces such as Amazon and eBay have been developed with automated uploading and updating of products enabled.