Doors Open for Multi-language BtoB Ecommerce

Busy times around the office these days with all the recent release and resultant excitement about Elastic Path 5. As such, I haven’t caught you up with customer site launches recently and there are several on my list - each one is unique and I enjoy (as I suspect the developers must as well) seeing what spin each deployment puts on the core application.

I am constantly curious about which features are they using? What did they customize? How did they arrange the content? How’d they design the interface?

Kicking it off, … Here is a sleek, fast, clean and optimized site for a high-end door vendor selling to architects and contractors but allowing the public to browse - choosing from the catalog in French or English with one click.

As they introduce themselves:

Camille European Distribution Group (CEDG) Inc. was founded with the purpose of offering European quality doors and windows with patented designs to the North American market.

Another unique market most people think little about until building a house …

The navigation is intuitive and the category landing pages make (rare) understated use of Flash to present an inviting interface - perhaps putting the hectic shopper in the mood for browsing through detailed items.

Once at the product page, the shopper is presented with an array of finishes and colors which load quick and orderly. The specs and measurements are all there too along with suggestive merchandising. In this case “Customers who purchased also purchased…” and Accessories - in this case, a bevy of knobs and locks.

The only thing that appears missing in this case is the “add to cart” button. Why? Because CEDG sell only to professionals who login to order after creating an account on the site. However, the site’s products are accessible to the public for ease of showing, choosing, comparing etc. with the homeowner/builder client. As they put forth, …

We distribute exclusively to architects and builders working on construction projects on all scales; our clients can choose from a long line of doors and windows with standard or exotic designs, for both commercial and residential settings.

I noticed that the URLs are created with product names and brands which is great for organic search however they did not optimize page title tags. There may be a reason behind this omission, perhaps as a BtoB site, organic search results may not be as important as to some retailers and they generate business through professional industry relationships. There is a spider-ready site map and they deliver some additional materials as .pdfs as well.

Four words: Clean, fast, inviting and focused.