Ouest Isol & Ventil breathes new life into its e-commerce platform with OroCommerce

Ouest Isol & Ventil is a company specializing in HVAC engineering. It manufactures its products and distributes them through a network of around forty branches across France. Technical insulation, ventilation, heat pumps, air conditioning, supports and fixings… Its products mainly serve building professionals on large-scale projects, from industrial sites to office buildings and multi-family housing. OIV’s sales strength lies in its field teams and, until then, e-commerce was a tool supporting their local business. In 2024, the company set out to stay one step ahead of the competition and grow its online sales. To do so, it launched a major replatforming project with Synolia x OroCommerce.

The online store, open only to customers with login credentials, was a secondary sales channel used mainly for replenishment. For customers, moving between the showcase websites and the online store was not seamless, and the experience fell short. In addition, the showcase websites were custom-built from scratch, so the admin teams could not manage them on their own. Every small change required a developer.

When Maleaume Tournellec joined the company in 2019, his mission was to drive the digital transformation and overhaul Ouest Isol & Ventil’s e-commerce strategy. He carried out an audit and undertook a full replatforming of the showcase websites and the online store with Synolia x OroCommerce.

The Ouest Isol & Ventil brief

Centralize product catalogs and sales on a single platform to deliver a better experience for both professional customers and OIV teams.

For Maleaume Tournellec, this replatforming project is also an opportunity to refresh OIV’s image with a more modern e-commerce solution that meets today’s online sales standards.

Synolia x OroCommerce

After extensive internal audit work, Maleaume Tournellec led the replatforming project. He wrote the requirements for the future e-commerce platform and drew up a detailed feature grid.

OroCommerce, already used by the Airvance group (which OIV belongs to) at its subsidiaries France Air and CAIROX, seemed to tick all the boxes and matched the group’s goal of sharing tools across its companies.

Synolia, a long-standing OroCommerce partner, had already successfully supported the replatforming of the France Air subsidiary. So OIV trusted us with its own replatforming project. We kicked off with workshops to understand the needs, challenge the feature grid and size the project.

Our support: functional and technical specification workshops, development, training, application maintenance.

An e-commerce project within a global digital ecosystem

For OIV, this e-commerce replatforming project was a major transformation, all the more so because it ran in parallel with the PIM implementation (centralizing product data) and the ERP overhaul (centralizing customer data).

Today, the e-commerce site is integrated with the PIM, and daily feeds from the PIM to OroCommerce keep the product offering up to date. Likewise, all documentation is pulled via API and kept current on the site. On the ERP side, all customers are synchronized daily into OroCommerce. Other APIs also update stock levels, prices, order statuses…

An evolving platform built for continuous improvement

The project between Synolia and OIV ran smoothly, following a classic (not agile) methodology and a fixed budget. Thanks to in-depth work to understand the requirements, all priority features were developed and are now live.

With the OroCommerce platform, OIV gains power and autonomy to deliver a better overall experience to its customers, create new pages, optimize upsell and cross-sell mechanisms, roll out improvements…

Toward a seamless experience

The OroCommerce replatforming made it possible to centralize brand content and the entire commercial offering on one single platform. And these are only the first building blocks, as OIV plans to add more services to make the experience even smoother for its customers and users.
In the medium to long term, the company aims to connect a marketing tool to reach its customers in a personalized way and encourage ordering through the e-commerce channel. It also plans to integrate a CIAM tool to manage the different levels of user rights and grant custom permissions, so that sales representatives can perform specific tasks based on their customers’ needs.
In the same spirit of streamlining the user journey, OIV wants to develop automatic login so that its customers can move from their ERP to the OIV site without re-entering their credentials, switching seamlessly from one system to the other.

Results

Today, the sales representatives at every branch are trained on the new e-commerce platform and promote the new site to their customers. After a significant support phase to help customers get their new credentials and log in to the new platform, Maleaume Tournellec quickly saw the benefits of the project:

• A much more modern platform
• A more user-friendly menu
• Instant visibility of all product information (item code, price, stock, lead time and technical documentation on a single page)
• A much smoother and more powerful search engine
• A much more intuitive quick order feature (with built-in search)
• Email management
• Better account and user management with detailed information
• The ability to fix data issues very quickly
• The ability to optimize the site’s mechanisms
• Statistics and trend reports

In the months following the site’s go-live:

• 4,370 users logged in at least once
• +6,600 orders placed on the online store
• +1,250 contact requests submitted through the contact form

Last year, e-commerce accounted for 4% of OIV’s revenue. With its new platform, the company is targeting 10% by 2030. We’ll be there to review the results!

Want to learn more about our e-commerce projects? Contact Synolia, your e-commerce partner agency!

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