Case Study: Merchandising Platform Helps LD Products Grow

PROBLEM: LD Products, an online retailer of ink and toner cartridges, needed help growing awareness and sales of its office supply products, a new category for the company.

SOLUTION: Launched a merchandising platform to help visitors more easily find the products they were looking for, as well as discover new ones.

RESULTS: Since going live with its new platform last December, LD Products has seen steady lifts in conversion rate, average order values, time on site and pages per visit.

For the first 15 years of LD Products' 16-year existence, the company sold ink and toner cartridges online — and was successful at it. Yet LD Products saw the chance to grow its business in light of the recent upheaval in the office supplies market — e.g., Office Depot bought OfficeMax, Staples bought Office Depot. The decision was made to transform LD Products into a full-line office supply retailer. Within the last 14 months, LD Products has added 50,000 SKUs to its website, everything from pens and pencils to jellybeans for office break rooms.

What LD Products didn't count on was how complex adding office supplies to its product catalog would be. The retailer was relying on standard data from its suppliers (e.g., product specs) to merchandise its site, making product discovery virtually nonexistent.

"We were an ink and toner company that also happened to carry some office supplies," says Aaron Leon, CEO of LD Products. "We weren't going to be able to compete with Staples and Office Depot and really be considered a full-line office supply retailer unless we found a partner to help us clean up the data that we got from our suppliers."

Edgecase and its Adaptive Experience Platform. As Leon puts it, "all they do is sit around and think about how customers will navigate and search for your products."

A Better Way to Sell Paper
Working with Edgecase, LD Products has improved the guided navigation on its site. Leon cited paper as an example.

"You used to see all these archaic attributes that you could search on to find what paper was best for you, but people didn't know what they were," Leon recalls. "Edgecase created more shopper-friendly attributes, such as lightweight, medium weight, standard and heavyweight as opposed to listing paper choices by the weight in pounds, which most people don't have a reference to."

What's resulted is an easier-to-shop website, leading to increased conversions, higher average order values and more revenue.

Visitors to LD Products' website are now discovering that the brand has a lot more to offer than just ink and toner.