MKM, the leading independent building supplies merchant with over 100 branches across the UK, enlisted the expertise of Brave Bison Commerce to overhaul their existing website and bring it into the new digital era, with a focus on improving customer experience.

The new site features an intelligent, flexible product search function related to shoppers’ behaviour and hyper-personalisation that remembers users' preferences. This results in a tailored customer journey with curated product collections and targeted suggestions.

MKM primarily operates within the B2B market but has recently noticed the demand for a B2C experience on B2B platforms, with this in mind and wanting to better serve their trade customers, the company had developed complex business rules around customer-specific price terms, decentralised management of stock and local delivery zones, all of which needed to be at the core of their commerce architecture when enlisting Brave Bison to tackle their re-platforming to BigCommerce. Essentially, Brave Bison’s task was to make the complicated, simple. The end goal being to deliver a platform that would deliver sustainable growth.

Work involved re-platforming the former MKM website to BigCommerce, building a stable, scalable, secure, and flexible platform which would deliver a first-class digital purchasing experience for new and existing MKM customers, with key focus on integration and supporting local stock and pricing. 

The new headless architecture for the MKM website was built around four key components: The BigCommerce Platform, The VueStorefront Front-end, The Bloomreach Suite and A Middleware Layer. This is a world’s first in composable commerce. 

Using a composable architecture of best of breed systems allowed MKM to move its operations to Cloud services without having to compromise on its unique business identity or having to limit its commercial offer and user experience. Making this project a success in migrating MKM to their new architecture, in less than a year. 

The new site, although only launched in August 2022, has already driven promising results for the brand, with MKM already reporting an uplift in organic traffic by 16%, 77% boost to time on page and a 26% uplift in online sales year on year. 

Andy Pickup, Digital & Marketing Director at MKM, said: “Working against the backdrop of a burning platform, a migration to a new domain and the end of a global pandemic we worked as part of Brave Bison’s extended team to deliver a composable eCommerce website combining BigCommerce, the three pillars of Bloomreach and Vue Storefront; a world's first combining these technologies. 

“To add to the complexity, halfway through the project the war in Ukraine broke out which is where some of the Brave Bison team were located. Nonetheless, the Brave Bison team showed real expertise managing cross-team collaboration and multi-partner management despite ever evolving requirements and constant integration challenges. Despite these ongoing complications and the complexity of our business model (where every branch has unique product selection and pricing) the Brave Bison team delivered a customer-first omnichannel solution on time and on budget.”