Builders Merchants Journal – BMJ Publishing to Builders Merchants and the UK merchanting industry for more than 95 years
MRA Marketing has produced a digital solution for merchant buying group FORTIS, allowing members to sell the group’s Infinita range through their own websites.
The Infinita Online Showroom Shop, a product developed by MRA Marketing, allows Fortis’ exclusive Infinita bathroom range to be sold online via its 42 member merchants’ websites. The Infinita range, with products from 21 different suppliers, was originally sold only through physical catalogues and branches. MRA created a closed loop website that embeds, or plugs-in, easily into members’ websites enabling them to make transactions regardless of their existing ecommerce functionality.
The Infinita Online Showroom Shop is hosted on a centralised domain and visitors to a member’s site are presented with a merchant-specific Infinita platform. Purchases are made through the member site or integrated with the merchant’s own eCommerce infrastructure, so purchases are made directly through the merchant. Each member also has their own administrative access, allowing them to manage their stock levels.
Mike Rigby, CEO of MRA Marketing, said: “The Fortis Infinita Online Showroom Shop was developed from MRA’s proprietary Plug-In Shop. The Plug-In is a unique multi-level digital solution that’s designed to help anyone in home improvements sell more effectively by pulling sales through the homeowner, installer, merchant interface. For us, that’s a bit like the home improvement Holy Grail, where we’ve always been looking for ways to help suppliers control the volume of their sales from end customer through to the merchant and to the brand itself.
“Most brands provide marketing and sales support to help their direct customer, the stockist sell. But pulling sales through from the customers’ customer, the installer, is harder, and engaging directly with the installer’s customers to pull through sales from the homeowner through installers to the merchant and thus to the brand itself has always been the greatest challenge. Most brands have little or no control over that, and only the biggest brands have the budgets and expertise to do it at all. That’s why we call it marketing’s Holy Grail, and that’s why we’re so pleased to have created a cost-effective solution, with a smooth and easy activation experience, whatever the company’s knowledge or experience of eCommerce.”
