Father and daughter Ken and Katie Noble founded Allied Medical in 1998 with the mission of providing world-class assistive technology in New Zealand. For over two decades, Allied Medical has been supplying consumers, businesses, and medical providers with innovative and trustworthy solutions such as mobility aids and rehabilitation equipment.
But despite a strong market position and consistent growth, Allied Medical's legacy website was difficult to maintain and lacked responsiveness. This made it difficult for B2B buyers, such as home healthcare providers, physiotherapists, and pharmacies, to place orders, view previous orders, or find essential equipment, and for customers to purchase directly.
They needed a sophisticated solution that could seamlessly serve their diverse customer base while maintaining the high standards their healthcare partners expect. Partnering with ERP integration expert CyberWorkshop in 2024, Allied Medical migrated to the Shopify Plus plan for customizable, advanced commerce solution.
Since moving to Shopify, Allied Medical has seen:
- 14% increase in transactions across B2B and DTC channels
- 40% reduction in time spent on back-end tasks
- 18% reduction in cart abandonment rates
The challenge: An outdated platform hurts efficiency and customer experience
Using Umbraco, Allied Medical designed their ecommerce platform to be more than just a sales channel. It was conceived as a resources hub, where users could find helpful information about highly technical and sophisticated assistive technology. However, their system’s lack of flexibility and responsiveness was not only affecting this vision, but also limiting the scalability of their model.
Poor search functionality made it difficult to find and purchase the right equipment. Given the technical aspect of the products at hand, a simple typing mistake could lead to error pages and abandoned searches and carts.
With no invoice history or a streamlined reordering process, Allied Medical’s customers faced a clunky online purchasing journey. Plus, Allied Medical’s team had to manage time-consuming manual workarounds to help customers overcome the hurdles they faced.
Our previous ecommerce solution was outdated and difficult to manage. We had to manually add all B2B accounts and contacts, which caused errors and created inefficiencies. Clients were often forgetting passwords or shared logins which created frustration and additional work for our customer care team. Allied Medical needed a solution that would help to scale our B2B operations and grow our DTC business, and Shopify was our best option.
The solution: Optimized B2B and DTC operations with Shopify Plus
Allied Medical partnered with CyberWorkshop to relaunch their online store using Shopify’s Plus plan, with B2B on Shopify, in May 2024. The migration lasted only six months and provided a scalable, efficient, and flexible platform that streamlined operations and improved customer experience.
Using Shopify’s advanced and customizable solutions, Allied Medical modernized their online store, providing wholesalers with customer-specific catalogs, volume pricing, company profiles, invoice history, and reordering, giving their B2B customers a more seamless, user-friendly experience.
Meanwhile, the InSyncer for MYOB Exo app, available in the Shopify App Store, automatically syncs prices and inventory across all channels, reducing the need for manual updates from the team and freeing up their time to focus on more strategic tasks.
On Shopify, Allied Medical could easily access the MYOB Exo integration app, which provided the company with a seamless data sync to give B2B customers greater transparency in pricing and order history. Another key benefit of Shopify was workflow automation, which helped to reduce manual processing time and empowered their team to shift their focus from repetitive tasks to customer support, improving the level of service.
B2B on Shopify also opened the doors to advanced user permissions, allowing Allied Medical to assign different access levels for wholesale shoppers. Now, healthcare professionals, procurement teams, and administrators have the right level of visibility and control over orders and account management. This makes it easier for wholesale customers such as dealers to log in and see whether anybody else in their organisation has placed an order.
Allied Medical has been receiving great feedback from wholesale and retail customers regarding the new portal’s responsiveness and speed. Specifically, B2B on Shopify has allowed us to introduce features that greatly improved the experience of our wholesale customers, such as better search functionality, access to unique offers, and the ability to access history from different user accounts within the same company. This consolidated view allows for a faster repurchasing process.
Using the multilocation stock management feature, Allied Medical tracks inventory across their three warehouses, making order fulfillment faster and more efficient for both the B2B and DTC businesses. Powered by Shopify’s Search & Discovery app, the upgraded search functionality helps users find the specialized equipment they need faster, leading to more streamlined shopping journeys.
Shopify’s intuitive and customizable design gives Allied Medical the flexibility to build new features without relying on developer input, a constant challenge of their previous ecommerce platform. With Shopify in place, Allied Medical has created a faster, more intuitive experience for B2B and DTC customers while significantly improving backend efficiencies.
Previously, even tasks as simple as changing menu options or the home page layout required developer support, which slowed Allied Medical’s workflows and drained their resources. On Shopify, we’re free from this dependence. Thanks to Shopify's inbuilt image editing features, bulk edit option and the ability to assign products to multiple collections, it now takes around 60% less time to list a product. Not only have we improved efficiencies, we’re also bringing in new features to transform our wholesale and retail businesses.
The results: A scalable platform for better efficiency and smoother customer journeys
Since moving to Shopify, Allied Medical have been able to list product updates 60% faster, accelerating time to market for new product launches. Furthermore, they have reduced time spent on back-end tasks by 40%, freeing up staff to focus on strategic jobs that would help grow the business.
With streamlined customer journeys on the platform, Allied Medical has seen their bounce rate almost halve, dropping from 35% to 17.6%. As B2B buyers now enjoy better access to pricing, past orders information, and bulk discounts, the cart abandonment rates have also decreased from 33.2% to 14.9%.
All of this has led to a 14% jump in transaction volume across all channels and a 4.7% increase in online revenue. Looking into the future, Allied Medical aims to continue expanding the automation of workflows and enhancing their B2B customer journey with more self-service tools. They have also just brought on an agency to handle SEO, improving their content resource bank for better searchability of stock and other critical information.
The big thing for us is that the new platform is built for the future. Thanks to Shopify, we’re well positioned for long-term scalability without having to expand resources. We’ve moved from a platform that held us back to one that empowers us to scale, automate, and provide a better experience for our customers. All of this is allowing us to adapt and grow in ways we never thought possible.
