KELTEC is a 100% B2B industrial filtration business. After moving to Shopify B2B, the share of online orders increased from about 20% to 40%, freeing up their teams to spend more time on technical advice and customer relationships.
Service companies come to KELTEC for filters, separators, and other components that keep industrial equipment running. Buyers may arrive with an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) part number, product specification, or application. Those buyers need to find the correct replacement part and place an order at their account-specific prices and terms.
KELTEC rebuilt that experience around self-service while keeping technical support available whenever customers need it.
With Shopify B2B, KELTEC has:
- Increased the share of orders placed online from about 20% to 40%
- Increased website users by 40%
- Set all-time online sales records for three consecutive months, starting in the launch month
- Produced average order value about 50% above normal during a Labor Day promotion
The challenge
Outgrowing a pioneering B2B ordering platform
KELTEC’s custom B2B site had introduced one of the first cross-reference search experiences in their market. Customers relied on it to find KELTEC equivalents for OEM parts, and the company kept adapting the platform as their product range and customer base grew.
Over time, custom code and APIs carried more product, customer, and order information between systems. The experience slowed, and the team could no longer extend the platform to support their growth plans. Keeping the existing site running had become the priority when KELTEC needed to improve how customers found products and placed orders.
Steve Spirko, Director of E-Commerce at KELTEC, encountered that limit on his second day at the company. The website went down for three weeks. Customers reverted to email and phone orders, leaving staff to process and enter orders manually. The additional calls, emails, and data entry put pressure on the organization and affected sales and customer satisfaction. Restoring the site would not resolve the constraints on future growth. KELTEC needed a new B2B platform.
Building confidence in Shopify B2B, with Praella as a partner
The team evaluated five B2B platforms and narrowed the choice to two. Steve had used Shopify at other companies, but only for B2C sites. For KELTEC, he needed to see how customer accounts, historical orders, account-specific catalogs, and pricing would work together in a B2B buying experience.
Shopify and Praella showed Steve how the B2B portal would work for KELTEC. Together, the teams walked through the functionality and mapped how the systems would connect, giving Steve confidence that Shopify B2B could support KELTEC’s customers and the technical requirements behind their orders.
Comparing KELTEC’s existing transaction charges with Shopify Payments also identified savings that strengthened the business case. Shopify B2B offered room to keep improving search, customer accounts, and ordering, so new ideas could become customer-facing improvements instead of more work maintaining custom commerce code.
Shopify worked with us every step of the way. It was head and shoulders above the other platforms in wanting to partner with us, knowing this was more than one project. It was a long-term relationship.
The solution
Connecting the B2B storefront to product and customer data
The Shopify B2B portal became part of a broader change in how KELTEC operated. The company moved their enterprise resource planning system to NetSuite, adopted Pimcore to manage enriched product content and cross-reference data, and connected the systems through Celigo.
The systems depended on one another. KELTEC first launched and stabilized NetSuite, then completed the Shopify connections and opened the new B2B storefront to customers.
NetSuite supplies core product information and customer records. Pimcore adds images, descriptions, resources, and OEM cross-references. Shopify B2B presents the catalog and ordering experience, including pricing, payment terms, freight preferences, and labeling requirements for each approved account. Shopify Flow uses the information from NetSuite to handle orders according to those customer requirements.
Praella designed and built the B2B storefront and handled Pimcore, HubSpot, email, and search work. KELTEC’s team owned the NetSuite program and the customer and product decisions behind the portal. For shipping requirements tied to NetSuite, the teams used Shopify Flow and the standard checkout with targeted modifications to achieve the ordering process KELTEC needed.
Helping customers find the exact replacement part
Search had to preserve the specialized lookup experience KELTEC’s customers already valued. The team considered a custom solution and specialized search tools, then chose Shopify Search & Discovery after determining how to supply and configure the product data.
Some products have as many as 25–30 OEM cross-references. When a buyer searches for an OEM part number, Shopify returns the KELTEC equivalent with the product information supplied by Pimcore. Buyers can also search by KELTEC part number, product name, or application-relevant characteristics.
The same product-data work supports KELTEC’s broader industrial filtration business. Alongside OEM equivalents, Pimcore manages the internal crossover among products sold through different websites, giving the team a way to reuse enriched product information as the range expands.
Making technical buying self-service
KELTEC built the B2B portal for approved business accounts. New customers are established in NetSuite and approved by KELTEC before receiving access to their Shopify account and catalog. The team offers walkthroughs to help customers get started, after which buyers can review their pricing and terms, find the right part, and order on their own schedule.
Customers also use the website to research products before placing orders by phone or email. Product information and cross-reference search help customers prepare for sales conversations, even when they order through another channel.
Shopify’s B2B platform lets us deliver the frictionless buying experience our customers expect.
The results
Doubling the share of orders placed online
Customers embraced the new B2B experience. In the first month after launch, customer service received a wave of requests for website access, and the team continued adding users as more customers adopted the portal.
The share of orders placed online increased from about 20% to 40%, while website users increased by about 40%. More customers can now place an online order whenever they need to, reducing the manual entry required from KELTEC’s teams.
Previously, credit-card payments required a secondary process outside the main ordering flow. Orders now reach fulfillment and ship faster, payments process faster, and order-to-cash has improved.
Customer research on the website also changes the work sales teams can focus on. With more product information available before a conversation, representatives can spend more time solving application-specific problems and building human relationships. Territory-based sales credit remains in place regardless of how the order arrives. For Steve, having more time to build customer relationships is one of the most important outcomes of the move.
Setting online sales records from launch
KELTEC began using the new B2B storefront immediately at launch. The early sales results gave the team confidence that customers were adopting the new experience.
We broke our all-time online sales record in our launch month. Then we beat that again in July, and then we beat that again in August.
Bringing promotional experimentation to B2B
KELTEC’s previous platform could not support the kind of promotional testing familiar to consumer ecommerce teams. With Shopify B2B, the company can launch a percentage-off campaign, measure the response, and use what they learn to shape the next test.
For Labor Day, the team tested a percentage-off offer for business buyers. The response encouraged KELTEC to explore more promotions.
We ran a Labor Day percentage-off discount, and average order value was 50% above what it normally is.
Extending self-service across the business
KELTEC’s next ambition is to move 50%–60% of orders online. Customer feedback is already informing changes to freight handling and other parts of the website, while the team plans further promotional tests.
The company also uses Sidekick daily and is beginning to experiment with an on-site AI chatbot. Steve has observed early pickup in search and AI-bot activity as customers use the site for product research.
KELTEC’s expanding range now spans compressed-air, hydraulic, liquid, and dust-collection filtration. The team plans to reuse the product-data model across additional B2B websites.
We’re planning on moving four more sites. That’s how confident we are in the platform and how excited we are with the results to date.