We recently sat down with Clint Cathcart, Senior Ecommerce Product and UX Manager at Waytek, to discuss the company’s transition from a different implementation services provider to Xngage. After repeated technical issues caused Waytek to delay deployment of its new site several times, Waytek brought in Xngage to address bad code and restabilize its technical environment. Now, our team is helping the company redesign its site to improve customer experiences.
Waytek is a distributor of DC automotive electronics, providing the electrical components for vehicles like police cars and fire trucks that power their lights, sirens, and computer equipment. They sell directly to upfitters, who outfit these vehicles with the components they need and then sell them to municipalities.
Joe Albrecht, Xngage CEO: Clint, we want to chat a little bit about your ecommerce operation. How does ecommerce fit into your world at Waytek?
Clint: Yeah, so it’s a big part of what Waytek does. We’re an almost $90 million dollar company, and nearly half of that comes through our website. So, it’s half of what we do as a business. Ecommerce is our new-customer growth engine, so all of our new customers come through paid search or search and the website. Our first point of contact for our customers is our website, so it’s important for us to have a good experience and one that makes them want to continue to come back.
Joe: Sean, what can you tell us about the ecommerce operation?
Sean Boulter, Xngage Solutions Architect: Well, when we took over, there was a little bit of a rough transition, I guess. But there were some things that were still in flight when we took over and some things we knew immediately could benefit from Xngage’s expertise. We ended up completely rewriting the pricing and inventory logic on your site to make sure things were working and would give you the right feedback and right application log messages to be able to diagnose issues and see what was happening on the site.
Clint: Yeah, I thought it was a pretty smooth transition. It was probably smoother for me than it was for you. It was down to the wire with finishing up a project with our previous partner. We launched it, and the next day we cut over to you guys. And we had issues. Sean and his team were able to pick that up and fix those issues immediately, so that was awesome to see. One of the reasons we came to Xngage was we lost a lot of trust with our previous partner.
Joe: Not to dwell on it too much, but if you could describe what drove that decision? Can you describe the challenges that you had before you came on board with Xngage?
Clint: There were a lot of differences between what we thought we should be getting as a level of service and what we were paying for and getting. There were a lot of quality issues and concerns. From day one, we launched our site in June of 2023 – that was about six months later than we had planned to. A big part of that was that we launched and then we ended up having to roll back.
Joe: To your old website?
Clint: With Optimizely. When we went to Optimizely, it took us three times to actually get it live.
Joe: And you had to roll back to what you had previously?
Clint: Yeah, to our old site. And then we just continually had issues with deployments. There were multiple times when we had to roll back when we had a deployment or an upgrade because something was missed – a setting was missed or something wasn’t set up right. We were unable to take orders for sometimes hours or days, and that’s something that we weren’t comfortable with anymore. When those situations would happen, we would hear nothing back for hour. There were just communication issues and things like that.
Joe: Just not the service level you need when you have 50 percent of your revenue coming through the channel. Then you decided to come on board with Xngage, and we’re so happy to have you. Can you tell us a bit about what that transition was like and what we worked through specifically in those early moments? It sounds like there was a pretty immediate takeover. How fast did we get up to speed, Sean?
Sean: We got up to speed pretty quickly, but then there was an unfinished tax feature and another issue with customer onboarding that we had to immediately address. Some of them were easier to address than others. Some of them took some additional development. Once things were stable, we hit the ground running. We began immediately figuring out what we can do to make sure this doesn’t happen again. What steps can we take to make sure in the future you’re not running into any outage situations that would take you down for hours or days?
Clint: I agree. A big part of it was just getting what we had just launched the day before with our previous partner up and running the right way and working through some of the bugs that came with that. Then, we just got into having you guys review because we didn’t really feel comfortable or confident with what we had. So, just having you guys review it was a big opportunity for you guys to see what was happening and find opportunities for us to make improvements which was what we needed.
Joe: I remember when we discussed this in the early days. We always do an assessment: the code assessment, the integration assessment – then get it stabilized. For both of you, if you think back to when we took over to where we are today, what are some of the major initiatives you were able to take on with Xngage since you came on board?
Clint: The big one is the redesign. We’re doing a complete redesign of our website. We’ve been working on it for the last six months or so. We’re finishing up the user acceptance testing for the second phase of that. It’s been hugely successful so far, so we’ve had very few issues with anything. Anything that has come up, we’ve been able to address quickly. We’ve almost doubled our new customers coming through the website – our sessions – over the last six months, and our conversion rate has been unchanged. And that’s after our phase-one changes. We expected a big drop because that’s what happens when you make changes: things change, people don’t like change, it causes frustration, and they don’t convert. We haven’t seen that – which is unheard of. So, that was just the first phase of redesigning the cart and going to a single-page checkout. Those two things have been extremely successful. We’re redesigning the rest of the site now and getting ready to launch that, and I think it’s going to continue to be successful.
Joe: Why did you decide a redesign was necessary? Did you look at certain data or hear back from customers about issues with the site?
Clint: A lot of that was just looking back at our old website – there wasn’t a lot of meat on the bones. If you look at our homepage now – which is still the old design – there’s not a lot of content. So, using tools like Hotjar, we could see there’s not a lot of engagement on our homepage. And that’s OK because a lot of our customers, we’re driving them directly to a specific product. There’s not a lot of searching for specific products or a category of products, which is fine, too. But we’re also losing opportunities with people who are coming in from the homepage. They’re not engaging in the content – there’s not very much content there. So, we’re trying to make a more engaging site and utilizing the space to the most we possibly could. There was so much information below the fold on our page that no one was every getting to. So, reorganizing things to get important information up top and getting the customers the information that’s important to them is kind of the key focus.
Joe: So, to summarize, we were coming in with a site that was in need of some technical overhaul, right? Then, we were getting it to stable before then focusing on the customer and the value that the site can offer to the customer – the usability, improving that checkout flow – all of that to ultimately serve your customers better. Sean, can you share a few areas of the site that really jumped out at you in the early days?
Sean: Code quality was for sure top of mind. That’s what led to us realizing we needed to rewrite certain parts of it to make sure that the code quality was on par with what you’d expect. Early on, it was eliminating all of those weird outages that were plaguing us at the beginning where things just weren’t working quite right. And code quality was a big piece of that.
Clint: I think another piece of that was the work that you did to improve our logs. So, I used to spend countless hours trying to find and troubleshoot when customers did have issues – trying to find the right log, the right transaction, the right information to see what was happening and try to fix it. Now, it’s so much easier.
Sean: Yeah, at the beginning, you didn’t know: was this a shipping issue? Was it a pricing issue? We just knew there was a failure somewhere in that chain, and we didn’t know where it was. Now we have actual request, response – now, we can actually track it on an individual level and say, this is what we’re getting back.
Clint: We can see all of the different pieces of it without having to guess, like, “OK this looks like the right time frame.”
Joe: Sean, on an architecture level, are there any major findings or big initiatives?
Sean: Recently, we transitioned the ERP to the cloud and made sure that that went smoothly. I jumped in on those discussions and tried to realign the direction we were going in, and I made sure it was going to work with our implementation, and all the services would still work post-transition into the cloud. That was a big piece and something we needed to get right. The last thing we wanted to do was to push something out and have something be unknown to us and be a huge restriction that would cause us to roll back like you have in the past.
Clint: That was a huge project for Waytek. That was all hands on deck. We were moving our entire ERP infrastructure to the cloud, and that had to go smoothly. And it did. Sean was on calls with our ERP developer and our IT team, just talking through things and making sure we were doing things in a way where we weren’t going to have to rebuild and rewrite everything. So, we could just move and continue operating our business in 24 hours. That was extremely helpful for us.
Joe: So, Clint, you’ve mentioned that you hired an internal digital ads expert, but you’ve also worked with us on GA4 and implementing analytics. What can you tell us about that?
Clint: We’ve expanded what we’ve done with Xngage, and we’ve started utilizing the digital growth services team. We’ve been working with Becca and Oliver, and they’ve done multiple reviews of our set up, made recommendations for things that we weren’t capturing that we should be capturing. That’s another phase in our roadmap, once we get through with the redesign, is to implement those changes. We don’t have that expertise in house, so we’ve relied on them to help us get those things set up and get the metrics that we need to operate and make decisions.
Joe: Looking forward, are there specific initiatives that you’re excited about? How do you envision continuing to grow your channel, which is already at 50 percent of total revenue?
Clint: I think what we’re really focusing on is leveraging the new customers that we’re bringing in. We’ve invested in getting new customers and getting them to our site. Now, we’ve got to focus on the middle of the funnel and make sure we’re providing the services and experiences that will help them convert and want to come back and do business with us online. So, how I look at it is: tools that make business easier, that make people’s lives easier. How can we provide different tools and services that make doing their job easier? Those are the things that we’re looking at bringing to the website. We’ve talked about using xAgent, and that’s on our roadmap next. We’ve got to go through the redesign, then go through our product content and get that cleaned up, which we’re in the process of starting now. We’re getting to a point now where we need to be able to use AI to help customers get the information they need quickly.
Joe: Is there anything we can do better?
Clint: I’ve been up front with you guys since day one, and you guys have been up front with me. When we first started talking to Xngage about transitioning, I told you what I wanted: I was looking for a partner I could trust and that felt like they were an extension of the Waytek team. And that’s what we have. I trust you guys. I know that you guys have our best interests in mind. I know that Sean’s got our best interests in mind. He’s not going to steer us down the wrong path. If he has an idea or an enhancement that we want to do, we’re working together to make that happen and talking through different ways we could approach it, rather than him telling me, “This is how you have to do it.” That’s not how I operate. We work together to find the right approach. I think the whole team has been awesome.