Integrus Brand Solutions

Promotional Merchandise E-Stores

Customer

Integrus Brand Solutions is one of Canada’s leading providers of promotion and logo products to Fortune 100 Companies. Integrus provides a full range of services from marketing program creation, catalog merchandising, product sourcing, warehousing and fulfillment. Integrus is seeking to become the leader in promotional product e-stores, where the company will provide a full merchandising plan for the customer, and then stock and maintain the products, providing next day delivery, anywhere in Canada, after a customer places an order online.

Mission

Integrus’ mission is to provide customers with a complete solution of promotional services and products and an enhanced experience with unparalleled customer service excellence.

Challenge

Integrus had recently secured the business of several high-profile customers, including IBM Canada. The web solutions that Integrus had been offering, were slow, difficult to maintain and did not reflect the unique branding requirements of each of their customers. Integrus needed a new web based e-store platform that would allow quick roll-out of fully customized solutions for each customer, while maintaining a common administrative back-end to allow them to meet the expectation of next day delivery on all orders.

Approach

Agora did extensive research into the market for customizable ecommerce solutions and then licensed the technology as opposed to building the core infrastructure from scratch. Agora then used this template and then built a fully customized e-store platform in Microsoft .NET. Agora worked with Integrus’ designers to implement a fully brand-compliant store for each customer.

Solution

The IBM Canada Logostore was put into production on time and on budget. The solution was the first of many to be rolled out for Integrus and incorporated client login, persistent shopping cart, newswires, shipping and Canada Post calculator and many other custom designed components.

The e-stores are running on a .NET infrastructure including SQL 2005 and hosted at an off-site service provider. Administration of the e-stores is performed on the simplified administrative panel built by Agora for Integrus.

An example of the e-store solution is at www.logostore-globalid.ca.

Impact

The new e-store platform has allowed Integrus to be very aggressive in the marketplace in offering new and existing clients a rapid implementation of an online promotional products program. During the month of February 2007, Integrus is doing 8 new customer launches on the platform. Integrus Project Manager, Kristy Bertrand, stated, "It would not be possible to meet this high level of customer demand without the simple, easy to administer e-store functionality that Agora has provided for us."

Future Plans

Agora continues to evolve the e-store platform for Integrus, based on new customer requirements and operational feedback from Integrus employees. Agora is actively engaged with Integrus in selling additional online services to their customers, including warehousing and fulfilment of Point of Sale materials.