Big Al’s, a Toronto-based retailer of aquatics products, operates 20 stores in Canada but does most of its sales on the web at BigAlsOnline.com. Online traffic and sales have grown steadily since the company’s e-commerce debut in 1999, a period during which its monthly traffic grew from about 100,000 visitors to about 3.5 million, says Dan Hamilton, director of Internet sales.
But after getting through last year’s holiday shopping season, Big Al’s realized it needed to replace its original platform hosted by a Toronto e-commerce services provider. “Our old system was having an issue with downtime, because the back-end wasn’t up to par,” he tells Internet Retailer.
Earlier this year, Big Al’s switched to an e-commerce platform hosted by Novator Systems, also based in Toronto. Novator provides a complete e-commerce system, though Big Al’s has retained the ability to control merchandising by directly changing images and product descriptions.
Novator has integrated order management, fulfillment and shipping services, replacing many of the manual processes that had restricted Big Al’s ability to process orders. “We’ve gone from struggling to handle 300 orders a day to handling 800 to 1,000 orders a day,” Hamilton says.
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