CPL Industries are the UK’s largest coal and firewood merchants, as well as the biggest producers of solid fuel briquettes in Europe. Founded in 1973, CPL remain at the forefront of their industry, responding quickly to ever-growing consumer expectations. By further investing in online operations, CPL hoped to combine their long-standing heritage in the fuel industry with cutting-edge digital technologies.

Over the years, CPL Industries have acquired multiple businesses as part of a Growth Through Acquisition strategy. This saw businesses such as Corrall Rudrums, Ferguson’s Coal and Coal Cornwall become part of CPL, although each retained their own platform and branding.

Our SEO team successfully maximised the existing sites for search visibility, but the digital estate was inefficient for business needs.

With each acquisition came a new digital infrastructure, where each brand was operating with its own codebase. To add to the complex system, these sites were also split between two technologies: Drupal Commerce and Umbraco.

Therefore, one of the key aims of this project from the outset was to reduce total cost of ownership by consolidating CPL’s digital estate into a single platform. This, in turn, would also streamline online inventory and site management, freeing time and resources to concentrate on delivering customer service and innovation.

Leveraging the capabilities of Magento 2’s Multi Website / Multi-Store Architecture, we developed several branded storefronts, each presenting their own product range and pricing. We were able to centralise management of all core and sub-sites by delivering a unified Magneto platform; doing so reduced the cost of ownership across the CPL Industries’ digital estate.

This approach allowed us to populate CPL’s impressive network of sites with a ‘Write Once, Deploy Anywhere’ strategy. This efficient approach reduces maintenance and support costs, whilst also enabling CPL to roll out new functionality globally, with ease.

With no plans to slow down, CPL now have a digital infrastructure capable of growing with their business. The Magento solution is scalable, allowing for growth of existing product lines, adding new brands, and integrating sophisticated technologies that may not even exist yet. 

Figures produced by eMarketer show that Mobile Commerce made up 58.9% of all global digital sales in 2017.  

During the discovery process, an analytical review of the CPL estate revealed similar trends in the upturn of mobile adoption for e-commerce. As with all new digital projects, it was paramount that we embraced a ‘mobile-first’ standpoint.

We achieved this by underpinning each new CPL website with CTI’s Proprietary ‘Accelerator Theme’. This theme delivers mobile-optimised pages which leverage over 400 hours of UX and Performance optimisation, providing CPL with a best in class e-commerce platform.

As a single-use consumable resource, the repurchase life cycle for solid fuel is regular and predictable. CPL wanted to encourage brand affinity with customers by implementing a loyalty scheme. The scheme incentivises online purchases, enabling customers to earn points which can then offset the cost of a future purchase.

The loyalty scheme is controlled by automation, giving customers one point for every one pound spent on the online store. At the checkout, customers are given the option to apply loyalty points to their purchase immediately or to save up points for a bigger discount.

In order to streamline the end-to-end order process, we integrated all new CPL websites with the existing ERP system: Perito. We developed a bespoke Perito connector, which provides data exchange for the following e-commerce components:

• Order Information
• Customer Information
• Delivery Information

This data exchange aids service automation and allows for a quick view of the fulfilment pipeline. CPL employees are now able to deliver from click to despatch in the most efficient way possible.