Case Study

SoCal

Who are SOCAL?

Socal, a shortening of Southampton Calor Gas Centre, was formed in 1989 as a privately owned family-run business and is now one of the largest official Calor Gas distributors in the South of England. We provide an unrivalled range of products along with unbeatable service through our team of experts, built up over 20+ years.

We at Socal have always been forward-thinking and first started trading online back in 1999, which helped us become one of the leading providers of high-end and specialist barbecues and accessories in the UK.

What challenges/problems did you have?

As an established business, we had many systems that we acquired over the years to accomplish different tasks, all of which were separate and required lots of manual intervention. We also had a lot of complexity with regard to how and where we could sell and distribute gas products, along with complex VAT calculations.

What made Sparkstone’s solution stand out over others?

After a lot of research, we struggled to find a product that could do everything we needed. It became clear that we couldn’t use an off-the-shelf product, and instead, needed a bespoke system to fully support our requirements and would allow us to sell both in-store and online. We also work with lots of different customer types, such as B2B, B2C, D2C etc… and the versatility of Sparkstone’s platform allowed us to manage and serve all of our business and consumer customers in one place.

How has our solution helped since its implementation?

We went live with Sparkstone’s EPoS platform in 2017, shortly followed by the Ecommerce platform in 2018. Sparkstone’s solutions allowed us to operate as a true multichannel retailer; with one system we could streamline most of our operations meaning we could efficiently sell in-store, online – through our website – and also manage more online channels through their built-in integrations with Amazon and Ebay.

When we replaced our old Magento website with the new Sparkstone ecommerce site our orders went from 1 a week to 5 a day, and now we’ve stopped counting!

Since launching the site we have served more than 500k users and our sales have more than doubled – in April our online sales were over £1million!

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To find out more about Socal, click here to visit their website.