Mone Bros DIY

About Mone Bros

Established in 1965, Mone Bros is an independent, family run business originally specialising in the maintenance, repair and hire of plant equipment to the construction industry. By the early 1970s, the business had expanded to include the supply of landscaping products, building materials, natural stone and garden materials, delivering directly to private homes and commercial building projects. The business is built on attention to customer service and product quality.

Developing a website to enhance efficiency and open up new markets

In 2019, Mone Bros made the decision to review their existing e-commerce provision, seeking to upgrade the capabilities of their online ordering and payment systems. In particular, the company wanted the ability to maintain and regularly update an extensive key product catalogue, as well as tailoring the software to enable more product-specific volume selection at point of sale.

The team from PCM Systems was selected to provide a bespoke solution which met the identified requirements of this market sector, addressing the limitations encountered with the existing platform and designing a website capable of responding to market demand into the future.

The challenge

One of the most challenging areas of this project was to develop a complex postcode matching system to facilitate deliveries. Dependent upon location, customers are able to order deliveries of products like gravel in bulk, in bulk bags or in smaller quantities; it was essential that the new e-commerce site could clarify this at order stage according to postcode, to assist customers and to optimise ease of ordering, deliveries and service.

Defining the requirements

At PCM, the team has completed a number of projects for construction industry businesses, bringing to the table considerable experience and understanding of the requirements of the sector. They began with an extensive scoping exercise to recognise exactly who the customers were, highlighting that these were predominantly retail.

This exercise influenced the design, look and ‘feel’ of the website, and also led the selection of the payment gateway and influenced the decision to make all pricing inclusive of VAT. Throughout the project, the team looked carefully at how the existing website worked and also how Mone Bros wanted it to work, with discussions and different iterations to ensure the end product matched the requirements of the business. Product reviews have been built in automatically to assist customer decisions.

Training on website administration

Frequent product changes and price fluctuations meant that Mone Bros wanted to administer the site in-house for speed and accuracy. PCM provided training for personnel on how to add and edit content to ensure the process continues to run smoothly to optimise business.

Smooth implementation

The switchover and implementation of the new website was completed according to plan with no business disruption. The entire project was completed within a six month time frame, and PCM Systems are now working on the production of a new corporate website for Mone Bros.

The website can be found at www.monebrosdiy.co.uk