UPLIFT Desk stands up to its competition with revenue-generating, built-in tools of new platform

The UPLIFT Desk success story

Jon Paulsen wants everyone to have a healthier life. As a Certified Professional Ergonomist turned CEO & Founder of UPLIFT Desk, Paulsen was unhappy with the available selection of office furniture after trying, and failing, to find a height-adjustable desk with the combination of features he wanted, ultimately deciding to build his own.

So, in the early 2000s after recognizing the market opportunity and need for a more customizable product, Paulsen formally launched UPLIFT Desk. Today, the company is one of the largest and fastest-growing manufacturers and retailers of standing desks, ergonomic chairs and other office accessories.

The UPLIFT Desk mission is simple — building the highest-quality ergonomic office products, at the best possible price to help everyone work better and live healthier.

A customer-centric approach to personalization

As told to BigCommerce by Brian Genchur, Marketing and PR Director and Angela Arnold, Content Director, upliftdesk.com

When Jon founded UPLIFT Desk, he did so with the fundamental belief that providing a better desk would make a massive impact in the health and overall wellness of our customers. Today, most people work eight, nine or ten hours per day — sometimes longer. Sitting all day, absent a proper ergonomic set up, is terrible for the human body. Jon wanted to help people suffering from pain, which is also positive for businesses in that employees are generally more productive when they feel good.

One thing we learned early on is that the desk needs to match the customer. Our customers want to customize everything, so we need to provide them lots of options and flexibility in how they design their desk. This is particularly difficult when selling online as desks are a sizable investment and customers have a natural preference to see and experience the product before purchasing, which is more difficult when they can’t touch it as they would in a traditional office supply or furniture store. Our solution to this is our Desk Builder.

Desk Builder is our custom-built solution which lets customers essentially see their desk being build virtually on their screens. We help them select and see various product option combinations — things like frame colors, desktop materials, monitor arms, grommets and more. Since launching the Desk Builder feature, we’ve seen a significant uptick in orders when compared to the prior period.

With BigCommerce, we’re able to deliver a highly-differentiated shopping experience to our customers.

Built-in features help recover lost revenue

As told to BigCommerce by Brian Genchur, Marketing and PR Director and Angela Arnold, Content Director, upliftdesk.com

We first launched with BigCommerce in 2011. At the time, we were looking for a platform partner that would provide us quality support, a strong product that was not stagnant and would give our development team flexibility to rapidly test and implement our ideas.

Our content development team spends most of their time in the backend of BigCommerce tweaking the website, optimizing our templates, adding new items — we’re constantly evolving and exploring opportunities to improve the experience for our customers.

One of the features that has been most valuable to us is BigCommerce’s native Abandoned Cart Saver, which allows you to very easily automate emails to shoppers that add a product to their cart but fail to complete a purchase. The emails are customizable, and since we launched on BigCommerce we’re seeing an increase of thousands of dollars and hundreds of orders every month pour in from the abandoned cart emails. It’s been something that’s really changed the way we approach our customers and our business in general.

BigCommerce’s integration with ShipperHQ has also equipped us with a powerful engine to manage complex shipping rules, pricing and a variety of product configurations. ShipperHQ is configured with all of our various product weights and dimensions, so we’re able to automate logic to determine if shipments should go via ground delivery or freight in real time.

Collectively, these features allow us to both provide a great experience for customers while also protecting our bottom line and keeping our team focused on growing the business.

Convenient B2B ordering fuels expansion

As told to BigCommerce by Brian Genchur, Marketing and PR Director and Angela Arnold, Content Director, upliftdesk.com

One of our primary focuses as a business right now is growing our B2B channel online, and BigCommerce is a core part of that strategy. A few years ago, we recognized an opportunity to better serve business customers by providing a great purchasing experience online for larger orders. Today, we serve some of the leading employers in the world, including Google, NBC, M.I.T. and others.

With BigCommerce, we’ve been able to provide a convenient purchasing experience for our corporate customers while also greatly improving our team’s operational efficiency and accuracy fulfilling these orders, which are usually high volume and inherently more complex.

Our team previously had to enter these orders manually and verify over and over again. Now, our team can plug them into BigCommerce which integrates directly with our ERP, NetSuite. We now are able to fulfill these orders, edit them, make adjustments, and obtain historical data very easily on BigCommerce, saving valuable time and resources.

Marketing integrations improve efficiency

As told to BigCommerce by Brian Genchur, Marketing and PR Director and Angela Arnold, Content Director, upliftdesk.com

Our website is critical to the success of our business, and BigCommerce is a big part of our strategy. We use a variety of marketing channels to reach and acquire customers, all of which funnels through BigCommerce.

For example, we use MailChimp to market our products to a large list of newsletter subscribers, and through the BigCommerce-MailChimp integration we are able to easily segment this audience, share relevant promotions and offers, then automatically track their effectiveness, all of which syncs back to BigCommerce’s analytics.

We’ve also used the Facebook pixel integration to inform our social advertising programs, retarget customers and bring people back to the website. This has helped us decide where exactly to continue targeting, where we need to allocate more ad spend and which ad formats and creative are working best with our audience.