Apex Coating Systems

Client: Apex Coating Systems Ltd, Hunslet, Leeds
Project: WooCommerce ecommerce website with bespoke product configurator
Sector: Industrial manufacturing, spray booths and paint finishing systems
Services provided: Ecommerce website design, custom product builder, SEO and hosting
Live site: apexcoating.co.uk

The background

Apex Coating Systems designs, manufactures and installs spray booths, drying rooms, paint mixing rooms and finishing equipment from its base in Hunslet, Leeds. Fifteen years in the trade, everything built in the UK, serving automotive bodyshops, metal fabricators, joinery workshops and industrial manufacturers nationwide.

This was the most technically demanding build of the group, for one reason. Industrial spray booths are bespoke capital equipment costing anywhere from a couple of thousand pounds to twenty thousand and beyond. Almost every competitor in this market sells them the same way: a brochure page, a phone number, and a request to call for a quote.

Apex wanted to sell them online, properly, with real prices.

The challenge

A spray booth is not a product with a price. It is a specification with a price.

Width, height, canopy depth, panel finish, whether the panels are insulated or bare galvanised steel, lighting, flameproof fans, ducting, installation. Change any one of those and the cost changes. Traditionally that means a customer describes their workshop, waits two days for a quotation, then goes back and forth on options. Plenty of buyers give up somewhere in that process, and the ones who do not have usually phoned three competitors by the time the quote lands.

The site also had to serve two completely different buying behaviours in one shop. Someone reordering a £40 roll of Andreae filter paper wants to add to basket and be gone in thirty seconds. Someone specifying a £20k drying room is researching for weeks, involving colleagues, and possibly arranging finance. The same shop had to work for both.

The custom product builder

This was the heart of the project. We built a configurator that lets a customer specify their own booth and see the price update live as they do it.

Take the bespoke dry filter spray booth. The buyer works through eight choices: width from 2000mm to 6000mm in nine increments, height in six, canopy depth in seven including no canopy at all, four panel and finish combinations ranging from non-insulated galvanised steel to fully insulated double-skin, sealed lighting units, flameproof fans, ducting, and installation.

That produces thousands of possible configurations for some single products, each one correctly priced, and all of it handled inside the website where the owner can change pricing on the fly themselves in live time. The running total updates with every selection, so the customer sees the cost implication of insulated panels or a deeper canopy at the moment they make the decision.

Five of these builders are live across the range, covering dry filter spray booths, commercial spray booths, insulated spray rooms, paint drying rooms and paint mixing rooms.

Matching the imagery to the specification

A configurator that shows the same photograph regardless of what you select undermines its own credibility. If a buyer chooses a 6m wide insulated booth with white internal panels and a 3m canopy, a stock image of a small galvanised unit does not help them picture it.

So the product galleries were built out with configuration-coded photography. Each image is named and organised against the specification it represents, by width, height, canopy and finish code, giving close to thirty reference images on a single product. The buyer can see something that genuinely resembles what they are about to order.

For a capital purchase being signed off by someone who has never bought a spray booth before, that visual confirmation does a lot of quiet reassurance work.

Why removing the quote gate works commercially

The instinct in industrial B2B is to hide pricing. Keep them calling, keep the conversation, protect the margin. In practice it mostly protects your competitors, because the buyer who cannot get a price moves on to someone who will give them one.

Publishing configurable prices does three things for Apex. It captures buyers who want to research privately before they talk to anyone, which in capital equipment is most of them. It wins the long tail of searches where someone is comparing options at nine in the evening. And it qualifies the enquiries that still come in by phone, because those callers have already seen the price and are asking about something else.

Each configurator is supported by a downloadable buyer's guide PDF setting out exactly what is and is not included on installation and ducting, which prevents the misconfigured orders that would otherwise be the risk of selling complex equipment unattended.

Consultancy, sectors and search

Not every buyer should be self-serving a configurator, and the site is honest about that. Three consultancy routes sit alongside the shop, covering spray booth design, equipment buying and a full turnkey service, each with its own enquiry form that asks which service the visitor wants before the message is sent.

Four sector pages address automotive, metal fabrication, joinery and wood, and industrial separately, because a classic car restorer and a production manufacturer are searching for different things and judging the same equipment against different criteria.

The SEO targets a genuinely valuable set of commercial terms across spray booth manufacturing, powder coating booths, dry filter booths, paint mixing rooms and spray booth filters, supported by sector pages, an FAQ section and a technical blog. Deep product category structure gives the long tail somewhere to land, and the whole site runs on our managed hosting with caching, which matters on image-heavy product pages carrying thirty photographs each.

The outcome

Apex now sells configurable industrial capital equipment online, with live pricing, in a market where almost everyone else still says call for a quote. A buyer can specify a booth to the millimetre, see what it costs, look at a picture of roughly that configuration, download the technical detail and place the order, at whatever hour suits them. The consumables business runs alongside it, and the consultancy routes catch anyone who needs a human.

Need an ecommerce website that can handle complex or configurable products? We build WooCommerce stores for businesses across Wakefield, Leeds and the wider Yorkshire region. Get in touch for a free audit and quote.