One of the most important things for a website to possess today is a great user experience, something that keeps the customer engaged and leads to conversions. It’s the ultimate measure of success, doing enough to get customers to the finish line.
That was the goal for Mark Saporito, the CEO of H-E Parts, when he contacted 1Digital Agency regarding his BigCommerce website development.
The goal for H-E Parts was to make it easy for customers to find exactly what they are looking for. To do this, they wanted to add a search tool with advanced functionality, allowing customers to answer a series of questions and arrive quickly at the desired product.
This is their story of how 1Digital Agency built a search tool to find products fast and improved the overall user experience through a development project.
The Client
H-E Parts is an independent manufacturer and distributor of replacement parts and components of construction vehicles, selling milling products, rubber tracks, teeth, kits, and adapters. With a mission to be the leading independent supplier of parts and equipment for mining, quarrying and heavy construction, H-E Parts provides customers with an alternative to traditional OEM channels with competitive pricing and innovative solutions.
Founded in 2006 and based out of Oakwood, GA, H-E Parts has spent years working to become the leader in aftermarket parts and components, all at affordable prices, for the construction and mining industry.
The Mission
The primary focus of this development project was to build a tool under the working name “GET Fast Finder.” This tool would work with the rest of the web pages and all of the products within the website to filter down to desired products based on answers to a series of questions from the customer.
This process included adding a link to this page on the home page, requesting answers to a series of questions upon landing on the Fast Finder page, and prompting answers to a series of questions in order to advance. Customers would be required to answer the first four questions before they could jump to the product results, even with two questions remaining.
In order to complete this, 1Digital would build custom filtering search capabilities and a custom product filtering tool.
The Process
With this development project, there is an element of design as well, because the tool is going to take such a prominent place on the H-E Parts website and be a visual aid to helping customers narrow down results. The first part of the process, then, is to make sure that the client is on the same page as 1Digital when it comes to the visual design aspect to make sure the look, feel, and branding are all accurate with the vision of the client.
Through a series of custom designs, each question was created with answer options to make the tool a visual series for the customer to answer to get to a destination.
Each question was created with images and text for each answer and the options to be displayed and was all created with custom functionality. The advanced search tool was designed to implement the steps in order so that the user answers each question before going to a landing page for the results. If the user is not satisfied with the results, they can return to the search tool and answer the questions again to obtain different results.
This search tool is built on a 3rd party dashboard that will display on the BigCommerce store. It runs on a dedicated Linux server that integrates API between the custom system and the BigCommerce store. 1Digital Agency syncs the products from H-E Parts BigCommerce website and stores them within the custom search tool database.
As an administrator, the client can add new answers to the original six questions created to help better filter results for customers. The admin can also manage images for each answer through the module. The admin is also able to select as many products that relate to each question and answer to ensure accurate results based on what the customer is searching for through their answers.
Conclusion
The project presented by H-E Parts is typical when it comes to developing a website. Platforms like BigCommerce can often seem like they come one size fits all and clients are often looking for ways to make their website more unique.
A specialized search tool to enhance the user experience is certainly a unique and effective feature for an eCommerce website to engage with customers and get right to the heart of the problem. It only increases the functionality of the website and makes it easier for customers to get to where they need to be instead of doing constant searching that can only lead to frustration and a trip back to the search results for an easier solution.
With 1Digital Agency, we take ideas just like this and turn them into reality for clients. We complete the work on the specific with our developers and designers leading the way and allow you to be part of the QA process so everything is functioning properly when launched on your website.
If you have a custom development project that may improve the user experience of your website, let 1Digital Agency be your partner through this endeavor. For everything from integration with a 3rd party service provider to a feature that your platform simply does not offer, a custom development project can get you the features you want so that your eCommerce store has the unique aspects to be a success and change the way you do business online.
Contact 1Digital Agency today for more information about how we can help you achieve the unique features and functionality for your website with a custom development project.
Why a Guided-Selling Tool Solves a Real Conversion Problem
The H-E Parts project is a clear example of a pattern worth generalizing: in catalogs with high SKU complexity and fitment-dependent purchases — industrial parts, automotive, machinery, technical components — standard keyword search fails because the buyer does not know the exact part name, only the machine and the symptom. A guided “answer-a-few-questions” finder converts where free-text search abandons, because it turns the buyer’s actual knowledge (equipment, application) into a path to the right SKU. The business problem the Fast Finder solved is not “nicer UX” — it is recovering sales that a parts buyer would otherwise abandon out of uncertainty.
The Build Decisions That Matter When You Do This Yourself
Several architecture choices in this project are the ones any merchant attempting guided selling has to get right:
- Question order should mirror how the buyer narrows reality. Equipment first, then application, then attribute — not the merchant’s internal category tree. Requiring the first few high-signal questions before showing results (as H-E Parts did) keeps result sets relevant instead of overwhelming.
- Admin-editable mappings are non-negotiable. A finder that requires a developer to add a new answer or re-map products to questions will rot. The H-E Parts tool let the client manage answers, images, and product associations — that is what keeps a guided-selling tool accurate as the catalog changes.
- Decouple via API, but mind the SEO trade-off. Running the tool on a separate server synced to the store by API is a sound way to add functionality the platform lacks. The caveat to plan for: third-party-rendered tools can be invisible to crawlers, so the finder should complement, not replace, indexable category and product pages.
Measuring Whether It Worked
A custom feature is only justified if it is instrumented. The right KPIs for a guided finder are finder-start rate, completion rate by step (to find the question where users drop), finder-attributed conversion rate versus site-wide, and search-abandonment change. Without this telemetry a finder is an act of faith; with it, it becomes a tunable conversion asset and a basis for deciding which other catalog sections deserve the same treatment.
When a Custom Development Project Is the Right Call
The transferable lesson: reach for custom development when a platform limitation directly blocks a conversion path that standard features cannot — complex fitment search, B2B quoting, ERP-driven pricing, or integrations the platform does not natively support. The discipline is to scope it to the specific conversion problem, instrument it, and keep it maintainable by non-developers. That is the approach behind our custom website development work; if a feature your platform does not offer is costing you orders, our team can scope and build it — contact us to discuss the requirements.