EVUM Motors case study

EVUM Motors GmbH manufactures electric vehicles and sells them predominantly to business customers. In 2023 the company was looking for a partner for a new website – a presence that would support existing customers and reach new ones in B2B. What came of it was a four-month project covering more than a website: an editorial system, a connected e-commerce system, a vehicle configurator, and measurement of what happens afterwards.

Project frame

• Client: EVUM Motors GmbH
• Year: 2023
• Duration: four months
• Scope: e-commerce consulting for management, rollout of CMS and e-commerce system, vehicle configurator, setup and optimisation of the newsletter tools, web analytics, A/B tests, conversion rate work

Why B2B makes different demands

Nobody buys a vehicle costing as much as a small car after two clicks. In business-to-business, a website visit generally ends not in a purchase but in an enquiry, a quote or an appointment – and several people on the customer side hang on that, each with different questions. Purchasing wants terms, the fleet manager wants range and payload, management wants an investment calculation.

A website meant to serve that has to do two things at once: explain without drowning the visitor in a datasheet, and offer at every point a next step that matches their level of information. That is the difference from a consumer shop where the basket is the only goal.

Coordination between departments

The first part of the project consisted not of design but of consulting. A presence of this kind concerns sales, marketing, product management and management simultaneously; every department has legitimate claims on the outcome, and those regularly contradict each other.

We therefore made sure early on that decisions were made around one table rather than in parallel rounds of coordination. That sounds like organisational work, and it is – but it is the reason a project of this size gets finished in four months. Most delays in web projects arise not in development but in approval loops where nobody has the authority to decide.

What mainly had to be settled was which audience the site should serve first, and which content would later be maintained by whom. The second point determines more about the choice of system than the people involved usually realise at the start.

CMS and e-commerce system

A content management system with a connected e-commerce system was rolled out. The division of labour behind it: the CMS carries everything that explains – product pages, use cases, references, news. The shop system carries everything to do with transactions – articles, availability, orders, payment processing.

For the editorial team the decisive point was that content can be changed without developer involvement. A manufacturer adjusts product details, prices and availability continuously; if a ticket is needed every time, the site goes out of date faster than it gets maintained. The interface was therefore built so that several people can work on content in parallel without overwriting each other, and so that building blocks are reusable – identical elements then look identical on every page, which holds the presence together.

On the shop side it was about the fundamentals that get uncomfortable fast in the vehicle business when they are missing: clean stock management with real-time updates, a secured payment route, and handover of order and customer data to the systems already running in the company.

The vehicle configurator

The most demanding single piece of the project was the configurator. Prospects assemble their vehicle in it to their own specifications – body, equipment, options.

The interest in such a tool lies less in the interface than in the rules behind it. Not every option can be combined with every other; some are technically mutually exclusive, some require each other, and the configurator has to know both before the user submits an impossible combination. Modelling those dependencies cleanly is the actual work – and the reason such applications count as custom web solutions rather than as part of a shop system’s feature set.

For sales it has a tangible side effect: an enquiry from the configurator arrives with a concrete specification already attached, instead of a request for a quote. The first conversation therefore starts from a completely different place.

Newsletter

The deliverables included the setup and optimisation of the newsletter tools. In practice that means: the sign-up is connected to the site, consent is recorded verifiably, and the reporting shows which sends actually lead to visits and enquiries.

In B2B this is more than a communication channel. Because months can pass between first contact and an investment decision, there has to be a way for a prospect to stay in touch without sales having to call them every fortnight.

Measuring instead of guessing

Measurement was set up alongside the build – not as an appendage at the end but planned in from the start. The usual on-site behaviour metrics were recorded and, more importantly, the events that count in B2B: submitted forms, newsletter sign-ups, completed orders. Along with revenue and transaction analysis from the shop system.

Only on that basis can A/B tests be run sensibly. A test compares two variants of the same page and shows which more often leads to the desired step – but that presupposes that the step is measured cleanly at all, and that enough data accumulates to separate a difference from chance. How we go about it is described in more detail on the web analytics page.

What transfers from this

Three points from this project apply to work in entirely different industries too.

First: the schedule depends on the decision structure, not on development speed. Settling who signs off before the start saves weeks at the end.

Second: products that need explaining need a system that separates content from transaction. A shop system alone forces product stories into article descriptions; a CMS alone cannot sell.

Third: what is not measured cannot be improved – and what is measured should be what the business actually depends on. In selling products that need explaining, that is rarely the visit count.

If you have a comparable project – a B2B presence, a configurator, or a shop for products that need explaining – describe it briefly via the contact page. You can also book a slot directly there.