Pentair is a global leader in water treatment. An esteemed component company of the S&P 500 and with more than 10,000 employees worldwide, Pelican Water, one of Pentair’s largest residential brands, approached CitrusBits with a mission-critical ecommerce app development project.
The ask? To build a mobile app to help Pelican Water’s residential customers quickly scan and ID their products, access pertinent videos and other user resources, and purchase water filters and accessories — bringing easy, fresh, clean water solutions to people.
CitrusBits’ designers created the UX flow and wireframes. Then, working with the Pelican Water brand team, we created high-fidelity user interface designs. In order to make the app user-friendly and approachable, we designed near field communication (NFC) scanner capabilities into the app, so that the app could easily identify the exact product the user had purchased. Through this product match, we could design in and automatically offer curated videos, FAQs, manuals, accessories for purchase, and other resources.
Because this scan feature was so critical to supporting existing customers, Pelican Water requested that we deploy an early version of the app with just the ability to scan NFC tags. So, we quickly designed and developed a working proof-of-concept and deployed it to the App Store.
Our teams then moved into the full design and development of the ecommerce portion of the app. Because Pelican Water already had an ecommerce website, our backend developers were able to utilize an existing (and very robust) product database. Working closely with the client’s technical leads, our team integrated the mobile ecommerce frontend with the existing backend and performed rigorous QA testing. Development time was kept to a minimum because we opted to stay with the existing PHP framework, minimizing the amount of recoding needed.
Finally, we incorporated payment options of Apple Pay and Google Pay to make mobile ordering as frictionless as possible.
The final app allows users to scan and ID their products, access pertinent videos and other useful resources, and purchase water filters and accessories.
Within two weeks of launching the app, Pelican Water have seen large numbers of return customers using the app to order replacements. They’ve also seen new customers making large purchases online using mobile payment options not previously available.
Since deploying the mobile app, Pelican Water has seen significant increases to average order size (AOS) and order frequency (or repeat purchasing). Customers have gravitated to the easy mobile pay options to replenish their filters, and user feedback has been refreshingly positive.
