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Angelo Berlingieri
  • Customer journey
  • Competitive research
  • E-commerce strategy

Turning a quote-by-email business into an online store

Role
Product Manager
Company
Grant Instruments
When
Jun to Aug 2025
Tools
Shopify, Google Gemini (mock-ups)
programme
£50k
a month in sales
~£12k
for a 2-week plan
2 days

Visit the live store →

Before

  • Buying meant emailing for a quote and waiting
  • Eight manual steps from enquiry to payment
  • No way to buy online

After

  • An online store, live in the US since October 2025
  • Built on the customer journey I designed
  • About £12k a month in sales

01The problem

Grant has made lab equipment since 1951 and sold it the traditional way. A customer emailed for a quote, sales prepared one by hand, and it took eight manual steps to get from question to payment. That was a problem in the US, Grant's biggest growth market, where lab staff often buy what they need on a company card and want to check out in minutes, not wait days for a quote. Grant wanted its first online store but had no clear picture of what it should be.

My job was to design the strategy and customer journey for that store.

02What I did

  • Mapped how buying worked today. I traced every step from first enquiry to payment, to see where customers were left waiting.
  • Studied 8 competitors. From big names like Eppendorf and Fisher Scientific to budget sellers, I scored their websites on search, product pages, checkout and support. None got everything right, so I took the best of each and noted what frustrated their buyers.
  • Designed the new journey. Five stages, from finding Grant online to recommending it to a colleague, each with one number to measure success.
  • Picked what to build first. Checkout and payment, then search, then product pages: the things that lose a sale when they're missing.
  • Made it visible. I used AI to mock up four key pages (home, category, product and checkout), so leadership and the web agencies could see the plan, not just read about it.

03What changed

  • Within my first two weeks, Grant's head of product took the analysis to the board, and it helped win their support for going digital.
  • The head of product and the board formally adopted it as the build guide, and the final site closely follows my mock-ups.
  • The US store opened in October 2025 with prices on every product and card and mobile payments at checkout, the first things on my list. Other regions followed in 2026.
  • It now brings in about £12k a month.
In a sector where almost nobody innovates, Grant went from quotes by email to a proper online store in one leap. That was the exciting part.