Curating Premium Online Experiences that Fuel Sales

JCG E-Commerce is a full-service distributor that specializes in creating custom, branded promotional products, corporate merchandise, and personalized online stores for their customers. With more than 50 years of combined industry experience, Carey Guglielmo, President, and Jay Toups, Owner, share a common mission to curate premium online experiences that make it quick and easy to order branded merchandise online.

JCG E-Commerce services a variety of customers and industries across the U.S., ranging from consumer goods, maritime, finance, schools, and more.

JCG E-Commerce was faced with a common challenge as a promotional product distributor—maintaining a high-level of quality and service with limited resources. “We’re a lean team,” said Carey Gugliemo, President of JCG E-Commerce. “We have thousands of shoppers ordering products from our online stores 24-7, 365 days of the year. That’s a lot of customer service and satisfaction to maintain.”

Navigating consumer expectations posed a challenge as well, requiring constant innovation to their product offerings and the online shopping experience. “It’s no different than retail,” said Guglielmo. “Shoppers always want something new – new products, new colors, new soft goods, new hard goods, new price points. That’s the nature of the consumer in today’s environment.”

Serving major brands like Coca-Cola and U.S. Steel, the JCG team needed an online store solution that would cater to the high expectations of today’s consumers while meeting the strict requirements of their customers—one that prioritized flexibility, security, and customization.

JCG credits their partnerships as a major key to success while operating as a small team. Guglielmo explained that they lean on their strong vendor relationships to curate unique product offerings for their stores and a technology partner to provide the expertise and resources needed to grow online.

“Online stores drive the business that we do with our customers,” said Guglielmo. “It gives us a presence with that company and continuously keeps us in front of consumers. That’s a huge competitive advantage.”

JCG runs a combination of year-round Company Stores and shorter-term Pop-up Stores, depending on their customers’ unique needs. “Some of our customers require intricate and complex demands on their stores, which Company Stores cater to very well,” said Guglielmo. “Pop-up Stores are more simplistic, but can be used for almost anything.”

Their team offers online stores for a variety of programs like Company Swag, Employee Uniforms and Supplies, and Employee Recognition and Incentives. Advanced features like Permissions allow them to customize the shopping experience for specific groups, like controlling how much an employee can spend on the storefront or which products they can purchase. To provide an additional layer of security, JCG leverages features like Single Sign On (SSO) for users to automatically log into the platform without reentering their information.

“We use online stores to gather the exact amount of products employees need instead of bulk ordering to reduce waste,” said Dennise Reno, member of the JCG team.

With the speed and ease-of-use of Pop-up Stores, JCG was able to recently expand their offerings to support programs like Spirit Wear for local schools and teams. “We plan to leverage OMG’s store building team to create more stores than we could manage internally,” said Guglielmo. “There’s no doubt we’re going to do more business on the Pop-up Store side.”

JCG E-Commerce has seen an impressive $3.6 million in total order value since using online Company Stores. They service more than 30 thousand active shoppers resulting in 35 thousand total orders on their online storefronts. They credit the highly custom, retail-like branding capabilities to meet the standards of the customers they work with, along with industry-leading security to protect the thousands of consumers shopping on their stores around the clock.

In the first three months of using Pop-up Stores, the JCG team created 16 new stores and launched a Spirit Wear store that resulted in more than $16 thousand in sales. “We can tell that OMG truly cares about us as a partner,” said Guglielmo. “Online stores are a critical piece of what we’re doing today and in the future success of our business.”