Industry
- Consumer Brands
- Ecommerce
Services
- Commerce
- Design Systems
- Website
Direct Tools
A store for buyers who check everything twice.
Direct Tools Factory Outlet sells certified refurbished power tools from Ryobi, Milwaukee, Hoover, and other TTI-owned brands through more than 35 physical stores and a growing e-commerce channel holding over 1,500 SKUs. The old experience organized that catalog around how the business thought about inventory. The rebuild needed to organize it around how customers thought about purchase.
Refurbished buyers research differently than new-tool buyers
A customer buying a new Milwaukee impact driver at Home Depot does not think twice about the SKU. A customer buying the certified refurbished version thinks about everything. What condition is it in? What’s included? Is it the current generation? What’s the warranty? How much am I saving versus new?
That difference in buyer psychology changed the entire UX brief. The information architecture was rebuilt around six distinct buyer personas and the way each searches. Product pages surface the refurbished-specific information buyers actually evaluate, condition, contents, generation, warranty, savings, instead of the marketing language new-tool sites default to. SKU descriptions carry the keyword structure refurbished shoppers search for, serving customers and search engines with the same work. High-contrast design and proper semantic structure brought the site into ADA and WCAG compliance, which matters as much for buyers shopping on phones in parking lots as it does for legal standing. Checkout was streamlined to remove friction from the moment of decision to the moment of purchase.
Result
Faster load times, improved SEO performance, full ADA and WCAG compliance, and a route from search to checkout that gets customers to the right tool in a few clicks instead of many. For a retailer selling a deep refurbished catalog to value-conscious buyers, those are the difference between a completed purchase and a closed tab.
