Brown-Campbell

At a glance

Web Ascender built Brown-Campbell’s first online store: a WooCommerce site that prices metal by the cut and tier, checks stock across branches, and quotes freight at checkout. It launched in November 2026.

• Client: Brown-Campbell, a metals supplier based in Shelby Township, Michigan, with locations throughout the United States
• Engagement: Launched November 2026, with ongoing support
• Platform: WordPress + WooCommerce, Breakdance, Stripe
• Integrations: Estes freight, UPS, inventory feeds from the client’s IBM system, Postmark inbound email
• Services: Discovery, UX and visual design, custom plugin development, data import, content migration, SEO, training, launch support

The client

Brown-Campbell supplies metals and fabricated products, including aluminum, stainless steel and fiberglass stair treads, from locations throughout the United States. Customers buy stock sizes and cut-to-size pieces, often in quantity and often shipped by freight.

Their old website was a custom CodeIgniter catalog. It described products but couldn’t sell them. Brown-Campbell wanted customers to price, order and pay online without calling a branch.

The challenge

Selling metal online is harder than selling boxed products. Off-the-shelf WooCommerce handled none of Brown-Campbell’s core rules:

• Cut-to-size pricing. Customers order custom lengths and widths, so price and weight change with every order.
• Tiered and category discounts. Price breaks depend on quantity and product category.
• Inventory across branches. Stock lives in the client’s IBM system and arrives as Excel and XML exports, not a live feed.
• Freight shipping. Heavy and oversized items ship by LTL freight (Estes), smaller ones by UPS. The right carrier and branch depend on weight, dimensions and the customer’s location.
• A large legacy catalog. Years of product pages, PDFs, load tables and spec sheets had to move over intact.

The brief was a store that follows these rules automatically, so staff aren’t re-quoting every order by hand.

What we did

We ran the project in five phases, with biweekly check-ins with the Brown-Campbell team the whole way.

Phase	What we delivered
Discovery	Kickoff, industry research, product-data mapping, plugin research
Design	Homepage, product listing, product detail and sign-in designs, refined over three rounds of feedback
Commerce engine	Inventory imports, tiered and category pricing, cut-to-size logic, Estes and UPS shipping, branch-aware stock lookup
Content and SEO	Full migration of product information pages, load tables and PDFs; page titles and H1s rewritten for SEO
Polish and launch	Stripe payments, tax, search, locations map, accessibility and checkout testing, staff training, go-live

Custom work worth highlighting

• Shipping engine. We wrote a shipping spec with the client, then built a custom plugin. It finds the closest branch with enough stock, using a zip-code location table so no live geocoding is needed. Then it quotes Estes freight or UPS from product weight, dimensions and freight class.
• Automated inventory imports. Excel and XML exports from the client’s IBM system are merged and imported on a schedule. Brown-Campbell can now email an export straight to the store, and an inbound-email importer (Postmark) loads it.
• Metal-specific pricing. Tiered quantity pricing, category discounts and cut-to-size pricing all run inside standard WooCommerce checkout.
• Fast quote and resources. A fast-quote form, a resource library with catalog downloads, a migrated calculator tool, and PDF deep-linking.
• Quality. Responsive and accessibility testing, plus automated test routines added before launch.

Results

Brown-Campbell went live with online ordering in November 2026. Customers can now price, ship and pay for metal orders without calling a branch.

• Orders online, rules built in. Cut-to-size, tiered pricing, tax and freight are calculated at checkout, not quoted by hand.
• Inventory that stays current. Stock updates arrive by scheduled import or a simple email from the client’s IBM system.
• A complete catalog. Every legacy product page, load table and spec PDF moved to the new site, with SEO-ready titles and headings.
• A team that can run it. Brown-Campbell staff were trained on the site and manage their own content.
• An ongoing partnership. Web Ascender still supports the store after launch.