GROWMARK, Inc.
Agricultural Cooperative is Increasing Yield from Connected Digital Platform
GROWMARK, Inc. is the parent company of FS Systems, an agricultural cooperative that serves retailers, businesses, and customers, operating in more than 40 U.S. states and Ontario, Canada. They provide fuels, lubricants, crop nutrients, crop protection products, seed, construction services, equipment, and grain marketing assistance to members of the cooperative, sharing resources, expertise, and innovation. The regional members of the GROWMARK cooperative operate under the trademarked brand, FS.
Challenges
While the 37 existing member websites were operational within their legacy platform, there were problematic inconsistencies across product catalogs, digital assets, capabilities, branding, navigation, and performance. GROWMARK needed to identify an experienced agency partner to support the acceleration of development and implementation of its new overarching strategy and content migration within their newly selected platform.
GROWMARK had identified Sitecore as the ideal platform to unify product catalog assets, improve website performance, and add impactful online capabilities while also maintaining flexibility and independent management for its members.
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Solutions
As a prominent development leader within the global Sitecore community, Americaneagle.com was selected as the agency partner for replatforming website solutions and providing training. Americaneagle.com’s Sitecore practice worked closely with GROWMARK to outline strategies that would maximize website capabilities and efficiencies for members within a reimagined fscooperatives.com. A single SitecoreAI instance would be developed and implemented to serve as a consistent, high-performance platform solution across the cooperative.
FS customers, brand standards, search optimization, product catalogs, accessibility advancement, and the newly designed SitecoreAI component structure led every consideration for asset improvement within the migration. This finely detailed and documented work provided a consistent content, user, and navigation model for internal team members to follow as they onboarded the new platform.
The clear and repeatable content model was key to project success. Strong collaboration throughout all phases of development promoted internal team understanding and confidence within the Sitecore’s multi-site management environment, equipping them to independently sustain migration through completion of all member sites.
Americaneagle.com also facilitated extensive training for GROWMARK’s corporate team and member representatives, including multiple educational sessions, hands-on content editing tutorials, and the creation of a SharePoint-based training hub for ongoing learning and reference.
Site search within each member site took a huge leap forward as well. With a unified product experience, supported by consistent data modelling, catalog offerings, categories, facets, attributes, and supporting assets, product discovery within the sophisticated Sitecore Search has proven to be both intuitive and successful. A robust location finder has also improved discoverability throughout the cooperative.
Shared assets alongside locally managed components within the intelligently connected SitecoreAI implementation now effectively showcase the latest FS products and specifications on all member sites, strengthening brand trust, improving user experiences, and supporting informed, confident purchasing decisions. Members of the FS Cooperative have shown unanimous appreciation for this scalable, easy-to-manage website platform. Improved content management capabilities across the family of websites have empowered each entity to better serve their region’s farmers and other commercial customers.
