Atlanta Light Bulbs Inc. recently switched on a new e-commerce site to avoid a technology blackout, CEO Doug Root says.

The 35-year-old distributor of lightbulbs, ballasts, sockets and other lighting products began selling online in 1999, and online sales now represent 25% of its business orders, Root says.

The company sells to businesses and consumers on AtlantaLightBulbs.com, and projects 11% year-over-year growth in business-to-business sales on that site in 2016. Root declines to break out figures on B2B and retail sales or to provide overall financial information. But he says “tens of thousands” of business customers, from commercial buyers shopping bulk lighting for a building to scientists buying a single lamp for a microscope, shop the 7,882 SKUs available at AtlantaLightBulbs.com, which receives nearly 51,000 monthly unique visitors. The company also sells to resellers through a dedicated wholesale site, DistributorBulbs.com.

The distributor recently upgraded AtlantaLightBulbs.com to handle its increase in online business, and plans to grow business sales on that this year site by leveraging negotiated pricing and a new customer service response system.

The company decided to revamp AtlantaLightBulbs.com after concluding the site it built in 1999 was no longer able to keep up with the distributor’s online growth. “We were running on an old shopping cart that we made nearly 20 years ago, and kept bolting on stuff. It turned into a programming monster,” Root says. “We just kept having to add on to it. It’s like when you have a little house and you keep adding onto it until, finally, the house collapses.”

To avoid an e-commerce meltdown, Atlanta Light Bulbs relaunched its site last July on e-commerce software from BigCommerce Pty. Ltd., which the distributor chose for its ease of use and customization, Root says. “With BigCommerce we could do a lot of stuff in-house,” he says. “We can pull up the design code and make a change to the front page if we want to; we don’t need to be an expert in coding.”

Developers from web development firm MindHarbor integrated the e-commerce site with Atlanta Light Bulbs’s Epicor Prophet 21 enterprise resource planning, or ERP system, which the distributor uses to manage inventory levels, financial records and customer activity. Coalition Technologies, a web design and search engine marketing agency, rewrote all the content on AtlantaLightbulbs.com to make it more easily captured by Internet search engines.

Since the relaunch last July, online sales have increased 5.4%, Root says. The electrical distributor plans to continue introducing new online features to increase e-commerce sales, he adds. For example, recent updates to AtlantaLighBulbs.com include negotiated pricing and a digital customer service program.

Once a business buyer arrives on a product page, she can now click a button titled “Let’s Make a Deal” underneath the listed price, and enter in the dollar amount she would like to pay. This feature, from Price Waiter, is popular with business buyers because it allows Atlanta Light Bulbs to offer discounted pricing for bulk orders, Root says. “For buyers spending commercially for lighting products, we’ll let them negotiate on it,” Root says. He adds that the negotiated price option is an example of extra service Atlanta Light Bulbs offers to differentiate itself from other companies selling similar products.

The distributor also recently introduced an Internet-based customer service platform from Freshdesk Inc. Now when a customer keys in questions to Atlanta Light Bulbs’ customer service staff, the system automatically routs the query to the customer service desk, where it receives a time stamp and is placed in a chronological queue. The distributor previously didn’t have an automated system for processing customer questions, and the Zendesk system has reduced Atlanta Light Bulbs’ customer response time to four hours from a day, Root says.

Atlanta Light Bulbs plans by the end of this year to also migrate to BigCommerce its wholesale site for resellers, DistributorBulbs.com, which it also built in-house, Root says. He declines to provide more specifics about the reseller site.

Root estimates Atlanta Light Bulbs spent $100,000 to design, deploy and integrate the BigCommerce site with its ERP system. He declines to note the cost of BigCommerce software separately, but BigCommerce says its e-commerce software ranges from about $30 to $200 per month for companies doing up to $1 million in online sales per year, depending on the number of online features. For larger companies, BigCommerce offers an enterprise version of its software with a higher level of customization; the cost varies for each contract, the vendor says. BigCommerce is deployed as a software-as-a-service, which lets clients access the software via web browsers without running it on their own infrastructure.

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