B2B E-commerce and Digital Catalog for the component sector

An increase in sales necessarily passes through a complete and satisfying customer experience, even in the case of a B2B relationship. Quite simply, B2B buyers need to easily find what they need and place their order quickly, at the exact moment they are looking for it. This is possible thanks to the implementation of an Enterprise E-commerce Solution.

This was the input provided to Lutech by an Italian company which is a world leader in the production of plastic and metal components for the engineering industry, a real benchmark for designers and manufacturers in about 60 countries worldwide.

The project involved the printed catalog being supplemented – after its digitization, naturally – with a responsive digital shopping experience based on the HCL Commerce platform in order to achieve greater visibility on digital channels and a greater variety of online services for designers and manufacturers.

In the components sector, the purchasing procedure often involves the use of the hardcopy catalog, which is followed by the order through various touchpoints (email, telephone, fax). It is clear that such a process involves too many steps and requires manual effort from customers and back-office operators. Moreover, the use of digital product sheets could overcome the limits of the paper catalog, thus allowing for greater detail.

In B2B e-commerce for the components market, the use of paper catalogs and tools such as fax machines is common. Differentiation in a competitive market also means resorting to more efficient digital solutions.

Together with Lutech, the customer opted for HCL Commerce, an enterprise platform for the creation of a self-service, multi-country digital store, with integrated and consistent shopping experiences.

The company therefore chose to abandon the open source approach, which had involved significant use of time and resources for development and customization, and opt for a standard and recognized platform.

HCL Commerce allows you to use basic store templates and then quickly customize them, including the graphical layout, based on web design best practices. Lutech’s contribution, on the other hand, was instrumental in directing, supporting and testing the solution as well as digitizing the product information.

The project focused on the following:

• Multicountry e-commerce with 24/7 catalog availability
• Flexible and customizable search
• Monitoring, promotions and pricing, with automated customization logic
• Product configurator capable of handling more than 10,000 references for customized solutions
• Detailed data sheets (download of component vector drawings for inclusion of the buyer’s product in vector graphics, multimedia, etc.)
• Multicountry Search Engine Optimization
• Omni-channel Customer Experience Monitoring, with reduction of the time to enter quotation/order requests from customers.

The implementation of the B2B e-commerce solution was an opportunity to automate order management processes at the back-office level. Thanks to new processes, the client can now handle greater order volumes even more efficiently. So, sales teams can focus on supporting customers in more complex and high-quality requirements.

What’s more, the analytics offered by the platform allow very useful insights and sales trends to be identified, in order to better differentiate the offering and marketing strategies.

The SEO strategy was also overhauled, with the aim of increasing sessions and, in a short time, the digital presence increased by 22%, while requests for quotes grew by 24%.

At the end of the work, 40,000 products were made available for online purchase 24/7, with a 99% faster order process, which, besides improving the customer experience, stimulated incremental orders.