BDI, a Cleveland-based distributor of industrial ball and roller bearings, electric motors, material handling systems and related products, has been growing in global markets since it launched in 1935 as a company serving the Midwestern United States. Early this year, it launched a global e-commerce strategy that it is implementing in the United States and across Europe, and planning to extend to Asia, Canada and Mexico.
On each of the four e-commerce sites it already operates—for Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the United States— “our customers can pick a country and language” to immediately link to a country-specific site for the markets BDI now serves online, says Steve Grzymkowski, manager of e-business at the distributor, which is also known at Bearing Distributors Inc.
BDI is rolling out its new e-commerce sites, each with its own web address, on a single e-commerce platform from hybris Software, a unit of SAP AG. The single platform makes it easier for BDI to manage content for its more than 1 million products across multiple sites, Grzymkowski said in an interview at the hybris Game Plan B2B Ecommerce Forum in Chicago last week.
Under its old technology platform, BDI would have had to do extensive coding of software to develop separate content in local languages and currencies for each of its markets.
When the site for Hungary launched in January, Grzymkowski said, the local managers of the site were pleased with how it presented product images and an e-commerce “look and feel like Amazon and eBay.”
But the e-commerce platform also provides functionality uniquely designed for how BDI deals with each site and its customers, he added. In some markets, for example, it may buy back some products a customer had in its warehouse, and replace them with products at new prices. That can lead to a confusing system of having to manage multiple prices, which the new hybris platform handles through a product content management system.
The product content management system also enables
BDI to more easily offer online alternate products that are similar to—and in some cases more appropriate than—the products a customer is viewing online, Grzymkowski said. Customers can search for alternate products by such attributes as width or bore (a hollowed-out space within an instrument or device). “They can do this through self-service or with a sales rep,” he said.
BDI is working with Rosetta, a digital agency specializing in online user experience, to continue upgrading its e-commerce platform with such features as letting customers check more details of their order history.
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