Verical.com, an e-marketplace for overstock electronic components, recently relaunched to appeal more to individuals—“the innovator, tinkerer or academic working on an individual engineering product” —as well as to its traditional buyers among large manufacturers, says Darryl Shaper, vice president of digital marketing.
Verical.com is a unit of Arrow Electronics Inc., a global distributor of more than 185 million electronic components that posted $22 billion in 2014 revenue. The company doesn’t break out e-commerce sales.
Since the site relaunched in May, its number of monthly unique visitors has doubled year over year to “tens of thousands,” and its conversion rate of visitors to buyers has increased 30%, Shaper says.
Shaper credits the increased conversion rate to an updated parts search tool, a larger online selection, mobile compatibility and a new option to view content in Mandarin, China’s official language.
The redesign incorporates HTML5, an emerging programming language that helps make sites look and function more like mobile apps, and which Verical’s developers say make the site “fully functional and viewable on any mobile device.” As a result, Verical.com traffic from mobile and tablet devices is up nearly 70% since the redesign, Shaper says.
The revised site lets customers search for a specific manufacturer, part number or category. In addition, the home page also makes it easier to find the more than 450 manufacturers and Arrow-franchised distributors who list their unsold parts on Verical.com; customers can click a Shop all Manufacturers link to navigate the site by manufacturer name. Visitors also can click a Shop all Categories link to navigate by product category. Parts listings are refreshed every 10 minutes, Shaper says.
Arrow Electronics has increased the number of unique SKUs this year on Verical.com to 800,000 from 450,000. Eventually, the company plans to feature more than 2 million SKUs on its site. The company updates information on available products on the site every two weeks. “Everything is available for immediate delivery,” Shaper says.
Buyers at original equipment manufacturers located outside of the United States in such countries as Taiwan, Israel and Germany account for 50% of gross merchandise sales on Verical.com, Shaper says. “We sell into dozens and dozens of countries every day,” he says. “That’s the benefit of the Internet.” Original equipment manufacturers, or OEMs, make components used in other companies’ products or items that others rebrand and sell to end users.
China in particular is a strong market for the company, Shaper says. In the near future, Verical will add as a payment option the debit cards carrying the logo of Chinese bank network China UnionPay, which are popular with Chinese buyers, he adds. Customers buying products on Verical.com can already pay with several major credit cards and PayPal, and existing Arrow customers can also use credit lines and pre-payment discounts.
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