VWR International LLC, a manufacturer and distributor of such laboratory equipment as calculators, chemicals and laser pointers, recently consolidated its more than 30 country-specific e-commerce sites, each with personalized content for local customers, on VWR.com.

The company, founded more than 160 years ago, started selling online in 1996. As the company grew through a series of acquisitions, including its purchases last year of Integra Companies Inc. and STI Components Inc., providers of products to the biopharmaceutical, food processing, and microelectronic industries, online orders for its laboratory supplies grew rapidly.

 “Anyone who is doing research today is likely buying from VWR,” says Ken Quesenberry, director of e-commerce. To handle demand from a diverse group of clients involved in the educational, pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, the company relaunched its e-commerce site on Oracle Corp.’s Oracle Commerce software platform last month. The company previously switched from its home-grown e-commerce technology to an earlier version of Oracle Commerce, then known as ATG, in 2011. “We looked at all of the top platforms out there,” Quesenberry says. “Then, we pared it down and made the decision to go with ATG based off of the capabilities that it could provide.”

More than half of Radnor, Pa.-based VWR’s $1.08 billion in second quarter 2015 revenue was processed online, the company says. 50% of VWR’s sales are to customers located outside the United States, in such countries as the United Kingdom, Singapore and the Czech Republic. “Most of the business we do globally comes to us through some e-commerce channel,” Quesenberry says.

The new e-commerce platform provides differentiated product displays for each market, such as for the United States, Denmark and Mexico.

Customers can log in to the password-protected VWR.com and purchase from more than 1.5 million SKUs through direct, web-based ordering. They can also place orders through electronic data interchange, or EDI, and through a punch-out application in e-procurement software on in the Ariba Network. A punch-out application lets a buyer link from her company’s procurement software to an approved vendor’s e-commerce site; when she places a product into a shopping cart and clicks to buy it, the transaction is automatically routed back to her company’s financial management system. Ariba is a unit of SAP SE, a provider of business operating software for such purposes as financial accounting and inventory management.

Customers’ expense department personnel can also log in to VWR.com and set up an approval process so employees can only spend within designated limits. Buyers now also receive industry-specific product recommendations, individual pricing and notices of delivery times based on a customer’s geographic location. VWR operates at least one distribution center in every major global market, Quesenberry says, including five in the U.S.

“It’s very important to offer a personalized experience to our customers,” he says. “The ability to tailor the shopping and web experience for our customers is where we want to be.”

Quesenberry says the company’s e-commerce platform is “tightly integrated” with VWR’s SAP enterprise resource planning, or ERP, system. The company uses the ERP software to organize its inventory and financial records. He declined to comment on the cost of either system.

“We were looking for a scalable platform that would allow us to support our current customer base, but also grow,” he says. “E-commerce is where our customers want to be and where they want to do business, so it’s very important for us.” He adds that the new e-commerce site “allows us to scale for future growth, and be nimble enough to support the personalization purchasing and financial requirements of our diverse customer base.”

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