Reinders Inc. is getting beyond the greenhorn stage when it comes to business-to-business e-commerce.

The distributor of landscape, irrigation and golf course maintenance products is swinging into its second digital transformation in two years, and will launch a new B2B e-commerce site at the end of February. The new site is being designed to inspire more of its business customers to go online to purchase its LED lights, lawn mowers and other products.

Based in the Chicago suburb of Franklin Park, Ill., the 150-year-old Reinders has grown over the years from a distributor primarily serving the Chicago area to a provider of products and repair services to some 120,000 business customers located across the Midwest. Customers range in size from individual landscape contractors to government municipalities, and include the operator of the Milwaukee Brewers baseball stadium, says Robin McGuire, director of information technology.

About 24 months ago Reinders’s executive team decided to focus the business on growing e-commerce sales, catering to the growing number of customers wanting to order online, McGuire says. “We wanted to add value and provide the best customer service and support possible for our B2B customers,” she says. “Delivering an online venue for business was necessary to achieve that.  Allowing customers to quickly and easily place orders, research product information and to help them conduct business in a more efficient manner was one of our main goals.” The company doubled its number of I.T. and online business staff, trained three interns to beef up online product information and deployed the company’s first e-commerce site in December 2014.

The company uploaded about 7,000 of its 150,000 SKUs to the new Reinders.com. But, once live, the new site didn’t feel like a “real launch” because few of the company’s customers used the site, McGuire says. That was because it lacked many of the necessary purchasing features and functions customers needed, she adds. In 2015, Reinders earned only about $950,000, or 1% of total sales of $95 million through Reinders.com, with the rest of its sales coming through telephone orders and its 12 physical sales locations across Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois and Kansas, she says

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“We got the pieces for our e-commerce platform, and what we discovered pretty quickly was that we didn’t have what we needed to be ahead of the curve,” McGuire says. “We really wanted to have the best B2B e-commerce platform available.”

The first Reinders.com e-commerce site could not calculate shipping costs on orders processed through credit cards, was not mobile-friendly, and provided what McGuire calls  a “quirky” integration with the company’s Infor SX.e enterprise resource planning, or ERP system. Reinders uses its ERP system to organize its inventory and financial records. Nor could the old system provide customers with personalized content and purchasing options. About six months after the new site went live, McGuire began shopping around for a more robust B2B e-commerce platform. In June 2015, she settled on e-commerce software from Real Omni Channel Commerce, or ROC Commerce. Reinders’s in-house designers and outside developers from web design and development firm AmericanEagle.com are building the site, and the new Reinders.com is set to launch at the end of February.

“It’s going to make business customers’ ordering experience with Reinders simplified,” McGuire says. “The product information will be there with enhanced digital assets, they’ll be able to find everything they need through the search function, they’ll be able to successfully place quotes online, schedule automatic reorders for products, place orders through a Quick Order function, view available shipping options and cost—it’s going to have everything they need.”

Business customers will also have the ability to create multiple customer accounts with varying levels of purchasing power within the ROC Commerce system, as well as use individual product discounts, rebates and promotions when shopping online. Reinders will also be able to gather track the products a customer searches for and personalize the products displayed based on that data. The site is being built with responsive design, which adapts the layout of an e-commerce site to the size of a shopper’s screen, including smartphones and tablets as well as PCs.

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McGuire says she expects the new site will more than triple the company’s e-commerce sales to $3 million, or 3% of total revenue of $100 million in 2016. She declined to specify the deployment cost of ROC Commerce.

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