Michael Luigs has a long list of complaints about the current e-commerce site of electrical supplies distributor Graybar: It can’t serve customers on mobile devices, even minor changes can take months and marketing pages don’t let customers buy, says Luigs, senior IT business analyst at Graybar.

But all that’s going to change this summer, Luigs says.

He described Wednesday in a session at IBM Corp.’s Amplify client conference plans for the new Graybar.com, which will sell to both businesses and consumers and should be live by late July.

For starters, it will be built with responsive design, so the site will readily serve buyers on smartphones or tablets, adapting the display to the size of the screen the visitor is using. In addition, marketing content will be on pages where customers can buy, which will make it easier for them to shop and also raise rankings on search engines, as there will no longer be separate marketing and commerce pages for the same product.

And, very importantly, e-commerce personnel will be able to readily make changes to web pages, sometimes in minutes, without involving I.T. personnel, Luigs said.

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The new site will use as its underlying e-commerce software an updated version of the IBM Websphere Commerce technology Graybar is using. Working alongside it will be a content management system from CoreMedia that Luigs says is key to making it easier for his staff to quickly change the look of any page on the site.

“Sometimes it’s taken us six months to get a new page into production,” Luigs said. “Now it will take us less than a day, in some cases maybe as little as 25 minutes.” That speed comes from CoreMedia providing ready access to all the product information and imagery about the 1.3 million SKUs Graybar sells.

As the project continues, integration between the IBM and CoreMedia software will enable Graybar to show business customers who log in their pricing and only the products their contracts allow them to buy. Luigs said the new site will be a hybrid in that in some cases the CoreMedia system will control the presentation of a content-heavy page, while in other cases IBM Websphere will present a page that is more transactional.

He expects the site upgrade will have a big impact. While the web only accounted for $14 million of Graybar’s $6.1 billion in 2015 sales, the company expects significantly larger online sales in the years ahead, he said.

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While IBM has introduced a cloud-based version of Websphere called Commerce in Cloud that IBM hosts on behalf of clients, Luigs said Graybar has opted to keep the technology on-premise. While the cloud version is less expensive to deploy for the first year or two, as a client company need not invest in hardware and software for its own data center and hire staffers to maintain it, he says, by the third or fourth year the on-premise version will be less expensive than paying monthly subscription fees to IBM for the cloud version.

IBM says Commerce on Cloud starts at $4,000 per month for development work and $20,000 per month once the website is live.

Michael Rabbior, director of IBM Commerce engagements at systems integrator and web design agency Perficient, notes IBM does not take a percentage of revenue for its cloud-based software as some software-as-a-service e-commerce vendors do. And Rabbior, who formerly worked for IBM, says Commerce on Cloud is a single version of the Websphere software for each client that is maintained by IBM, which allows a client considerable freedom to customize Websphere. He says that’s different from multitenant SaaS software that offers the same features to all clients.

He also estimated that a company should expect to spend at least $100,000 to develop a Commerce on Cloud e-commerce site, even if it has a strong I.T. team that can do most of the work in-house. For those that need outside help, the initial deployment is likely to cost at least $500,000, which is still far less than the initial cost of building an IBM Websphere site for on-premise deployment.

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CoreMedia charges a one-time licensing fee for its software that varies by the computing resources required by a client’s content management system, says vice president of marketing Doug Heise. He says a typical e-commerce implementation costs $250,000 to $500,000 initially, with an 18-20% annual maintenance fee. He says CoreMedia has some big clients, including major media companies in Europe and North America, for whom the initial fee could be $3-4 million or more.

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