A veteran sales rep is a vital asset because he can guide customers to what they need amid the often voluminous catalogs of manufacturers, distributors and wholesalers. But how does a company provide similar guidance on a website?

That question came up in several sessions this week at the IBM Corp.’s Amplify client conference. Here are three challenges B2B executives described:

• An electronics distributor that maintains 46 e-commerce sites around the world seeks to provide the appropriate content for each site without replicating every piece of content 46 times.
• A furniture manufacturer that offers products that can be configured in as many as 750 ways wants to make it easy for customers and dealers to create a feasible version of the product that suits their needs and tastes.
• An engineering products distributor that offers products made up of many parts and that come in many models aims to make it possible for new customers to find what they need.

There was no one technology that solved all of these problems. But there was a common approach: Start with what the customer is trying to achieve and use technology to give her the information she needs in a form that will make sense to her.

Premier Farnell is the electronics distributor with 46 websites. It sells 4 million products from 3,500 suppliers, stocking 500,000 of them in its own distribution centers. Every day visitors to its websites view 13 million pages and the company updates its online inventory 1.2 million times, Chris Angus, head of e-commerce, explained in his presentation. Premier Farnell runs its e-commerce sites on a single IBM WebSphere codebase, but there are three instances—essentially copies—of the software for the company’s three major regions: Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific.

The key problem was how to display content in the optimal way on each of the 46 e-commerce sites. That includes presenting it in the proper language, but goes much further. Is the visitor on a smartphone or a desktop? Has he logged into an account that includes preferences for what he sees and negotiated pricing? Must the information be tailored to local laws or customs?

“You end up with about 5,000 different combinations, and that would lead to massive amounts of duplicated content,” Angus said.

The solution Premier Farnell came up with is to provide descriptions for each piece of content in the form of meta-data. For example, staffers describe a particular log-in page as suitable for a German visitor because it conforms to local laws, while another version would be served to a visitor from South Korea.

The WebSphere Commerce software recognizes the customer context—such as the device he’s on, preferred language, country and whether he’s logged on—and, based on the meta-data chooses the right version of a piece of content to display. “By combining content with context we have been able to support multiple devices, countries and languages and different elements that make content vary over 46 global websites without having to replicate that process 46 times,” Angus says. Premier Farnell, best known in North America as Newark element14, completed its rollout of IBM WebSphere Commerce early in 2015. Premier Farnell is a finalist in the 2016 Internet Retailer Excellence Awards overall B2B e-commerce performance; the awards will be presented on June 8 in Chicago at the Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition, which includes a full-day B2B Workshop on June 7.

The furniture manufacturer is Herman Miller Inc., whose popular Aeron office chair can be configured in 750 ways, depending on fabric, color and other options. Furniture dealers and interior designers place many of the orders on behalf of clients and Herman Miller wanted to make it easy for them to do, including when using mobile devices, particularly the tablets they frequently have at hand to show clients furniture and fabric options.

But Herman Miller’s website was not nearly up to the task, Ben Lichtenwalner, the company’s IT applications manager, explained in his presentation. It was built on technology that was more than a decade old, was no longer supported by the vendor and was not designed for viewing on mobile devices.

Herman Miller worked with Perficient Inc., a systems integrator and design firm that specializes in IBM WebSphere implementations, to develop a new version of the Herman Miller site. To ensure the technology would be kept up to date, Herman Miller went with the cloud-based version of WebSphere, Commerce on Cloud, which IBM maintains on its cloud infrastructure.

The new site, at HermanMiller.com, is based on the Aurora storefront package of features built to work with WebSphere commerce. This bundle, introduced four years ago, includes several features especially important for B2B companies, such as contract pricing, uploading requisition lists and the ability to set rules about which customers can buy certain products.

The new website is built with responsive design, so that each page adapts to the size of the screen the visitor is using, making it instantly available to customers, whether consumers, dealers or designers, on tablets and smartphones.

But the real challenge was to enable customers to put together the furniture they wanted, particularly the best-selling Aeron chair. “The most complex part was to take something as configurable as the Aeron chair and understand it deeply enough to reflect it in the configurator,” said Michael Rabbior, a Perficient director who worked with Herman Miller on the project and spoke alongside Lichtenwalner at the IBM event. That included developing rules about what configurations are possible, and what each individual customer would be able to order based on their contract terms. It also meant putting all the image possibilities into Scene 7 image-management software from Adobe Systems Inc. and ensure it works with the WebSphere Commerce platform.

Lichtenwalner says he tried to customize the IBM technology as little as possible and only implemented some of the options available with WebSphere—for example, Herman Miller is still using its existing order management system. That allowed the project to be completed within seven months. Herman Miller has brought one customer onto the new platform, Lichtenwalner says, and hopes to have all up and running by the end of the year. While he declined to say how much business Herman Miller does online today, he says the goal is to generate 10% of the company’s business via the web.

The third company wrestling with complexity was National Instruments, a distributor of testing equipment such as oscilloscopes, industrial controllers and digital signal analyzers.

The company’s catalog includes 58,000 parts and its website, NI.com, offers 4,000 parts that go into 160 products available in 1,200 models. The website is already important to the company: It generates 80% of its leads, 15% of orders are booked online and NI.com accounted for about 6% of the company’s 2015 revenue of $1.23 billion.

But customers complain they have a hard time finding what they want on NI.com, especially new customers, Nathan Schatz, manager of global e-commerce, said in his presentation at the IBM Amplify event. “There are too many navigation options, too many products that are similar but not the same. It’s too difficult to find key product information. There’s just too much in general,” Schatz said.

To help solve the problem, National Instruments engaged Rosetta, a digital agency that specializes in website design and development, with a focus on customer engagement. The two companies are building the new website on IBM WebSphere Commerce and using Adobe Experience Manager for content management.

After extensive customer research, the two companies decided it would be important to simplify the site in a number of ways.

For one thing, the navigation will be simpler: There will be a tab called “Learn” that will provide in-depth information about products and be distinct from the navigational pathway for customers ready to purchase.

Product data is being standardized in a product information management system to make descriptions more consistent and items easier to find through faceted navigation. Schatz says the new website will focus on the products customers look for most, and make them easier to find and to understand the products when they find them with clearer descriptions, better imagery and a product-comparison feature.

To simplify the look of the site, Rosetta and NI have come up with 10 page templates that will be used for consistency and ease of navigation. “Simplify, simplify, simplify,” said John Wade, a senior vice president of account management at Rosetta who spoke with Schatz.

Initial tests with customers show some pages of the website are working well, and others less so. While 90% of customers were able to find one product in a test, only 59% were successful in finding another. Schatz and Wade emphasized that they would continue to test extensively with customers to ensure they find the new site useful.

The first section of the new website will go live in the next month or two. It will provide information for customers seeking to learn about NI’s products, with clear paths by industry, such as electronics and communications. The hardware path to purchase will be launched in English in November, and for other languages the following spring, Schatz said, (NI’s website fully supports 10 languages and provides some information in 13 more.) The purchase section for software will be ready in the middle of 2017, with other “long-tail” elements, such as being able to purchase in bundles later on.

All three projects are aimed at making it easy for business customers to buy complex products online. And in the case of National Instruments and Herman Miller the projects are being driven by experienced e-commerce executives who joined their current companies less than three years ago.

Their hiring and the projects they are leading underscores the growing commitment among many manufacturers and distributors to recruit e-commerce veterans to upgrade their websites and better serve the growing number of business customers intent on buying online.

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