Global Automotive Parts Distributor
B2B Digital Transformation for a Global Automotive OEM Parts Distributor
Our client is one of the world’s largest independent distributors of automobile and truck spare parts, whose customers include OEMs, dealerships, and independent warehouse distributors.
Seeking a Modern B2B Customer Experience
Our client has a global distribution network that spans more than 60 countries. The company needed a modern global B2B ecommerce platform that would integrate its business partner websites with its website and ERP system for order fulfilment, product catalogs, pricing, inventories, and service APIs. The company also wanted visibility into user engagement on its partners’ websites to deliver tailored experiences and help them find the information or product they seek.
Identifying Key Challenges
We began by working with key stakeholders to identify specific challenges, needs, and goals which included the following.
- Site performance
- Product search would take more than 15 seconds and page loads could take as long as 45 seconds, which led to significant user abandonment.
- Site downtime
- Legacy systems caused website downtimes during the integration of new applications.
- Lack of control and visibility into partner websites
- The company needed a solid foundation for rapidly building and launching ecommerce sites and centrally maintaining them.
- Pricing mismatch
- Serious issues with mismatched ordering quantities resulted in losses. For example, an order of “quantity five” would be counted as five individual units rather than five packages containing a multiple quantity. This resulted in inventory mismanagement and improper package weight calculations with the shipping company that were costing the client money.
Building a New Platform for B2B Growth
Our experts conducted a review of the existing architecture to identify risks, areas to improve code maintenance and performance, and determined which data sources or applications to keep or drop. We used this information to create a detailed roadmap to a future state based on existing and anticipated needs as the company grows
Going Headless
We deployed a .NET Core-based headless architecture so that the client can easily create and manage content from one instance and deliver it across all partner websites built on open-source applications. This hybrid approach was a game changer as it helped our client support localized content and multi-site scenarios, rapidly build customer-facing ecommerce portals for its partners, and provide better control over content creation and delivery.
Improving the User Experience
Separating the back end from the front end with headless allowed our client to address issues, maintain, and improve the back end without impacting site performance and causing costly downtime.
Layering the architecture and independent servers for the client and its business partner sites ensured improved code maintenance and performance. Our website performance specialists fine-tuned site loading time, which was reduced from 15 seconds to under three.
Our client experienced a 500% increase in website performance and improved engagement as a result of our work.
Eliminating Order and Shipping Mismatches
To address shipping and order mismatches we bundled products into a package, which allowed for weight-correcting . This resolved the pricing mismatch via the shipping company, eliminating huge losses per shipment.
Results
Complete Engagement Visibility
Personalization
- Track user behavior and recommend products based on a user’s searches, purchases, and items added to cart
- Capture search terms with and without results to help set up search terms for a given product
Google Analytics
- Set up on both the client and partner websites to enable better tracking of user behavior and activity, including search term, event, ecommerce, and user session tracking
Google Data Studio
- Consolidated reporting of Google Analytics data to identify logged-in users and inactive users
- Built a dashboard to track usage and compliance of new websites
Delivering Big Results
70% Reduced time to market
- Faster - Headless B2B commerce provides more flexibility and scalability to rapidly launch partner sites, reducing time to market by 70%.
500% Improved website performance
- Improved Conversion - Improved website performance by 500% with load time reduced from 15 seconds to under three seconds.
Improved Engagement
- Increased Engagement - Integrating the existing ERP with the client’s and their partner’s websites increased data accuracy, visibility, and improved customer self-service.
