Industry
Manufacturing - DurablesUse Case
B2B Launch
“I love Elastic Path’s flexibility and its ability to do things out-of-the-box that other platforms can’t do at all. It meets our current requirements and our long-term future requirements. It gives us the power to craft our site just how we want it and create a personalized experience for each customer.”
Who They Are
Louis and Company was founded in 1975 as a B2B supplier of products for individual contractors, large enterprises in the woodworking industry. In 2011, it merged with The Wurth Group and changed its name to Wurth Louis and Company. It now serves cabinetmakers, woodworkers, architects, and designers from 20 locations in the United States.
Like most companies founded in the mid-1970s, Wurth has spent most of its history as an offline business. Its sales representatives had long-standing relationships with various contractors and dealers and did business with them the old-fashioned way—by connecting with them over the phone or in-person and taking down orders by hand.
When the company decided to launch its first website, they selected Elastic Path to establish an online presence by digitizing business transactions and enabling 24x7 ordering. Even so, most of its customers still do business over the phone, with sales reps using the website on behalf of their customers.
Commerce from the Ground Up
When the company decided to launch its first website, it used the Elastic Path Commerce platform to establish an online presence by digitizing business transactions and enabling 24x7 ordering. Even so, most of its customers still do business over the phone, with sales reps using the website on behalf of their customers.
Paving the Way for the Future
Wurth Louis and Company is now ready to encourage its customers to fulfill their own orders instead of depending on sales reps to do it for them. The company wants to go further than that and make its website an information clearinghouse as well as a place to do business online. Its customers and resellers will soon be able to research and analyze products in detail without having to go anywhere else—not to manufacturers’ websites or worse, to competitors’ sites. With Elastic Path Commerce, Wurth Louis and Company will be able to grab product information directly from manufacturers and replicate it on its own site, making www. wurthlac.com a one-stop-shop for research as well as for business.
Enabling Resellers Through A B2B2C Model
Some of Wurth Louis and Company’s own resellers are asking for help. Many of them resell a subset of Wurth Louis and Company's catalog, mostly to the general public instead of to businesses. They want to create their own microsites, with a limited number of products available, and all managed by Wurth—a perfect example of the B2B2C model. With Elastic Path Commerce, Wurth can say yes.
Reducing and digitizing unwieldy manual processes will yield huge cost savings. Since Wurth Louis and Company knows who its customers are, the shopping experience can be tailored to individual buyer organizations and to individuals within those organizations. Service level agreements negotiated prices, and order history will remain part of the process.
Staying Ahead of the Curve
Today, Wurth Louis and Company looks forward to staying agile, innovating without disruption, reducing customer service costs, automating manual tasks, increasing its web site performance, and opening up new revenue channels. The company will be able to move the entire business to a single platform—comfortably, at its own pace—without having to rip and replace what it already has.
“I love Elastic Path’s flexibility,” says former eCommerce manager Carla Gonzales, “and its ability to do things out-of-the-box that other platforms can’t do at all. It meets our current requirements and our long-term future requirements. It gives us the power to craft our site just how we want it and create a personalized experience for each customer.”
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