IMI Norgren

Norgren’s challenge: Expanding digital commerce to dozens of countries while elevating customer experiences

For more than a decade, Norgren’s commerce function operated on a self-hosted architecture that supported customer self-service. Jez Ashton, Global Director of Digital & Marketing, says that as the company’s product catalog and geographic reach expanded, this self-hosted solution became untenable for the business.

“We were experiencing a heap of real, severe commerce pains, and they were getting more painful,” Jez says. “Literally any time we wanted to introduce change, errors came up in areas we weren’t even touching. Doing a live release meant spending a massive amount of time and money on testing to be sure nothing would break. It kept getting worse and worse – costing us more and more money over time.”

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One example of Norgren’s commerce challenges was what Jez describes as a “laborious” process of expanding online commerce to a new country – a priority for a global brand. Norgren supported a 1:1 credit card solution that linked to local banks or payment gateways, so for each new country, the company had to ask:

• Does the payment gateway we use link to an available bank in the country?
• Are we able to offer payments that can be processed in this locality?

The result was slow expansion to new countries and substantial time and money spent coming up with solutions to make it happen.

Making changes to its commerce solution was necessary for Norgren, but the brand was held back by fears that the efforts of addressing commerce pain points would mean pressing pause on business growth.

“We knew that we needed to rip and replace our commerce solution, but the thought of what that meant – particularly having to stop business initiatives – delayed and delayed and delayed changes,” says Jez.

Norgren’s solution: Opting for Elastic Path’s flexible commerce platform

Eventually, Norgren had to act. Together with McKenna Consultants, a software development partner, Jez and his team considered a shortlist of commerce solutions. In the end, Norgren opted for composable commerce – and for Elastic Path.

“Flexibility and understanding of our needs was what attracted us most to Elastic Path,” Jez says. “When you’re investing in something of this scale, you need to get into the details. Elastic Path was willing to dive into those details, adjust to how we work as a company, and build a strong bond that puts our business interests first.”

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To Norgren, diving into those details meant ensuring that they selected a commerce platform capable of supporting specific requirements, including:

• Creating a cohesive, uniform catalog experience across geographies
• Supporting an expanding product portfolio
• Integrating with Norgren’s existing industry-specific ERP, and existing tools such as Auth0 and Tacton
• Providing a single source of truth for product data
• Processing transactions in dozens of different currencies with a single, unified global credit payment solution
• Supporting different account types:
  • Accounts for non-partners, who are businesses buying products that they will use
  • Accounts for resale partners, who buy in larger volumes and then sell Norgren’s products to businesses. Resale partners often have different rates than non-partners.
• Merchandising complex products, and accounting for pricing, currency, language, and measurement differences in different geographies. For example, the price and measurements of a filter regulator have to be displayed in dollars and inches and the U.S. and pounds and centimeters in the U.K.

Jez says that Elastic Path was able to provide compelling, specific answers about supporting these requirements. Now, Norgren uses Elastic Path Composable Commerce as the engine of its commerce solution, and Elastic Path Payments for payment processing. Other vendors – selected by Norgren – service other commerce components:

• Crownpeak for search and navigation
• Tacton for product configuration
• Auth0 for credential management
• Contentful for content management

By going composable, Jez says, Norgren developed a commerce solution that meets its present business needs – for example, Elastic Path Payments is powered by Stripe, which is easily processed around the world. Plus, because of composable commerce’s emphasis on independently-deployed and managed commerce components, Norgren knows that future changes won’t disrupt the company’s entire commerce solution. Specific commerce pain points are addressed with specific, decoupled commerce components. Changes, implementation, and improvements happen over time – not in one big, disruptive reset.

Implementing a commerce solution that puts business interests and growth first

Jez says that implementing a composable approach means advocating for it within your organization. In Norgren’s case, that meant selling executives on a small proof of concept: a commerce site, powered by Elastic Path, launched specifically for Ireland.

Why start with a composable commerce solution for only a sliver of Norgren’s overall market? To demonstrate to Norgren executives that composable commerce could – and already was – servicing business interests and growth, without swallowing resources.

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When Norgren launched its Ireland-specific site, it left the rest of its existing commerce solution untouched. Focusing on one, small, English-speaking country gave Norgren a low-cost way to test, learn, and optimize before introducing the solution to the rest of the world.

After a successful launch in Ireland, Jez was able to appeal successfully for more time and budget to transition the rest of the site to a composable architecture. Norgren now powers all non-partner commerce experiences across the globe with their composable solution, including localities in the EU, U.K., Nordics, North America, and Asia Pacific regions. Resale partner commerce experiences, which contribute about half of Norgren’s sales volume, are adopting the solution over time.

So far, the results have been strong:

• Norgren has increased its gross merchandise value (GMV) by 100%.
• Norgren has processed transactions in dozens countries from Europe to North America to Asia
• Norgren hosts thousands products on its catalog
• Norgren’s customer service team is spending more time meeting customer needs and less time performing manual data entry, which was necessary due to the limitations of the previous commerce solution

Jez says that Norgren “didn’t want to invest a lot of money and a lot of time to deliver the same old commerce experiences.” And, by gradually adopting a composable approach built and tested for bottom-line business results, Norgren has expanded its commerce reach to drive more transactions and higher revenue.