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At first glance, Lake Forest-based Grainger might not seem like a fast-moving digital company. After all, they are a Fortune 500 industrial supply company that's been around since 1927. But taking a closer look at their 300-person e-commerce division, you will find a digital team that striving to push the company forward. In fact, 30 percent of company sales in 2012 came from e-commerce (that’s $2.7 billion!).
To keep up with the demand, their 300-person e-commerce division is growing at two times the rate of the rest of the business, VP of E-commerce Strategy Geoffrey Robertson said. Since Robertson came to the role in 2011, he has set out to give Grainger’s customers online tools to purchase and manage spending that are so convenient that it makes it “almost reflexive to conduct business with us.”
So far, this strategy has worked for Grainger and its over 2 million customers worldwide. Grainger’s customers trust that they will get the right products and get them right away, Robertson said.
“Our customers are faced with the ongoing challenge of staying safe and being more productive, while reducing expenses,” Robertson said. “Grainger gets this and we are uniquely positioned to help our customers save time, money and space, while keeping them safe. Getting our customers what they need, when they need it means less time spent looking for and ordering products, less inventory for them to buy and store, and more time spent on the task at hand.”
Built In Chicago caught up with Robertson to hear more about how his team's fresh e-commerce and mobile strategies are driving more and more sales for the Fortune 500 company.
What do you consider to be your division's biggest accomplishments over the past year?
For the eCommerce team, our biggest accomplishments include:
- delivering a better experience to our customer via the launch of our new website on the Hybris platform
- launching a Spanish version of our site
- establishing a full feature mobile offering via our mobile web site, our Smartphone apps, and our newly launched iPhone and iPad app
- continuing to break company records for the eCommerce channel
How fast is Grainger’s e-commerce growing?
E-commerce is estimated to be between 40 and 50 percent of total company sales by 2015. Since 60 percent of Grainger customers use smartphones, mobile now accounts for 13 percent of Grainger’s website traffic and more than 20 percent of all online searches.
How is Grainger using digital to increase overall customer engagement?
We are using digital capabilities to serve up the most relevant content, product offers, and recommendations to our customers and provide the easiest way to find a product whether searching on an external search engine (e.g., Google, Bing, etc) or our own website search and navigation. We also coordinate workflow between those who work in the field using the products with those who work in the back office and purchase those products. We continually leverage new context information via mobile GPS capabilities to offer products that are most relevant to their facility or suggest the nearest branch for a will call pick-up.
What kinds of technologies is Grainger interested in?
Our work is very focused on how we improve the working lives of our customers. We look to use technology to solve the inherit issues associated with the core customer use cases. We look to use technologies that help our customers find the right product that is compliant to their standards, that help simplify the purchase process, that help customers receive products quickly and that help them manage their Maintenance, Repair and Operating (MRO) product inventory (to make sure they have their important items on hand, while ensuring that they are purchasing the right amount and not overspending).
What is your current involvement with the local startup community?
We have active relationships with CEC/1871, Reboot Partners and Chicago Ventures to name a few. We are very interested in working closely with the startup community.
Our desire is to share our use cases with the startup community in a coordinated way, find solutions that solve the problems or meet the needs of our customers, and partner with the companies to bring the new solution solutions to market. We operate using an Agile methodology. We continue to look a ways to balance quality, speed to market, and role interaction between our triad of resources: product management, user experience and engineering.
