A few years ago, Bisco Industries Inc. decided it was time to make online buying much more attractive to a lot more customers.

Krizia Labayen, ecommerce and marketing director, Bisco Industries

Its legacy ecommerce platform had catered to procurement teams who searched dutifully and narrowly by SKUs and part numbers organized by manufacturers and brands. Bisco distributes electronic components and fasteners used for production operations in industries including aerospace, industrial equipment, instrumentation, marine and military.

But Bisco devised a plan to appeal more to other potential customers like engineers who, at the top of the purchasing funnel, needed more product information to shop by electronics product categories. The new strategy also included bringing in more suppliers to expand Bisco’s supply chain and purchasing options.

Fast track to fast growth

It didn’t take long to see some results. After relaunching its ecommerce platform in 2020, Bisco realized 40% revenue growth the first year, followed by additional 20% growth over the next two years, says Krizia Labayen, ecommerce and marketing director.

Using headless technology architecture, Anaheim, California-based Bisco worked with systems integrator Clouda Inc. to relaunch its website on a VTEX commerce platform, providing more flexibility in managing product data and content from suppliers, introducing new features like “Quick Quote” to accommodate engineers and other buyers, and setting up marketplace technology to accommodate third-party sellers. The Bisco ecommerce site runs on the VTEX IO platform, which VTEX describes as a “low-code serverless development platform designed to help create scalable, production-ready web applications.”

Labayen says the changes have upgraded how Bisco fosters commerce through its sales reps and other company professionals as well as directly with online customers.

“There’s been some really solid progress being made there,” she says, adding, “The features we’ve been able to add on the site have really helped us to service both internal and external users.”

Helping sales reps as well as online buyers

Bisco operates 51 sales offices throughout the U.S., a presence it maintains with local, personalized service to differentiate from its competition. But the ecommerce platform complements the sales office network, providing sales teams with comprehensive, up-to-date product information as well as more purchasing options for customers.

For example, the Quick Quote feature provides pricing information engineers may need to authorize purchases with financial managers while also giving useful leads to Bisco’s sales reps.

“That is a huge additional value,” Labayen said in a recent interview. “It generated over 20,000 leads in the last 12 months. That equated to about $1.2 million of additional business.” And those were new customers looking for products online.” Bisco does more than $330 million in annual revenue.

A product detail page on BiscoInd.com.

She adds that Bisco has restructured its product catalog within the VTEX platform to make it more “category-driven” as well as SKU-driven. Bisco’s site has more than 540 active brands and over 3.1 million SKUs.

Giving engineers the online experience they need

“It really allows us to engage with those engineers that are looking for specifications in the part they’re looking for,” Labayen says. “And it’s wonderful because we’re still having all the buyers with SKU-driven searches on the site while we’re also engaging the engineers.”

In addition, Bisco provides on its ecommerce site:

• Custom pricing and availability display: Custom buying tables enable Bisco to meet each customer’s complex purchasing needs by displaying real-time stock, unit of measure, unit price, price breaks, the extended price for large orders and the number of days to delivery.

• Multiple warehouse and back-order functionality enable buyers to plan out purchases in advance even amid supply chain constraints.

The distributor — which operates seven U.S. distribution centers and dozens of domestic sales offices — uses commerce data compiled and analyzed on the platform to identify and develop new markets.

Growing internationally

After recording significant international online sales, Bisco supported further global growth by deploying multilingual content in ten languages on its ecommerce platform and launched its first overseas sales office in Manila. In addition to English, Biscoind.com lets site users view content in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Polish, Russian, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese.

VTEX recently launched the VTEX Data Pipeline data-management tool, which uses AI to centralize digital commerce data from multiple channels and provide demand forecasting to B2B sellers.

The VTEX platform uses APIs and other integration tools to accommodate large as well as small suppliers depending on how they want to connect their product catalogs to Bisco’s platform. The integration with suppliers lets Bisco’s customers view available inventory and expected delivery times for items from multiple suppliers, without having to call someone to confirm product availability. “The customers will know that they have access to that inventory,” Labayen says.

Turning on marketplace sellers

Bisco is also deploying VTEX technology for marketplace functionality on the same platform at Biscoind.com that supports its own first-party direct ecommerce sales.

Labayen adds that the marketplace functionality will further add to customers’ purchasing options by letting them purchase directly from participating suppliers.

“We’ve been focusing on a lot of enhancements to the Bisco ecommerce site to allow us to really bolster up our catalog and optimize user experience,” she says. Bisco has the marketplace infrastructure in place to onboard suppliers that want to start selling in the marketplace, she adds.

Bisco’s Anaheim, California, headquarters.

Capturing young buyers

Labayen adds that providing Bisco’s customers more digital commerce options is critical to the company’s growth.

“The industries that we serve, the procurement agents and engineers are getting younger, and they want to engage online. And we have to be able to service that demand and do it efficiently.”

She adds, “Even if we have existing relationships with buyers who have been with their companies for 20 years, we want to be able to reach the new buyers that have just joined their organization as they’re searching for products online.”

Paul Demery is a Digital Commerce 360 contributing editor covering B2B digital commerce technology and strategy. [email protected].

Submit a nomination

Nominate a game-changer for the Global B2B eCommerce Industry Awards from Digital Commerce 360 and the B2B Ecommerce Association.

Sign up

Sign up for a complimentary subscription to Digital Commerce 360 B2B News, published 4x/week. It covers technology and business trends in the growing B2B ecommerce industry. Contact Mark Brohan, senior vice president of B2B and Market Research, at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @markbrohan. Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.