The multibillion-dollar metalworking and industrial supplies distributor is building out integrated sales, marketing and service operations to improve customer experience and conversions across channels.

MSC Industrial Supply Co. has long focused on a holistic digital commerce strategy backed by a digital technology platform that has put its ecommerce sales at close to $2 billion, more than half of total sales.

The strategy has worked well. In MSC’s most recently reported financial period, the fiscal second quarter ended Feb. 26, 2022, ecommerce sales increased 14.2% from the same prior-year period to $523.2 million, as total sales gained 11.4% to $862.5 million.

That put ecommerce sales including transactions through MSCDirect.com, vendor-managed inventory, internet-connected vending machines, and EDI at 60.7% of total sales, up from 59.2% a year earlier. For years, MSC has posted steady increases in both ecommerce and total sales, with ecommerce typically running at about 60% of total sales.

Now the distributor of metalworking and industrial products is raising the bar further to bring cross-channel customer experience to a new level, Faisal Hussain, vice president of ecommerce, and Mark Pickett, vice president of cross-channel growth, said in an interview.

In effect, MSC is expanding on its customer-focused digital experience by hiring an extensive team of subject matter experts, developing a culture of focusing on the customer journey, and deploying the tools to monitor and analyze the customer experience.

This comprehensive digital approach follows an “agile” development strategy, where MSC will adjust technology based on what it learns about how better to connect with customers.

In the past year, that scientific approach led to a critical improvement on MSC’s flagship ecommerce site, MSCDirect.com. The company replaced its legacy site search with one built with artificial intelligence and machine learning technology. The new site search is designed to constantly measure the tool’s ability to present relevant results that convert customers to buyers and generate revenue.

MSC is upgrading its legacy ecommerce technology, which is based on a monolithic WebSphere Commerce platform, with APIs to make it easier and faster to deploy additional features designed to improve customers’ buying experience.

The company’s building its own APIs and microservices to make its business more nimble and better able to serve its customer experiences and journeys better.

A new carting and checkout system is planned for next year. MSC is also working with an API-based commerce software developer, to develop an ecommerce mobile app.

The new agile, API-based infrastructure will enable the company to make “iterative changes every two weeks, or every week in our smaller features” instead of taking months under the legacy technology. “We’re placing ourselves in a way where we can make these changes much faster, and we can respond to the market needs.” Eventually, MSC will completely replace the WebSphere platform with hybrid of commercial and in-house technology, he added.

Operating in an agile technology development environment responsive to changing markets also extends to MSC’s marketing operations. This strategy helps MSC quickly update marketing campaigns with new collateral and digital enhancements to market new products and offers more effectively.

Since the API infrastructure also fosters more effective data sharing among ecommerce and marketing applications, it is also fostering bet  ter flow of customer information in customer service.

MSC recently deployed the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, which is designed to capture digital signals from any venue where a customer interacts with the MSC brand, such as through online ads, product videos, or webinars. This helps MSC to understand customers’ interests and their preferred customer experience.

In addition, MSC is deploying Google Marketing Platform, which complements the Salesforce technology with analytics and tools for measuring the performance of marketing content. Google’s suite includes Google Analytics and Display & Video 360 for managing video campaigns like MSC’s Tooling Up product demonstration videos on YouTube.

The company team is going to pay more attention to video advertising this year, as they have very rich content, and market it more effectively.

Along with other developments in ecommerce technology and customer service, the company’s expecting to see a much more enhanced integrated and woven experience with customers.

Google has tried emulating Amazon’s ecommerce services, with little luck. Now, the search giant is positioning itself as a kind of anti-Amazon, a free marketplace for merchants and Amazon rivals that’s designed to get consumers more comfortable shopping with Google.

Google executive Prabhakar Raghavan (61) is a senior vice president responsible for most of Google’s largest services — search, maps, advertising and more. He is determined to crack ecommerce, a market projected to hit $2.27 trillion in 2025 that the Alphabet Inc. division has tried and failed to figure out many times before.

According to Bloomberg, earlier this month, at Google’s I/O software conference, Raghavan and his deputies demonstrated new features they hope will achieve that end, including one that lets visitors use photos to search for nearby retail products or find any item in the physical world with the click of a camera.

And on Tuesday, the company unveiled a feature that lets people go from merchant listings on Google search to their checkout pages in one click. Raghavan hopes the various initiatives will persuade millions of people to click buy, prompting sellers to purchase many more Google ads.

For Amazon, which built a booming business by essentially renting its digital real estate to small sellers, the risk is that Google could give those brands a pathway to thriving outside its marketplace. That, in turn, could force the Seattle-based company to more aggressively court sellers with discounts on fees, advertising or logistics services.

Still, Amazon remains a formidable rival, and Google confronts daunting challenges. Its renewed push into ecommerce coincides with a slowdown in online shopping as consumers revert to their pre-pandemic habits. Amazon and EBay Inc. both recently reported slowing growth and weak profit outlooks.

Moreover, Google has always sought to make its technology fade into the background. Turning the site into a shopping destination risks wrecking the experience and alienating visitors. Ahead of the I/O presentation, Raghavan took pains to say shopping on Google would be “super smooth.” If the concept works as advertised, he said, shoppers won’t have to wonder if they are doing a search, if they are on Amazon or Google.

Meanwhile, even as Google tries to build an online shopping destination to complement its ad business, Amazon has done the inverse. It has created a robust advertising operation on top of its enormous online bazaar. Google’s success is hard to gauge because it doesn’t break out ecommerce sales or retail ads. Amazon’s is easy to see. Its ads business posted 23% growth in the first quarter.

On the other hand, there are signs that Raghavan’s strategy is starting to pay off. Earlier this year, Google revealed that ecommerce advertising was a leading contributor to a 43% bump to search revenue in 2021. Google also said last year that over a billion people shop on its properties every day, though it hasn’t updated the figure.

In the fall, Morgan Stanley research showed that consumers were using Google and YouTube to research products and price-shop more often than they used Amazon, EBay or Walmart. In April, the bank reported that 59% of survey respondents who are Amazon Prime members said they started researching products on Google, up from 50% in the fall.

Talley & Twine, an independent watch brand based in Virginia, started getting serious about Google in the past two years and has sometimes seen a fivefold return on its ad spending.

Leading ecommerce platform Shopify is shutting down its dropshipping extension, Oberlo. Sellers who want to use the app to fulfill their dropshipping business via AliExpress can no longer find it in the App Store. Shopify is transitioning to another dropshipping solution developed by DSers.

For online sellers using ecommerce software from Shopify, Oberlo has been a popular dropshipping-plugin for years. Users could easily import products to their store and sell them directly from the inventory of thousands of Chinese suppliers. The app offered a gigantic range of products with low prices.

No more access

Oberlo was created by a Lithuanian startup and acquired by Shopify in 2017, for around 14.3 million euros (15 million dollars). However, as of May 12, the app was delisted. Sellers can no longer find it in the App Store or install it from other sources.

Users who already have an account for the app can still access it until June 15. After that date, the app will be uninstalled and historical data will be lost. Why the app is being shutdown is unclear, but a blog post from Oberlo says: “This product deprecation, which is a routine occurrence, is in pursuit of providing merchants with the best solutions to reach their customers wherever they are.”

Many other apps available

Shopify suggests using a dropshipping solution developed by another partner called DSers. Oberlo users can now migrate their historical data, settings, products and import list data automatically to the DSers app with a few clicks. The ecommerce software provider also offers many other apps for dropshipping suppliers. Sellers that don’t want to use this app, can look for an alternative dropshipping app and migrate their data manually.

The DSers app is said to have the same features as Oberlo, such as an integration with AliExpress, bulk order fulfillment, as well as additional features. There are currently over 150.000 merchants selling their products via the app. Just as with Oberlo, it offers a free and monthly or annual paid subscription options.

Refunds

The company says that on June 15, all remaining Oberlo subscription plans will be canceled, and affected accounts will receive refunds or Shopify app credits for unused subscription days. Users can also cancel their subscription plan immediately by downgrading to the free plan.

Unlike many ecommerce retailers, Wish failed to gain traction during the pandemic. The marketplace hasn’t reported a net profit since the second quarter of 2019.

Wish is an app-based marketplace for very inexpensive goods, the majority of which are sold by merchants in China. The marketplace is filled with a wide variety of items in big number of categories. All the merchandise is of low cost. The average ticket on Wish is $17. By contrast, the average ticket on Alibaba Group Holdings’ Taobao is $93.

The company continues to struggle to achieve profitability. The parent of the Wish marketplace reported sales of $189 million in the first fiscal quarter of 2022, a decrease of 76% year over year.

The Wish marketplace posted a net loss of $60 million in Q1, the 11th straight quarterly loss, but a 53% year-over-year improvement from the $128 million net loss in the first quarter of 2021.

ContextLogic Inc., the San Francisco-based parent company, has stumbled badly in recent years. In December 2020, the company went public in an initial offering that valued Wish at about $17 billion. Now trading on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol WISH, the company has a market capitalization of around $1.12 billion.

Wish has long struggled with quality issues and customer satisfaction. Deliveries from Wish merchants in China take a considerable amount of time. The supply chain crisis and the pandemic led to additional slowdowns.

The Wish marketplace is taking steps in improving delivery and customer service and notes that its Net Promoter Score (NPS), a measurement of customer satisfaction, has improved from a -66 in May of 2021 to a -27 today.

Vijay Talwar, Wish CEO, said in a written statement that they are seeing progress in their turnaround in just a few short months, including a doubling of the NPS, and lower post shipment refunds.

During a call with analysts, Talwar said employees in China were facing difficulties under COVID restrictions. The company has some 200 employees in Shanghai. As lockdowns spread and shortages grew, the company sent emergency supplies to its workers. In addition, the company faced headwinds  when COVID restrictions closed ports in both Shanghai and Shenzen. Talwar said Wish managed to move 90% of delayed shipments to other ports in March.

Wish launched a redesigned app for Android phones during the quarter. An app for the Apple operating system will launch before the end of Q2, Talwar said.

Only 45% of organizations have deployed or invested in new digital technologies such as cloud ERP and B2B ecommerce applications to address supply chain disruptions, says a Syspro survey.

Businesses of all types are still suffering from three years of supply chain disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

But despite ambitions to make digital transformation a top strategic priority, not all companies are making the substantial investment in recent technologies needed to better digitize their supply chain or use B2B ecommerce tools to sell more effectively to digital-first customers, according to new research from Syspro, a developer of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and related business systems applications.

Since the pandemic began, 70% of businesses have experienced material handling and supply chain disruptions and 60% were (or still are) unable to have ongoing engagement with customers and suppliers, according to the Syspro survey of 167 organizations from the US, Canada, Europe, Middle East, and Africa” (EMEA), and Asia-Pacific (APAC).

But only 45% of organizations have deployed or invested in new digital technologies such as cloud ERP and B2B ecommerce applications to address supply chain disruptions, and only 44% of companies have allowed manufacturers to collaborate with external suppliers and customers effectively.

“The reality is that without real-time collaboration with suppliers and customers, long-term revenue growth has been compromised,” the Syspro survey says. “While the improvement of internal operational efficiencies is vital for any business, the question is whether the knock-on effect of supply chain disruptions will inhibit long term growth.”

The survey also finds that in certain industries such as automotive parts, investment is low in critical technologies that enable digital transformation, such as ecommerce systems and the Internet of things (IoT). For example, only 42% of organizations have invested in more ecommerce and only 41% and 25% of companies, respectively, have invested in IoT or advanced analytics and big data.

“Manufacturers and distributors are now asking: ‘How can I future-proof my operations against the disruptions of today, to bounce-back and thrive tomorrow,’” the survey says.

Ecommerce sellers, both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C), are keeping up with order fulfillment to their digital customers.

But the process is not easy with all types and sizes of online sellers fighting a lot of challenges, not the least of which are rising costs and a labor shortage, according to a survey of 300 sellers by Saddle Creek Logistics Services.

Record ecommerce order volume, combined with rising rates and capacity issues, made shipping particularly challenging this year. Not surprisingly, delivery expectations (45%) and transportation capacity (36%) were the most common fulfillment challenges.

To help mitigate transportation issues, ecommerce shippers are utilizing traditional strategies such as negotiating rates (36%) and switching carriers (31%), but they are also exploring a variety of other approaches, Saddle Creek says.

Many respondents also are turning to technology.

Half (48%) are adding or upgrading their parcel/less-than-truckload freight shipping (LTL) transportation management system (TMS). LTL is the transportation of an amount of freight sized between individual parcels and full truckloads.

36% are automating parcel sortation and/or utilizing software for rate shopping (32%) and parcel analytics (29%).

Rising fulfillment costs are another problem area for ecommerce sellers, Saddle Creek says.

In the past year, 51% of sellers say their fulfillment costs increased “somewhat” or “substantially.”

For respondents whose costs increased, labor was the primary factor, followed by customer service requirements and the competitive landscape. Overall, most respondents whose costs decreased said greater use of material handling equipment/automation/ robotics (53%) was a factor, according to the survey.

In addition, 37% say they required less labor in the past year, due to decreased order volume, and/or improved processes (38%) to help reduce costs.

The pandemic has escalated consumer expectations for free and fast shipping, and companies are stepping up their game to satisfy consumer demand.

Free shipping is offered more widely than fast shipping. Free shipping is offered for all orders by 43% of respondents. Just 25% offer one- or two-day shipping.

Many companies are utilizing multi-node distribution networks. For example, 17% of respondents have two distribution centers, and 22% have three.

Over half of respondents (57%) utilize a third-party provider for all their ecommerce fulfillment, and another 20% plan to begin outsourcing in the next 12 to 18 months.

Many respondents plan to add new sales channels in the next 12 to 18 months, including third-party marketplaces (48%) and social platforms (41%).

The aspect of fulfillment operations that respondents would most like to improve in the next 12 to 18 months is mechanization/automation/robotics.

Moving forward, respondents are taking a more strategic approach to fulfillment operations. Plans include distribution network expansion, expanding technology use, optimizing for omnichannel, reducing labor dependency and more.

The $103 billion Tata Group rolled out its long-awaited all-in-one ecommerce app allowing users to buy everything from apparel to airline tickets. The sprawling Indian conglomerate is competing for a piece of the fiercely competitive sector currently dominated by Amazon.com Inc., Walmart Inc. and Reliance Industries Ltd.

Tata Neu, Mumbai-based Tata Digital Pvt.’s digital services platform went live to consumers on Thursday. According to the group’s website, this “super app” has been in development since at least mid-2020 and it is “a single platform that brings together multiple brands in the Tata universe like never before.” It will comprise the company’s own brands such as Croma, Westside, AirAsia India, the Taj chain of luxury hotels, BigBasket,  watch maker Titan, jewelry brand Tanishq and automaker Tata Motors Ltd thus gathering all its brands into one powerful app.

The 154-year-old Tata group, which makes luxury cars, trucks, air conditioners, smart watches, tea besides operating luxury hotels, airlines, utilities, department stores and the local Starbucks Corp. franchise, wants to leverage the diversity of its products and services to lure buyers in a country of almost 1.4 billion people, who are increasingly shopping online.

India’s e-retail segment is expected to be worth as much as $140 billion by March 2026, Bain & Co. estimates, and is the only large consumer market still open to foreign companies, making it a prize fight for global and local retail firms.

Pratik Pal, chief executive officer at Tata Digital, which developed Tata Neu, has helped with digital transformation at some of the world’s largest retail chains including Walmart, Tesco Plc, Target Corp., Best Buy Co. and Marks & Spencer Group Plc.

The all-in-one app also has a loyalty program for retaining customers. Each brand on Tata Neu is “connected by a common reward called NeuCoins, which can be earned across all brands online and at physical locations and can be used similarly as well,” according to the website.

Tata Neu is expected to give more firepower to the Indian conglomerate against entrenched rivals such as Amazon, billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance and Walmart-owned Flipkart. Tata Group, founded by Jamsetji Tata in 1868, that has 29 companies across ten sectors across steel, automobiles, technology, consumer retail, infrastructure, financial services, trading, defense, travel and tourism.

Customer support was busier in 2021: ticket volumes increased for all channels compared to the year before. Consumers also have higher expectations of customer service.

Customer’s questions on WhatsApp even more than tripled compared to 2020. Requests via phone calls and social media increased around 20 percent according to research by Zendesk. More than 80 percent of customers expect to continue contacting customer care at this rate, while 10 percent expects to contact support even more, Salesforce reports. These are just a few conclusions from Salesupply’s latest Ecommerce Customer Care Guide.

New increased expectations

In addition to higher ticket volumes, online retailers face some unique challenges. Firstly, shoppers have higher expectations: 55 percent of consumers say they expect more from customer service compared to 2020. For example, a majority wants their issue to be resolved during the first contact.

Customer support has also become more digital. For the first time in 2021, more than half of British customer service experiences were digital, according to The Institute of Customer Service. Contact took place, for example, via e-mail, chat and social media. These channels can still be improved though: of all online channels, chatbots scored the lowest in customer satisfaction.

Service only in their own language

Besides, cross-border ecommerce is on the rise. The market is expected to reach over 4 trillion euros by 2030, according to Fatpos Global. That is a sixfold increase compared to 2020. Although consumers increasingly shop cross-border, they prefer service in their native language.

CSA Research shows that 40 percent of consumers will never buy from a website in a different language. If customer support does serve in their mother language, 3 in 4 shoppers say they are more likely to buy from that website again.

Self-service options appreciated

Another post-pandemic expectation from customers is self-service. More than 40 percent of customers are choosing digital self-service options, a survey by Shep Hyken found, like Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), video tutorials and chatbots. Do-it-yourself options such as knowledge bases and community forums are thus gaining popularity.

One of the consequences of Russia’s “military operation” in Ukraine is the loss of technical human resources.  This will definitely impact software innovation and supply chain, analytics say.

Ukraine called itself Eastern Europe’s Silicon Valley with more than 300,000 technology professionals.

Before the end of February the country was a top software developer community and provided services for customers in European and other countries.

Gartner estimates more than one million IT professionals work in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, with one-quarter (250,000) working for consulting or outsourcing firms. The loss is 10-15% of European developer workforce. The crisis is already clear. It made evident how many global companies relied on Ukraine as one of their development bases.

More than three million people have already fled Ukraine and millions more internally displaced.

Lithuania has launched simplified processes for Ukrainian refugees to work in the country.

Belarus was also a significant player in the developer sourcing ecosystem. But it played in another part of the market and cannot so far compete with that current scale and level of software developing services.

Besides, there are economic sanctions imposed on Belarus. They are less severe, but still Western companies are exiting Belarus as their development hub.

Amazon.com Inc. has recently acquired e-commerce technology startup Veeqo Ltd and confirmed it in its statement. It happened last November but the company announced the acquisition several days ago.

Quoting Veeqo’s website, it is the inventory and fulfilment platform built by an ecommerce seller, for ecommerce sellers, made in Swansea, Wales. It provides a cloud service that helps online retailers manage their business operations.

The startup’s service mainly targets retailers that sell their merchandise through not one but multiple online platforms, such as Amazon and Shopify  and helps avoid a great deal of duplicate work.

With Veeqo’s cloud service retailers can centrally perform tasks such as inventory management across all the online channels through which they sell their merchandise. It reduces manual work for a retailer’s employees and thereby increases operational efficiency.

Retailers can track inventory levels, determine when stock is running low and order new merchandise from suppliers. If a retailer has a presence in multiple markets, it can use Veeqo to coordinate what merchandise shipment should be routed to which location.

Veeqo also provides features to manage customer orders, returns and refunds. The service has a built-in analytics tool to predict future customer demand and help retailers ensure that they have a sufficient amount of merchandise in stock.

A few months ago, Amazon said that about 2 million third-party sellers offer their products on its e-commerce marketplace. With Veeqo’s service, the company can help simplify operations for third-party sellers that offer their products not only on its marketplace but also on other platforms such as Shopify.

Third-party sellers are central in Amazon’s e-commerce strategy. They accounted for about 60% of Amazon’s online sales last year. Small and midsized businesses in the U.S. sold more than 3.8 billion products through the company’s e-commerce marketplace during the 12 months ended Aug. 31, up from 3.4 billion the prior year.

Amazon could also use Veeqo’s features to manage sales across multiple e-commerce platforms to advance its Multi-Channel Fulfillment program. That program allows retailers to use Amazon’s logistics network to ship products they sell through other e-commerce platforms.

Amazon’s representatives added in the official statement that the company “plans to continue investing in new features and improvements to help Veeqo serve sellers globally from its home in Wales, facilitate growth for sellers’ multi-channel businesses, and enhance the experience of their customers”.

As siliconangle.com reminds, Veeqo is the second e-commerce technology startup that Amazon has acquired in so many years. Early last year, the company acquired Selz, a startup with a platform that helps online retailers with tasks such as website development and managing ad campaigns.

Amazon’s cloud unit, Amazon Web Services Inc., also offers multiple solutions for retailers. Among those solutions is the Amazon Personalize service that AWS launched in 2019. The service uses machine learning to help companies with tasks such as generating shopping recommendations.

AWS has a long list of major retailers among its customers, including Best Buy Co. Inc. and J Sainsbury plc, the second-largest supermarket chain in the U.K. Best Buy recently named AWS as its preferred cloud provider as part of an initiative to upgrade its technology capabilities.