Whether you have 500, 5,000, 500,000, or 5M SKU’s, you as a distributor have plenty to offer. Whether stocked on your shelves or through various drop ship programs, the breadth of your catalog is always growing and changing. Great concept: the more I offer, the more I help my customer, the more wallet share I get.
However (and as we have all experienced), there are times when too much is just that—too much. While you are looking to increase your products and services, it can pose a challenge for a customer to easily find and/or navigate to exactly what they are looking for. OR perhaps the customer wants to limit your catalog offering to just certain items, categories, etc. (think GSA contracts). OR maybe you have identified a group of customers that operate in a similar fashion and want to make it easy for them to focus on items that are important to them.
Let’s break these three seemingly different, but very similar, challenges down and discuss how you can solve for them:
- Let me build my catalog, my way: we always want to do what’s best for our customer, make ourselves the easiest supplier to do business with, etc. However, sometimes we have to admit, the customer has their own ideas on what would make life easier for them. We, as distributors, spend a lot of time on our product catalog - enriching the SKU’s, getting good imagery, putting a taxonomy together that makes practical sense on how to group and navigate our catalog. But, in the end, it could be the customer themselves that can do a better job on creating what works for them.
What about a concept where a customer can create their own catalogs and catalog structure and either use it for themselves OR if it's that good, they (the creator of this amazing catalog) can make it available to the other peeps within their organization? Take this a step further and allow your customers to assign THEIR own part number to a particular SKU, and BOOM - winnah, winnah, chicken dinnah! A catalog AND structure created by the folks who will use it coupled with those same users being able to assign part numbers that they are familiar with to a particular SKU—it doesn’t get any more personalized than that!
- Limiting what my company and/or employees can see/buy: In my past, I was reluctantly asked (ok, forced) to limit the products on our site to just those that we were awarded via contractual negotiations. The ask was straightforward: you, the distributor, were awarded these five categories and that's all I want my users to access and be able to purchase (oh and by the way, we will be auditing you on a regular basis to ensure compliance on both what was sold and for how much) - feel me?
To solve for this, as pricing was handled by the ERP, nothing special was needed there. However, to limit the catalog, you need to leverage post-login behavior to dictate who can see what - by the way, things got more interesting as we had to alter the checkout process as this was when punchout made its debut (or roundtrip for those that remember CommerceOne - ha). This was cutting edge back in the day, but today, it’s easy peasy, self-configurable, and all supported out of box with the right solution.
- Create shared group catalogs: For the last scenario here, we, as the distributor again, are looking to leverage our infinite product, application, and market knowledge to provide a better user experience (acronym alert: User Experience = UX) for a group of customers that either operate in similar fashion or sell into similar industries. For this, it would mean having the ability for us, as the experts, to set up predefined catalogs (along with structure/taxonomy) and assign them to a defined list or group of customers.
Case in point in the MRO space - once again, let's say that we have a particular piece of equipment that is readily used within a particular industry, AND we, as a distributor, have a number of customers that use that piece of equipment, we can group those customers together, create a catalog or list of items that are needed for the common, particular piece of equipment, and then give those specific customers access to that catalog. Boom - just made those customers’ lives that much easier by giving them easy access to a prebuilt list of products that are of interest to them, including calling that list out by application (e.g., Spare parts for Machine XYZ), capeesh?
The beauty of this is that it allows you, as the distributor, to increase your stickiness factor to these groups by creating and managing catalogs (supersedes, add ons, up sells, etc.) Conversely, the same concept could apply to customers that are heavy consumers (or you would like them to be heavy consumers) of a particular product or category.
Let's admit it, the chest puffs up a little and there is a sense of pride that comes out during watercooler, happy hour, and trade association talks, or when speaking to new or existing customers about the size of your catalog. Size matters, but it can also, to some degree, pose a challenge and possibly create a less-than-desirable UX. Having the flexibility to offer a full catalog to those that want it and/or the ability to limit that offering when requested or required is an optimal solution.
Kodaris has built (OK all we did was the programming, but it was spec’d by distributors) a whole host of tools that make it easier for your customers to not only do THEIR job but also to interact with you as well. After all, good service matters—whether in-person or online with a great user experience.
