AI, Tech, & Digital Commerce

It’s no secret that mobile-friendly sites are important today and will be even more important in the future. Many distributors’ website visitors are in the field and very mobile, so this future change is important.

This article examines the results of the 2015 State of E-Commerce in Distribution Survey and how the industry’s e-commerce offerings are maturing. Part 2 will look at best practices for distributor-integrated marketing approaches to support electronic shopping and buying.

Increasingly, we hear distributors say that their e-commerce site is not getting the revenue traction they expected. The distributor went into the initiative thinking, “Build it and they will come.” But, what really happened was, “We built it and they didn’t come.

Distribution Strategy Group conducted an electronic survey of 305 participants to better understand trends in distribution marketing. This survey was conducted with Modern Distribution Management in July 2014.

The 2014 distributor marketing survey covered several areas of marketing, including planning, objectives, vehicles, channels and organization. Companies are using more digital marketing than they did in the 2011 survey. They consider it more important, and they are staffing accordingly.

E-commerce demand generation is in transition. According to results from the third annual MDM Distribution E-Commerce Survey, while most distributors are increasing e-commerce revenue from email marketing, catalog and organic search, they remain less effective with paid search and marketing automation.

This article examines the results of the 2014 State of E-Commerce in Distribution Survey and how the industry’s e-commerce offerings are maturing. Part 2 will look at best practices for distributor e-commerce marketing, data management and operations.

Customers have indicated a preference to receive communications in both digital and print formats. It’s not a surprise that they still want to receive the traditional print catalog once per year. As we’ve discussed in past articles, print is still a very viable and preferred form for customers to have a complete view of your…

E-commerce revenue as a portion of total revenue has grown significantly in the past year through the growth of existing e-commerce sites, as well as new implementations, according to a joint MDM online survey with Distribution Strategy Group conducted at the end of 2012.

The vast majority of distributors who are still in business today have good direct salespeople without whom they would not be in business. Yet the distribution world is changing – it’s not your grandfather’s distribution business anymore.