Zoro.com is an ecommerce platform that helps businesses thrive by offering an endless assortment of parts, tools and supplies for every business need. Launched in 2011, the Grainger subsidiary has grown rapidly to over 600 team members and over $1 billion in annual revenue. 

Ian Heller and Jonathan Bein, Ph.D., talked with Sandy Mattinson, president at Zoro, about the company’s value proposition and how Mattinson is helping build on its success by investing in the success of other distributors.   

Ian Heller: Sandy, please give us a detailed overview of how Zoro works, what it offers to customers and distributors, and how it’s different from others in the marketplace?  

Sandy Mattinson: Zoro exists to help businesses and their people thrive. That means helping our business customers get everything they need, along with helping our supplier partners reach new customers. We offer an endless assortment, with over 13 million products and growing. We do this through a number of distributor partnerships.  

A common misperception is that we are a marketplace because we work with a number of partners to fulfill orders. The difference between Zoro and a traditional marketplace is that we don’t have multiple listings on our website. We present a simple and seamless experience to our customers and work hard to make sure our customers are always getting the most relevant products.  

We create a unique experience for our customers because we’re focused exclusively on business customers. We’re mindful to create a great customer experience, not just online, but also through our customer service team.  

Our distributor partners would say Zoro is different because we don’t have that marketplace listing experience where suppliers compete to be seen and visible. We work behind the scenes with our partners to ensure we present the best customer experience. That enables Zoro to manage the digital merchandising, pricing and marketing on behalf of our supplier partners. That also allows our supplier partners to focus on what they do best: serving end customers. They may or may not have digital capabilities of their own, which helps our partners quickly get online into new channels without a heavy investment of resources.   

Heller: What is Zoro’s relationship to Grainger?  

Mattinson: We’re a subsidiary of Grainger, and Zoro was founded in 2011. Grainger is focused on a set of end customers through a high-touch solutions model and services a distinct customer extremely well through that model. Zoro is focused on our simple and seamless experience and serving our distinct customer base through an ecommerce channel. Over the years, we’ve worked to create these very independent business models and teams. Ultimately, through our relationship and ownership by Grainger, we found that these business models are very complementary to one another and allow each of our teams to focus on what we do best.   

Heller: Would you say Zoro relies more on distributors than other platforms?  

Mattinson: We’re very focused on distributors. We also work with some manufacturers and brands, but distributors are very much a core part.  

Heller: With Zoro, the search is much more straightforward than what I have found on Amazon, and you’re more likely to find what you’re looking for. 

Mattinson: Our philosophy is very much that the experience, both the online and fulfillment experience, needs to be customer-centric. One of the exciting milestones we’ve reached in the last year was building our own in-house search engine. We have a wide, vast and growing assortment across a wide range of product categories, many of which are fairly technical and industrial in nature. Making sure that we’re surfacing the most relevant products from our assortment is really important for Zoro and for our customers. 

Heller: We think it’s important for distributor marketplaces to compete. A lot of distributors are never going to build their own marketplace.  

They need an alternative that is safer, more effective and more targeted than some of the other options out there. When you partner with distributors, what does that look like? What are they signing up for? What are you looking for in a partner and when you have a partner that succeeds with you, what is it that they do well?   

Mattinson: Partnership is what I consider a long-term relationship. We’re going to take our time to understand and learn from partners. We want to know their strategic objectives. We want to help our partners understand how Zoro works and what it takes to be successful working with us. Our goal is to make it easy for both our business customers and our supplier partners.  

To start, we have conversations to understand our partners’ business objectives, work through those business objectives and set up the onboarding process. It’s an ongoing relationship from there. Zoro will own the content, the merchandising onsite and making sure we’re presenting products in ways that help our customers find the relevant products that they need to get their job done.   

We work on fair pricing for our customers. We work together on what fair pricing looks like for our partners. The fulfillment and delivery experience are critical for all, especially for our customers. We want to make sure that we are delivering quickly and reliably.  

We clearly can’t do that on our own without a great partnership with our supplier and distributor partners. That’s an important part of that onboarding process, making sure that the fulfillment experience is outstanding. Where we really excel and have been innovators from the early days is in digital marketing. We have a team dedicated to innovative digital marketing strategies that drive traffic to our suppliers’ assortment, and the listings that we own and manage.   

Jonathan Bein: We often talk about an ideal customer profile. Is there an ideal supplier profile for Zoro?   

Mattinson: The distributors we work with are generally excellent at fulfillment. That’s an important part of the capabilities we look for at Zoro. In general, there’s a very broad range of digital expertise they bring. Some want us to be their digital strategy because they don’t want to have their own digital marketing team, ecommerce capability or long-term technology roadmap.  

For those partners, we can be that solution. On the other side of that, we have partners quite advanced with ecommerce or digital capabilities of their own, but find that Zoro can be complementary to them. I wouldn’t say that there is a target or ideal profile in terms of how we fit into a distributor’s overall strategy.   

Bein: Can distributors participating in Zoro compete to sell the same product?   

Mattinson: We do not have competition for listings for our customers. If there’s a single product on Zoro, we will show that single product. We’re really focused on the customer experience. And what do I mean by that? Understanding which of our partners can provide the best fulfillment experience and the best price for our customers, while working together on how we present and merchandise that product effectively.  

Similarly, we have a broad range of partners that we work with, everything from a best-in-class partner with rich content to partners that have either sparse content or who have not invested in that area. A lot of that work is happening behind the scenes to ultimately get to the best customer experience. We’ve expanded the assortment and haven’t run into a significant overlap in products that our distributor partners are offering. In the instances that might happen, we’ll make sure that we’re presenting the one with the best customer experience.   

Bein: How is Zoro leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and the opportunities it presents?   

Mattinson: AI and machine learning (ML) technology is at the heart of everything that we do, given that we have to do everything at scale. When we think about how we market an endless assortment of merchandise, we have to take a non-traditional approach. If we took a traditional approach, we wouldn’t be able to continue growing our assortment.  

A few examples of the ways that we’re using ML and AI are our search experience and product recommendations. We’re continuously learning from our customers and the things that they’re looking for, and increasingly presenting more and more relevant products to our customers throughout the journey with more personalization. As our customers spend more time with Zoro and buy more things, we learn what our customers want and bring that into the experience.  

We are also using AI to help us merchandise to present a simple, seamless experience. If we have product information from multiple different suppliers, we organize the information cohesively. It takes a tremendous amount of effort to normalize that information at scale. 

Heller: What are your thoughts on Amazon Business and MRO? How does Zoro differentiate?  

Mattinson: Zoro is focused on our business customers and our heritage in MRO and industrial supply. That’s where we excel. It’s difficult to understand technical products, making sure that we’re helping our customers understand everything that we offer and get the exact product that they need for a very wide range of jobs. We are able to do that through the amazing partnerships that we have.  

We’re very honored to be a trusted partner for the industry, and that’s something we take to heart and value tremendously. That’s one of the ways in which Zoro continues to be distinct. And one of the ways that I know we’ll continue to grow. 

Bein: What are the elements of the customer experience that are key?   

Mattinson: One of our key offerings is an endless assortment. Zoro is distinct and unique in that we have products you can’t find anywhere else. To do that, we have millions and millions of products. That also creates a challenge for our customers to quickly and easily find what they need. Part of everything that we do is creating a simple and seamless experience for our customers where they can easily find what they need, and know that they’ll get it at a great price, delivered quickly and reliably. That’s how we have earned our customers’ trust over the years.  

We also have a live customer service team that you can call and talk to, and that’s really important for Zoro and for our customers. We’re digital-first, investing in AI and ML, and we’re an ecommerce and technology company, but we also get to know our customers. It’s our goal to make sure that we’re there to answer questions and resolve issues quickly and seamlessly.  

As far as net 30 terms, given our customer base, we work with a number of smaller businesses and we know our customers wear many hats and are very busy in their day to day. They’re working to make their businesses thrive. Something as simple as lending net 30 terms to help them run their businesses more efficiently is something that our customers value.  

We also have no-hassle returns. We make sure that the return process is easy if an item wasn’t exactly what you were looking for. Those are aspects of the customer experience that are digital and through an ecommerce platform, but really important for our business customers.   

To learn more about Zoro.com and supplier partnership opportunities, please visit https://www.zoro.com/sell-on-zoro/.