How STAUFF Rolled out a Customer-Centric B2B Commerce Platform
Back in 2010, STAUFF was one of the first movers in the manufacturer space offering digital touchpoints to order their industry-leading parts for hydraulic components. Together with Spryker and diva-e, STAUFF went yet again beyond the market standard by building a scalable e-commerce platform for their digital strategy highly focusing on delivering a cutting-edge experience to their B2B customers.
Industry
Hydraulics
Video-Recap
STAUFF at Spryker OnAir
STAUFF’s Global Chief Digital Officer Mark Wever joined us during Spryker OnAir to talk about their experience with our technology. Experience in less than three minutes why Spryker was the right choice for STAUFF.
Snapshot
A True Hidden Champion in its Industry
STAUFF is a champion in manufacturing hydraulic components and performance parts used all around the globe by engineers on projects, services, and industrial maintenance. With more than 1,400 employees spread across 18 countries, STAUFF and its components became quickly recognized as a true leader in their space due to their high-quality product lines. To achieve their ambitions, STAUFF heavily invested in the future with its own technology center and R&D team to keep the bar high in their industry.
Background
A Market That Demands More Than the Average
STAUFF identified that the existing e-commerce solution increasingly became a limiting factor in their digital growth strategy. Their former legacy technology had a predefined scope of functionalities that did not provide STAUFF with the flexibility they needed. The demand for STAUFF’s products kept growing year over year and so did the importance of digital sales channels. To serve the increasing expectations of the B2B customer base, STAUFF entrusted a task force, led by Mark Wever, Global Chief Digital Officer, to come up with digital commerce strategies to increase digital revenue streams while emphasizing STAUFF’s key value proposition of customer centricity.
Within the team, we pursue the goal to create customer-centric value with each activity we execute. It’s a common vision we share across the entire company. ”
Challenge
Streamlining Complexity in Favor of the Customers
Coming from the existing but limited e-commerce environment STAUFF was relying on, the project requirements were tough: A variety of touchpoints such as the existing web store, the corporate website, and various databases had to be merged into a single experience for customers. Furthermore, staying agile throughout the project would make the difference, as Mark’s team was heavily focused on creating user-centric value and avoiding inflexible monoliths.
The expectations towards that needed technology were high: It should be flexible to keep up with the agility, easy to customize unique use cases, offering capabilities to scale fast, and seamlessly integrate itself in the given tech-stack.
We wanted to go beyond the market standard, not just offering a polished e-shop. Our goal was to achieve a one-stop shopping experience for our customers and Spryker delivered on our promise.
Solution
Frictionless B2B Commerce
STAUFF redefined and rebuilt their entire digital B2B commerce experience with Spryker to address that common pain point in the market: offering seamless access to purchasing needed spare parts to existing and new customers without unnecessary friction. STAUFF customers can easily search for products they need, set-up complex access management to fulfill internal procurement requirements, import spare parts lists for ordering, place recurring orders and much more.
STAUFF’s commerce experience is based on Spryker’s B2B suite giving them access to a wide range of functionalities to digitize their commerce experience: multi-language support, advanced account management, integrations into existing ERP & CRM platforms, product information management and more. STAUFF uses this foundation and is able to build on top of it to create a buying journey that matches their individual demands and surpasses their customers’ expectations.
Finding STAUFF equivalents as easy as using google translate
STAUFF’s product catalogue offers more than 50.000 products, parts and components for their customers. Due to their excellent quality, customers request a comprehensive solution to find the equivalent STAUFF product for the existing third-party component they want to replace. With advanced search capabilities in Spryker’s B2B suite, customers can simply use the existing product numbers that will be matched and shown in the search results on the platform.
Bulk ordering made simple
To serve the complex needs of their customers, STAUFF offers bulk ordering with advanced customization. Those customizations include defined delivery for single products, upload of CSV for bulk ordering, account & access management for procurement departments and more. Those are used heavily as they make the lives of engineers and maintenance teams easier all over the world by being seamlessly integrated.
With Spryker, we were able to testify to our shareholders that our MVP approach to roll out our global e-commerce strategy was the right decision. We see a lot of positive feedback and internal requests to share our insights and learnings within the overall organization.”
Results
B2C-Like Experience Increased Orders and Customer Satisfaction
Within less than six months, STAUFF relaunched their digital commerce platform successfully. It now addresses all customer needs by offering a customer-centric one-stop shop experience inspired by B2C buyers’ journeys. Internal reporting shows that the offering is well-received and there is a substantial increase in orders and customer satisfaction.
And yet, Mark’s team at STAUFF is already planning next iterations and evolutions of the digital commerce platform. One specific plan is Spryker’s capability to expand digital commerces into marketplaces, which will allow STAUFF to integrate third-party vendors and additional services.
With Spryker we have chosen the right technology which not only serves our customers’ needs today, but also future-proves our digital strategies.”
Partner
And the Oscar for the partner in crime goes to…
diva-e is Germany’s leading Transactional Experience Partner creating experiences for companies and brands worldwide to engage with their customers and achieve business success. As Spryker Platinum Solution Partner, diva-e supported STAUFF with the business ideation and evaluation while Spryker provided the technology to put it into action. Together we supported Stauff to transform their offline-influenced sales model into a digital full-flesh experience.
STAUFF is a prime example for Transactional Experiences. Together with Spryker we ensure that the digital interface between customers and STAUFF is beyond a simple integration, it creates a relevant and positive customer experience.”
Powered by AWS
Thanks to AWS, Spryker was able to fulfill the customer's needs, when they needed it to make it a success. The composability on AWS is crucial to deliver the highest level of flexibility for customer requests. It allows the customer to select the best-of-breed components they need, which will work seamlessly and reliably straight away, thanks to Spryker being a truly composable platform and the high levels of service AWS has. Due to AWS, the onboarding takes from as little as 4 hours to 1-2 days, compared to months previously. With the Spryker Cloud Commerce OS solution, built on AWS, Spryker can scale computational and storage resources to accommodate the customer's goals.
Updated in January 2024