Editor’s note: Bay Supply, an industrial distributor based in Farmingdale, New York, which has been selling a wide array of fasteners to big and small companies since 1961, continues to build out a new marketplace on BaySupply.com to bring together buyers and sellers in what the company calls a disparate industry. That means connecting with digital-first customers in new and diverse ways, says chief operating officer Michael Eichinger.

Digital Commerce 360: How does your organization define connected commerce and how important is this strategically for the company?

Michael Eichinger: Connected commerce for Bay Supply is all about providing our customers with the convenience of transacting business using analog or digital communications to manage credit accounts, digital and analog payments, sales taxes, and data transmissions.

Connected commerce is a vital part of digital transformation and remains ahead of customer’s future expectations of quality support and service.

DC 360: The maturity curve. How far along are you in implementing connected commerce? (Please be specific.) Where do you expect to be 12 months from now?

Michael Eichinger: We are extremely far along on the maturity curve today. We still face challenges, but today our customers transact business with our company on our online vertical marketplace, offline through emailed purchase orders or even over the phone. In all cases, our customers can utilize credit term accounts or pay by credit card. Our credit Terms program for users on our vertical marketplace provides an employer identification number (EIN) upon registration and by the time they complete adding products to their cart and checkout, they can utilize their new Net 30 Credit Terms account and are provided their limits. That is as instantaneous as it can be, and we built this in our partnership with “Balance” over the past 2-3 years. We still have much to do on the data transmission front, but our immediate challenges were not only to provide a seamless experience with our customers across various channels of communication, but to provide analog and digital methods of invoicing, collecting digital payments and still secure a process of check payments most effectively in a traditional fashion for orders placed digitally.

DC 360: What are the top three digital goals and objectives for achieving digital commerce and why these three? (Please be specific).

Michael Eichinger: I believe these three digital goals will vary by the type of organization, industry, and customer persona. For Bay, our three digital goals are:

• Transform long-term, traditional, analog relationships with our customers by providing a seamless way of engaging and transacting business from an all-analog approach to include a digital option for communications, purchasing, paying, and managing credit accounts. We believe the customer should see minimal impact in how they opt to conduct their business with our company depending on where they are in the digital transformation process as an organization. Many companies are moving to all digital payments, while others remain analog for all purchase orders and payments but communicate with us online and source plan from our online marketplace platform. Every customer is different and at a different stage of digital adoption. The challenge is to continue to engage and move ahead of the customer’s ultimate expectations because these challenges are not quickly met.
• Duplicate your analog customer experience with your digital experience. Most companies fail at capturing more than 5%-15% of their business digitally because they restrict customer options far more digitally than analog. They may not offer quantity break pricing or customer contract pricing digitally, but the customer can certainly get this flexibility offline. Digital commerce is about mirroring the customer’s analog experience as much as possible and this is not as easy as it first appears. Communications, resource tools, educational content, transaction management, RMA’s, order modifications, scalable and realistic pricing for bulk to minimize the noise of RFQ and Quote submission management. This also includes order tracking, backorders, lead times, account oversight and a variety of digital payment methods that can work concurrently with analog check submissions. The future is all digital, but this goal has no shortcut.
• Establish connectivity within your enterprise resource planning (ERP) for transparency and ability to leverage automation digitally to provide scalability and foundational resources required to communicate with your customer via data transmissions in the ways that they may prefer today. This may include punchout, EDI, API, JSON, and XML. This landscape is moving just as fast. We are attempting to change the industry landscape for the fastener industry by providing a custom digital quotation software program that will reduce the time and efforts for buyers and sellers to request and submit quotes. It includes a method of syndicating requests from buyers to the supply chain of relevant suppliers, analysis tools for quote submissions, the ability to convert a quote to a purchase order to complete a transaction or print the consideration list for internal management and analog purchase order submission.

DC 360: Connected commerce embraces new digital and cloud-based applications such as headless commerce, IoT, AI and advanced analytics. Are you implementing any or all of these?

Michael Eichinger: We are in the planning stages with one partner to utilize AI for true customer personalization related to their digital interactions with our company through capturing a few datapoints based on their activity sessions on our marketplace and engagement with educational blogs and resources that may occur in other online channels.

Since we are a marketplace, we have approximately 2,000 categories and are continuously adding new products. We are exploring AI options that will help to eliminate the degree of manual data manipulation to align products appropriately to categories within our taxonomy. These applications of AI are just beginning to emerge.

DC 360: What are your top challenges in achieving connected commerce and how are you overcoming them?

Michael Eichinger: As a marketplace, our top challenges are not what other traditional companies have. We do have the same challenge of any other business to blend the customer analog experience and expectations with the digital experience in every aspect of our engagement together and with the smallest degree of recognizable change or perceived burden by our customers.

As I pointed out, mirroring your analog world of engagement with your customers digitally is a huge undertaking, but is necessary as your customer digital requirements for data transmission continue to evolve. One cannot effectively evolve or scale realistically with connected commerce and their customers if they fail to set the necessary foundations required for their customers to engage with them digitally seamlessly. The plan will inevitably fail as technology innovates along with customer expectations.

As a marketplace, we must find ways to transmit and receive data from our sellers and our customers. We are evaluating a single partner for an assortment of requirements in lieu of addressing each requirement individually.

DC 360: How will connected commerce help you better connect with internal and external stakeholders and across which digital channels?

Michael Eichinger: The answer here is “In Every Way.” Placing a business’s purpose, service, or product aside, we are living and breathing buckets of ever-changing data points in every way. From communications to transactions to KPI collection and measurement to customer personalization, to product and transaction communications. If the digital foundations are built from the ground up to create these buckets and accumulate the data, agility, scalability and use of this information can emerge and capitalized on resourcefully to communicate with internal and external stakeholders while still serving all in a traditional analog way as the industry evolves to meet with your digital capabilities in place.

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