For the quarter ended March 31, Global Industrial, which does not break out ecommerce but does say it generates more than 50% of all sales transactions digitally, posted sales of $273.8 million. That compares with $288.6 million in the previous Q1.

The first quarter was not the best for industrial products distributor Global Industrial Inc. But the company sees its future focused on B2B ecommerce and continues to build out its digital strategy and infrastructure.

“The first quarter performance reflects a continuation of the recent demand environment, with average daily sales declining 3.7%,” CEO Barry Litwin told analysts on the company’s first quarter earnings call. “Price was neutral in the period and volume remained muted, reflecting cautionary purchase behavior, specifically within our core, small and medium business customer base.”

Global Industrial sales

For the fiscal first quarter ended March 31, Global Industrial posted $273.8 million in sales. That compares with $288.6 million last year. Global Industrial does not break out ecommerce but does say it generates more than 50% of all its sales transactions digitally.

Global Industrial net earnings were $13.3 million compared with $21.8 million in the year-ago period.

“Recent ecommerce sales performance on our new web platform has been below our expectations, and we have identified a number of user experience changes that are increasing friction while navigating our ecommerce site,” Litwin said. “We aggressively worked to address these issues. In this regard, we recently completed navigation enhancements on the product experience to enhance shopability and additional optimization efforts are ongoing.”

advertisement

Sign up

Sign up for a complimentary subscription to Digital Commerce 360 B2B News, published 4x/week. It covers technology and business trends in the growing B2B ecommerce industry. Contact Mark Brohan, vice president of B2B and Market Research Development, at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @markbrohan.

Follow us on LinkedIn and be the first to know when we publish Digital Commerce 360 B2B News content.