Global Industrial is paying “approximately $69.2 million in cash” to acquire St. Louis-based Indoff, Global Industrial said. Indoff will continue to operate under its own brand and leadership team as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Port Washington, New York-based Global Industrial.

Complementing a multichannel B2B strategy

Barry Litwin, CEO, Global Industrial Co.

Barry Litwin, CEO of Global Industrial, said Indoff will complement his company’s multichannel sales strategy. Global Industrial relies on ecommerce to process more than half of its sales transactions, and Indoff brings a network of more than 360 sales partners that “extends our one-to-one sales reach to new customers and markets,” Litwin says.

Litwin adds that Indoff’s product lines and customer base — ranging from material handling systems to office furniture and lighting systems for such customers as financial giant Wells Fargo and manufacturers Lockheed Martin and Johnson Controls — will also strengthen Global Industrial’s market position and support the broader use of the company’s B2B ecommerce platform.

Jim Malkus, CEO, Indoff

Global Industrial already sells over 1 million SKUs of maintenance, repair and operations (MRO) products. That includes its own private label products and equipment branded by Caterpillar that companies use to operate their facilities.

Jim Malkus, CEO of Indoff, says he expects Indoff to grow as a Global Industrial subsidiary

“As part of Global Industrial, we will be in a stronger position to drive the value we provide our customers and support the continued expansion of the business,” he says. Indoff caters to B2B and B2C industries including distribution, healthcare, finance, education, legal, engineering, manufacturing, hospitality, and government.

Global Industrial’s EnvisionB2B speakers

Klaus Werner, former chief marketing officer, Global Industrial Co.

Alex Tomey, chief merchandising officer, Global Industrial Co.

At the EnvisionB2B 2023 Conference & Exhibition in June in Chicago, Alex Tomey, Global Industrial’s chief merchandising officer, will speak on sustainability as a market differentiator. Klaus Werner, Global Industrial’s former chief marketing officer, will speak on customer loyalty strategies.

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Alex Tomey, senior vice president and chief merchandising officer, Global Industrial Co.

Alex Tomey, senior vice president and chief merchandising officer for industrial and commercial products distributor Global Industrial Co., is applying his 20 years of merchandising expertise to help Global Industrial improve margin performance, accelerate new category expansion, and strengthen core and private brand product growth.

Prior to joining Global Industrial in 2021, Tomey applied his merchandising expertise at such companies as Petco, DICK’S Sporting Goods, Kohl’s, and Walmart.

DC360: What is driving B2B companies like Global Industrial Co. to expand online?

Tomey:  B2B customers expect a similar experience purchasing products online as they have in their personal life; everyone is challenged for time and the convenience of researching and buying products online greatly improves efficiencies. We continue to focus on improving the customer experience by elevating our content, functionality, and integration with our managed sales organization.

DC360: What are your biggest internal or and external barriers?

Tomey: The pandemic, the supply chain crisis and inflation has created a lot of disruption in the market place the last three years. It also inspired a lot of transformation and innovation. At Global Industrial, we re-branded our company, launched a new website, and re-vamped our ‘Go to Market’ strategy, focusing on elevating the customer experience.

DC360: What are the chief gains you’re realizing?

Tomey:  We have doubled down on our customer focus; fully integrating our product and marketing strategies, operational efficiencies, and customer service. We are confident this will position us to drive customer acquisition and growth over the long term.

DC360: What is the most valuable piece of advice you have on how to launch online B2B sales or increase them?

Tomey: Develop seamless customer touch points to drive efficiency and improve the overall experience.

Alex Tomey, senior vice president and chief merchandising officer of distributor Global Industrial Co., will speak during the session, “Make Sustainability A Differentiator for Your Company,” at the EnvisionB2B Conference & Exhibition in June in Chicago. 

Peter Lucas is a Digital Commerce 360 contributing editor covering B2B digital commerce technology and strategy.

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IBT Industrial Solutions — an industrial products distributor for factories and warehouses in such industries as manufacturing, food processing, packaging, bottling, and power generation — realized the need to deliver more personalized online buying experiences to its customers after it launched a B2B ecommerce site two years ago.

Carin Sampson, vice president, human resources and marketing, IBT Industrial Solutions

IBT learned that its online customers fall into two distinct categories: legacy customers who transitioned to digital purchasing and digital-first customers who have long preferred the online channel and started doing business with IBT after its website launched. Each customer segment has its own needs when it comes to ecommerce and uses the company’s website differently when purchasing.

For example, legacy customers will search for products ranging from industrial motors and metalworking tools to safety equipment and janitorial supplies by part numbers. In contrast, digital-first customers will search by keywords.

Helping customers manage their overall buying process

At the same time, legacy customers tend to view IBT’s website as a self-service purchasing tool, but digital-first customers expect the site to help them better manage their overall buying processes. The latter often want to reorder products in one click and access and print past orders and invoices.

But IBT realized it developed its ecommerce site primarily to service the needs of its legacy customers, which led to lower conversions rates and sales among digital-first buyers.

“Our site was set up to support legacy customers, which is why we did not have as much success with digital-first customers,” says Carin Sampson, who leads IBT’s ecommerce strategy in her role as vice president of human resources and marketing. “We had a group of beta testers that we tailored the site to, but we didn’t turn the lessons learned from that group into something more scalable for a broader audience.”

IBT worked with digital agency Xngage to deploy and modify its new ecommerce site on software from Optimizely.

IBT generates about $200 million in sales annually through its ecommerce site. Since launching the site, it has started a personalization strategy that makes its site search more dynamic, leveraging buyers’ online purchasing behavior for product recommendations and personalized videos and marketing messages.

To improve its site search, IBT is looking at adding artificial intelligence capabilities that predict a customer’s keyword search term, then displays relevant results. This capability is expected to reduce friction during search and the purchasing experience.

Applying AI to personalized videos

On the product recommendations side, IBT plans to begin leveraging past customer purchasing data to recommend relevant products and brands. The company is also looking at applications that will allow it to track a newer buyer’s behavior on the site to make product recommendations, as opposed to relying on the buyer’s past online purchasing history, which may be thin or nonexistent.

The idea for adding personalized videos grew from research IBT conducted into how artificial intelligence can improve personalization.

“AI is something I follow, and there are lot of innovative ways it is being used — and personalized videos are one of them,” Sampson says. “There are companies that produce personalized videos using AI, and our aim is to explore this space and experiment with how we can use personalized videos to engage customers.”

Key to making its personalization strategy work will be integrating new personalization engines and tools to its ecommerce platform. As part of its personalization strategy, IBT is upgrading its enterprise resource planning system to help improve data flow between the ERP software and IBT’s ecommerce platform.

“Our legacy ERP predates APIs, and that’s where the complexity with integration comes in,” says Sampson, who adds the company’s ecommerce platform integrates easily with its product information management (PIM) system. “For us, it’s about the tech stack, not one app.”

Making the buyer’s job easier

Once IBT completely installs its new ERP system, Sampson says the company will be able to make relevant product recommendations for each customer, whatever their interests.

In addition, IBT is looking to add predictive analytics to forecast what products customers are likely to buy, helping IBT to achieve the right balance in its catalog. The company has more than 2 million SKUs in its ERP system.

“Right now, we can get data on what a customer buys and how often, but we can’t predict what they are likely to buy,” Sampson says. “That is a capability we want to pull into the personalization mix.”

Having predictive capabilities will also open the door for IBT to proactively reach out to customers. For example, the distributor plans to use customer purchasing histories to identify products that are regularly reordered and at what intervals, so it can send reminders to customers when the time to place a reorder is approaching.

“Customers care about convenience and proactive service, whether it be a reminder to reorder a product or predictive maintenance,” says Sampson. “Providing convenience makes the customer’s job easier.”

Steady increases in ecommerce sales

Overall, ecommerce sales for the company are showing steady growth. During the first few months of 2023, ecommerce sales grew about 20% compared with the same period a year earlier. This growth comes after ecommerce sales more than doubled in 2022 over 2021.

“The growth through our digital channel is outpacing growth in traditional sales channels,” Sampson says.

Another area where IBT is improving the buying experience is by reducing the number of products in its online catalog in favor of higher-quality products buyers want.

“Initially, we focused on quantity, but we have found we would have benefitted more with a ‘less is more’ approach first,” Sampson says. “Having built our site for existing customers, we now know we need to provide features that appeal to digital-first customers if we are to build strong relationships with them.”

Carin Sampson, vice president of human resources and marketing, IBT Industrial Solutions, will speak at the EnvisionB2B 2023 Conference & Exhibition on integrating ERP and ecommerce technology and building resilient supply chains.

Peter Lucas is a Digital Commerce 360 contributing editor covering B2B digital commerce technology and strategy.

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All in, manufacturers grew B2B digital commerce about 15% to $623.3 billion in 2022 from $543.3 billion in 2021.

Distributors, meanwhile, grew year over year much faster, with ecommerce sales growing 25% in 2022 to $1.4 trillion from $1.1 trillion in 2021.

Distribution companies move faster on digital commerce and transformation than manufacturers because distributors’ prime customers are now younger and increasingly prefer digital channels to traditional paper and in-person purchasing.

Young buyers prefer digital self-service commerce

In a study last year based on a survey of 14,000 B2B buyers, Forrester Research found that young buyers, far more than their older peers, preferred digital and self-service purchasing methods over traditional in-person options.

Among B2B buyers, those born in 1981 or later “now hold the keys to decision-making for the majority of purchases,” Forrester says. It defines young buyers as millennials and Generation Z and older buyers as baby boomers. Millennial and Gen Z buyers are much more digital in their channel usage than their older counterparts. For example, 35% of young buyers say they will use an enterprise app to make corporate purchases.

But 24% of older B2B buyers prefer placing orders with an inside sales representative, compared with just 19% of millennial and Gen Z buyers.

Fastenal Co., an industrial and construction products distributor, is typical of the large public distribution companies seeing more digital purchasing across the board because of fast-changing customer demand.

Fastenal is on a mission to grow digital commerce. But for Fastenal, the online road takes many forms and is not as linear a path as building and maintaining a single ecommerce site.

Fastenal is building out its digital channels through many facets, including internet vending machines, ecommerce, and electronic data interchange. It has reached the day when electronic sales account for half of all revenue, with first-quarter digital sales at 54% of total sales for the period ended March 31.

A big priority for the company moving into 2023 is building out what it calls its digital footprint.

Fastenal grows its digital footprint

“Ecommerce, the next piece of our, what we call, digital footprint, daily sales rose 48% in the fourth quarter,” president and CEO Dan Florness said. “Again, incredible traction in that area. We have really seen traction move in the last three years, partly a function of COVID. And I think a lot of people are seeing those kinds of patterns, but also, we have gotten better as an organization in our ability to execute on ecommerce.”

Fastenal reported an increase in 2022 sales to $6.980 billion. That is up 16% from $6.010 billion in 2021. Meanwhile, ecommerce sales were $1.07 billion, compared with $925.1 million in 2021. Based on $1 billion in ecommerce sales, Digital Commerce 360 projects that ecommerce accounted for about 15% of all sales in 2022.

Fastenal includes in its digital footprint ecommerce sales along with customer transactions processed through its FMI inventory management programs, including FASTtock, FASTbin and its FASTVend internet-connected vending machines. The company’s digital footprint in the fourth quarter of 2022 represented 52.6% of sales. That is an increase from 46.4% of sales in the fourth quarter of 2021.

Fastenal is growing out its digital footprint in large measure because of customer demand, says Edwards Jones research analyst Jeff Windau.

“Fastenal is having success implementing on-site locations and product vending machines,” he says in a research brief. “The pace of customer implementation has been improving since the pandemic lows.”

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MSC Industrial ecommerce sales

Total ecommerce sales increased 0.05% year over year to $595.8 million for the fiscal second quarter ended March 4. MSC Industrial ecommerce sales amount to 62% of total sales. In comparison, total sales increased 0.04% to $961.6 million.

“We think we can be doing better,” Gershwind said on a second-quarter earnings call. He added that improvements were already well under way with digital technology under the leadership of MSC’s first chief digital officer.

John Hill, chief digital and information officer, MSC Industrial Supply Co.

“It’s been nearly a year since John Hill joined us as MSC’s first chief digital and information officer, and progress with our technology function is encouraging,” Gershwind said, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript of the earnings call. “We are enhancing our ecommerce functionality and expect to see incremental benefits in the coming quarters.”

Increasingly digital

Kristen Actis-Grande, chief financial officer, also noted that one of MSC’s priorities “is digital, which includes all aspects of MSC’s digital engagement with customers, suppliers and associates.”

When asked on the earnings call how MSC was growing sales among smaller companies and government agencies as well as larger companies, Gerswhind again cited ecommerce as critical to its strategy.

“Ecommerce has application across the board, all customer sizes,” Gershwind said. “But certainly for smaller customers, the enhancements we’re putting in place, we’re already doing pretty well in ecommerce.”

He added, “We are improving our product information and customer data, making for a better customer service experience and a more efficient business.”

Ecommerce sales were also helped by MSC’s growth of internet-connected vending machines.

“Vending machine net sales grew mid-teens year over year and reached $89.4 million, representing 15% of total net sales,” MSC said.

MSC also continues to drive growth through acquisition. In January, it completed the acquisition of two Ohio-based distributors:

• Buckeye Industrial Supply Co., a metalworking products distributor that caters to manufacturers
• True-Edge Grinding, which brings MSC “new capabilities in customer tool manufacturing and grinding,” Gershwind said.

Speaking at EnvisionB2B 2023

John Hill, MSC’s chief digital and information officer, will give a keynote address at Digital Commerce 360’s EnvisionB2B 2023 Conference & Exhibition in June in Chicago.

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Kathleen Lewarchick

“Visual commerce,” or online buying that uses 360-degree image views, interactive 3D models, and in some cases, augmented reality, has made the jump to B2B ecommerce. Introduced by the gaming world, visual commerce became more mainstream when B2C brands began offering enhanced visual experiences. Think eyewear retailing, where consumers “try on” frames, or furniture buying, where buyers preview products in their virtual home. It was only a matter of time before those experiences appeared in B2B.

How visual commerce helps B2B buyers

Buyers look for clarity as they step through an online customer journey. Ordering and reordering can be straightforward, but increasingly distributors and manufacturers have turned to “solution selling” of interconnected products using a visual approach. Buyers appreciate seeing a more fully integrated list of materials. It removes the guesswork and saves time. Sometimes it even saves them money.

In some categories, visual commerce provides wholesalers (and even their consumers) with engaging experiences. It might be a virtual showroom with curated collections that support full online buying. Other times it is a mixed-use tool, a digital assist: buyers peruse fixtures and materials in a real showroom and place items in an online cart, on a device, as they shop. This can save buyers time and it can be a wonderful way to cross-sell them throughout the customer journey.

New technology tools

One tool — exploded-view diagrams, or schematics showing parts together — was a mainstay for engineers. But they are more common now throughout B2B ecommerce.  Buyers can now see the entire solution, both holistically and individually, and order with them. Per the parts diagram below, the exploded view integrates with the order management system. See a part that you need? Check. See the whole solution? Check, check. In either case, just click and place it in the cart.

An exploded-view diagram, which is becoming more common in B2B ecommerce, lets buyers view and click to buy individual parts of complex equipment.

One B2B company incorporated this technology into their user experience flow. The goal was twofold:

1. to make it easier for B2B sellers in their organization to explain larger, integrated solutions; and
2. to make it easier for their customers, B2B procurement teams, to visualize the outcome.

By creating an integrated visual tied to the company’s order management system, they reduced steps in the customer journey. As the ecommerce manager says, “There’s a wonderful moment when buyers say: ‘Aha! I see how it all works.’ We want to delight and relieve buyers during the process.”

While not all B2B categories are a match for transactional visual commerce, other augmented reality tools are on the cusp of changing the way that overall B2B business performs. Again, driven by experiences in gaming, buyers like MRO (maintenance, repair and operations) engineers can now don A/R headgear or use tablets to “see” solutions in their natural environment.  As a result, they may uncover potential barriers earlier in the buying process, maybe even prior to ordering. This accelerates the knowledge build and helps save time and money with returns.

MRO engineers use visual commerce to view products in their natural environment before placing an order.

Preparing for the future

Visual commerce may never fully replace traditional ecommerce, just as “voice commerce” hasn’t become the dominant way to place B2B orders yet. However, visual commerce will continue to be incorporated into many facets of B2B digital commerce given the appetite that online users have for strong visuals. A great place for your organization to start is with a strategic discussion about use cases. These provide the foundation alongside good product data, and with technologies like Digital Asset Management systems, you evolve toward the Visual Commerce experiences that your customers increasingly expect.

About the author

Kathleen Leigh Lewarchick is the VP of Marketing for Xngage LLC, a B2B digital commerce services company with more than 60 clients across the industrial trades. She is the former PURELL® Hand Sanitizer Brand Director, has co-created automated replenishment products with Amazon Business, and created telehealth solutions for a company that she later helped sell to CVS Health. 

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Klaus Werner, senior vice president and chief marketing officer, Global Industrial Co.

Ecommerce accounts for more than 50% of all sales transactions at Global Industrial Co., a maintenance, repair and operations (MRO) distributor  with more than $1 billion in annual sales. Here, senior vice president and chief marketing officer Klaus Werner provides insights about digital expansion and personalizing the online purchasing experience.

Werner will speak during the June 20 “Build Customer Loyalty” panel and workshop session and give a featured presentation June 21 on “Driving B2B Success With a B2C Twist” at the EnvisionB2B 2023 Conference & Exhibition in Chicago.

DC 360: What is driving B2B companies like Global Industrial to expand online?

Werner: The increase in B2B ecommerce continues to reflect changes in the market and customer digital trends. Ecommerce remains a strong and growing component of the B2B market. Global Industrial has a long history of ecommerce leadership and a dedicated one-to-one sales team. This combination provides a very compelling and value-additive omnichannel experience to our customers.

DC 360: What are your biggest internal or and external barriers?

Werner: Businesses have faced some challenging external forces the past couple of years, from economic headwinds to inflation and supply chain disruptions. Global Industrial’s ability to navigate these challenges and deliver operational excellence has made it a stronger and more flexible organization. Internally, our daily focus is on delivering an exceptional customer experience and driving continuous innovation. These are the keys to long-term success and allow you to stay ahead of the competition.

DC 360: What are the chief gains you’re realizing?

Werner: We are delivering a fully integrated brand marketing campaign that is enhancing awareness of Global Industrial across industries and activating our “We Can Supply That” tagline with customers. This is allowing us to provide customers with the right solutions to help them address challenges and be successful. We believe this positions us to capture market share through customer acquisition and retention while deepening existing relationships.

DC 360: What is the most valuable piece of advice you have on how to launch online B2B sales or increase them?

Werner: Put the customer at the center of everything you do. Be an excellent listener and execute flawlessly.

DC 360: Looking back over the past few years, is there anything you wish you had done differently in ecommerce?

Werner: I wish we were quicker in driving a personalized ecommerce experience. In our one-to-one sales organization, personal touch comes through a direct relationship, but in a digital world that connection can be lost. The innovative new digital platform we launched last year, which includes enhanced personalization and resources to shop by your industry, significantly strengthens our capabilities. It’s an area where we will continue to be a leader and look forward to bringing further innovation.

DC 360: What excites you the most in new digital commerce technology?

Werner: ChatGPT—it accelerates product descriptions; it will completely transform customer service, and the opportunities are endless.

DC 360: Going forward, what do you see as the most significant commerce challenges and opportunities? 

Werner: Challenge: Driving continuous innovation throughout the organization and continuing to differentiate our brand, products, and value in the market. Opportunity: Enhance Global Industrial’s brand recognition and the market’s understanding of the wealth of services and products we provide. Continuing to grow the customer base, expand our Global Industrial Exclusive Brands product line, and deliver an innovative and personalized ecommerce experience.

Jim Daly is a Mount Prospect, Illinois-based freelance journalist covering business and technology.   

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Sandy Mattinson, soon to be president of Zoro.com

Zoro.com, a fast-growing, online-only unit of W.W. Grainger Inc. that supplies equipment and tools to small businesses throughout the United States, has named Sandy Mattinson as its new president, Zoro said today.

Mattinson, who currently serves as chief revenue officer, will take over as president on April 1, succeeding Kevin Weadick, who has served as president since 2017.

“Sandy is a consummate leader who both inspires and challenges her teams in new and creative ways all with the goal of doing good for our team members, customers and communities,” D.G. Macpherson, chairman and CEO of Grainger, said in announcing Mattinson’s appointment. “Sandy’s strategic vision, thought leadership, innovative bent and authenticity helped drive the company’s success over the past four years, and as president she will continue to strengthen the Zoro brand and deliver value for our customers and suppliers.”

Mattinson joined Zoro in 2019 as its first female vice president and has taken on roles of increasing responsibility across the company, including serving as the chief merchandising officer. In that role, the company says Mattinson provided “strategic and operational leadership across Zoro’s business development, category management, product information, pricing, and digital merchandising teams.” In addition, she was “instrumental in Zoro expanding its assortment to 11 million products and achieving $1 billion in annual revenue in 2022.”

“I’m honored and energized by the opportunity to lead the Zoro team,”  Mattinson said, adding: “We are passionate about delivering a differentiated experience for our business customers, and thanks to the great talent at Zoro, I believe the best is yet to come.”

Mattinson will participate in a “fireside chat” keynote presentation about Zoro’s growth strategy at the EnvisionB2B 2023 Conference & Exhibition in Chicago in June.

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DG Macpherson, chairman and CEO, W.W. Grainger Inc.

Sales at W.W. Grainger Inc.’s full-service and web-only businesses drove the industrial products distributor’s total 2022 sales up 16.9% year over year to $15.2 billion, chairman and CEO DG Macpherson said today.

For the fourth quarter, total sales increased 13.2% year over year to $3.8 billion. Grainger, a prominent distributor of maintenance, repair and operations (MRO) products, didn’t break out total ecommerce sales for the full year or Q4. But it has said in in prior financial reporting that more than 75% of orders originate through Grainger’s digital channels.

Zoro surpasses $1 billion in annual sales

But Macpherson said in an earnings call that web-only sales in its Endless Assortment segment, including Zoro.com in the United States and Japan-based MonotaRo.com, increased 0.9% year over year to $670 million; adjusting for depreciation of the Japanese yen, Endless Assortment sales rose 16.8% in constant currency.

In addition, Deidra Merriwether, chief financial officer, noted that Zoro’s 2022 sales surpassed $1 billion for the first time in a 12-month period. Grainger says Zoro and MonotaRo cater to smaller companies with less complex needs compared with the larger customers served by Grainger’s High-Touch Solutions segment, which includes the flagship Grainger.com and Grainger’s sales team.

Grainger also said Zoro ended the year with 4.57 million registered users. That’s up 17% from 3.92 million a year earlier. At the same time, Zoro increased its number of SKUs 28% to 11.1 million. Zoro is on course to add about 2 million SKUs annually over the next several years, Grainger said.

Deidra “Dee” Merriwether, chief financial officer, W.W. Grainger Inc.

Grainger said Q4 High-Touch Solutions sales increased 16.8% to $3.07 billion, as the segment’s operating earnings rose 32.9% to $477 million.

In 2023, Merriwether said, Grainger expects ongoing revenue growth to more than $16 billion will support significant investments in technology and services. The company expects to generate 2023 cash flow from $1.45 billion to $1.65 billion. That’s an increase of over $215 million by mid-year compared with 2022. It plans 2023 capital spending within range of $450-$525 million, investing in its distribution center network, customer experience, and product information technology.

In addition, Grainger will invest this year in “our environmental, social and governance objectives internally and supporting our customers to help them achieve their own ESG goals,” Merriwether said.

Zoro executive to speak at EnvisionB2B 2023

Zoro chief merchandising officer Sandy Mattinson will be a featured keynote speaker at EnvisionB2B 2023 June 20-22 at the Chicago Hilton in downtown Chicago.

She will deliver a fireside on Wednesday, June 21, 2023, from 9:30 a.m to 10 a.m.

Mattinson will discuss how the distributor anticipates dynamic change in digital commerce, executes a flexible and winning ecommerce strategy, and how other organizations can do the same.

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Fastenal is building out its digital channels through many facets including including internet vending machines, ecommerce and electronic data interchange. It is almost to the day when electronic sales account for nearly half of all revenue.

A big priority for the company moving into 2023 is building out what it calls its digital footprint.

Fastenal ecommerce grows

Dan Florness, president and CEO, Fastenal Co.

“Ecommerce, the next piece of our, what we call, digital footprint, daily sales rose 48% in the fourth quarter,” president and CEO Dan Florness said. “Again, incredible traction in that area. We’ve really seen that traction move in the last three years, partly a function of COVID. And I think a lot of people are seeing those kinds of patterns, but also we’ve gotten better as an organization and our ability to execute on ecommerce, and that’s times through the numbers as well.

Fastenal reported an increase in sales to $6.980 billion. That’s up 16% from $6.010 billion in 2021. Meanwhile, net sales were $1.07 billion, compared with $925.1 million in 2021. Based on $1 billion in ecommerce sales, Digital Commerce 360 projects that ecommerce accounted for about 14% of all sales.

“EDI and punched out catalogs and really large customer-oriented ecommerce was up 45%, and our web sales was up almost 60%,” he told analysts. “Our goal is 65% of net sales going through our digital footprint next year. In the interest of full disclosure, that’s an aggressive goal, but it’s our goal nonetheless.”

Fastenal includes in its digital footprint ecommerce sales along with customer transactions processed through its FMI inventory management programs, including FASTtock, FASTbin and its FASTVend internet-connected vending machines. The company’s digital footprint in the fourth quarter of 2022 represented 52.6% of sales. That’s an increase from 46.4% of sales in the fourth quarter of 2021.

Fastenal is growing out its digital footprint in large measure because of customer demand, says Edwards Jones research analyst Jeff Windau.

“Fastenal is having success implementing onsite locations and product vending machines,” he says in a research brief. “The pace of customer implementation has been improving since the pandemic lows.”

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