Distributor Corporation of New England

Getting buy-in for eCommerce

The initial investment for ecommerce and PIM may have been a sticker shock for DCNE at first, but they knew their long-term viability was predicated on injecting value in the channel, and that they had to own ecommerce. They could not afford to rely on a third-party developer’s roadmap or somebody else’s content.

For DCNE, introducing ecommerce was never about eliminating jobs.  In fact, when they planned for ecommerce, they knew it would help to create even more jobs and enhance and streamline the way in which the sales force and sales support associates would serve their customers.

With the help of Absolunet, an end-to-end eCommerce agency, DCNE assembled an ecommerce team and identified their ecommerce requirements. When prioritizing their ecommerce requirements, DCNE considered impact, cost and complexity of each of the features. After about 10 months, they were ready to launch their site.

Transformational results and high praise

DCNE’s ongoing investments in eCommerce have gained major industry recognition including being publicly referred to as the “Amazon of HVAC” by Supply House Times. DCNE’s site search tool is among the best in the industry.

Each piece of large equipment and all the tools and parts (including items that must be backordered) are listed and available for purchase on their website. Salespeople and customers are now saving time through DCNE’s modern quote management dashboard. The customer portal is a one-stop-shop for the majority of interactions.

Sales representatives can easily go in, create a proposal, and forward it along to the customer. Once the customers are ready to place their orders they can simply click, accept, and check out. Additionally, they can easily choose the closest warehouse to pick up orders and receive status notifications on their order.  DCNE also provides helpful recommendations of associated products to customers at checkout and all online promotions.

Ecommerce has even enabled DCNE to break down walls and divides that previously existed in the company. Traditionally, DCNE had separate sales teams for equipment and parts. The problem was the equipment team never felt comfortable talking about parts and conversely the parts team was not comfortable talking about equipment. With ecommerce, that division no longer exists. More of DCNE’s orders include equipment and parts because there is no divide, and sales personnel are more empowered to sell the entire breadth and scope of products.

In addition, many sales representatives have years of knowledge with DCNE’s products and can recall certain product SKU’s off the top of their heads. DCNE needed everyone at that knowledge level.  It once took six to twelve months to train a new salesperson; however, with ecommerce DCNE has been able to cut training time in half!

On DCNE’s original platform, ecommerce sales were around 2.5% of their total sales, with 8,000 SKUs represented online. Today DCNE is marching toward 30% online by the end of 2020 with more than 115,000 SKUs populated on the site.  

Looking ahead

DCNE’s main goal is to drive as much business online as possible.  For many distributors, Amazon is the enemy.  Although DCNE has earned the reputation as ‘The Amazon of HVAC’’, this is the opposite of how they wish to be viewed.  While Amazon leverages scale and automation to drive transactions, DCNE leverages technology to minimize low value-add transactions and free up their employees so they can focus on delivering value in other areas.

Whatever happens, one thing is clear: DCNE will continue to do whatever they can to make sure their customers are completely satisfied. 

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