The Business
Part of thyssenkrupp Materials NA Inc., Online Metals is the world’s leading e-commerce metal and plastics supplier. The company specializes in raw materials such as alloy steel, brass, copper, nickel, titanium, and zinc, offering custom cut-to-size and small-to medium-quantity orders, shipped direct to any location.
Founded in a garage in Seattle, Washington, in 1998 and acquired by thyssenkrupp AG in 2007, Online Metals operates seven facilities across the United States and offers 70,000 products. The company serves a wide customer base that ranges from private individuals to multinational corporations and from small schools to massive government agencies, providing materials for projects as diverse as furniture repair and spacecraft construction.
The Challenge
Intent on bolstering its online capabilities and presence, Online Metals wanted to sell customized and manufactured material on demand through a consumer-grade digital experience. But its legacy e-commerce environment lacked the capabilities to handle the demand and frequency of the customizations that its customers required.
“By enabling SAP Emarsys on our websites, we've been able to offer unique and customized experiences so that we can better reach and talk to our customers at the right time, at the right place, with the right message. We can see customers engage at a higher rate of conversions or average order value or even more traffic because they're more willing to look at more pages on our website.”
The Solution
Forging innovation in metals and plastics e-commerce
To delight customers with a consumer-grade buying experience for complex B2B purchases, Online Metals invested in the SAP Commerce Cloud solution, transforming the company from a materials retailer to a materials-as-a-service provider. This move allowed the company to offer customers access to material, no matter the quantity or material size, and apply value on top, helping it go further to meet the needs of its customers.
Greg Raece, President at Online Metals, explains how this works: “Our customers can select not just a material but a specific type of material, custom cut to their chosen tolerance. And it’s delivered to them using their preferred freight options. We even offer commercial 30-day payment terms to help businesses finance their purchases. This helps us provide far more value than simply putting the metal in a tube and shipping it out.”
Online Metals chose to expand on the e-commerce foundation by launching its own marketplace. It realized this aim by integrating the SAP Commerce Marketplace Management application by Mirakl, creating a novel metals and plastics catalog marketplace, and onboarding over 50 sellers. The company also adopted SAP Emarsys to help it deliver personalized, real-time engagements at scale. Using the integrated marketing solution allows the company to better understand its customers and provide marketing messages that resonate with them.
“Capturing browsing and ordering behavior and other information from customers that they have chosen to share allows us to better connect with them. We can create targeted marketing campaigns around geographic location, industry segment, and products they have purchased or are interested in, to better meet their needs and support sales conversions.”
Enriching customers’ experience with a data-driven e-commerce ecosystem
Since implementing SAP Commerce Cloud and SAP Commerce Marketplace Management by Mirakl, Online Metals has evolved its e-commerce capabilities and is now selling products that were traditionally difficult to order in small quantities.
Also supporting the consumer-grade B2B experience, combining SAP Commerce Cloud and SAP Emarsys allows Online Metals to display meaningful recommendations and information to customers when it’s most relevant to them. With the solutions, the company’s frontline employees can also assist customers at the shopping cart level by answering their questions and generating quotes. These quotes can then be used by the customer to finalize their purchase on the e-commerce website.
Online Metals has also helped some of its sellers create digital catalogs so that they can sell direct to the consumer. As Online Metals works with many sellers that are family-owned businesses, this move means customers are now gaining access to products that were previously inaccessible to them.
The Impact
The launch of Online Metals’ e-commerce website and marketplace offerings represents a significant evolution milestone for the business, with its revenue doubling and its profits tripling during this time.
With SAP’s cutting-edge solutions at the core of its operations, Online Metals continues to redefine the future of metals and plastics e-commerce, setting a new benchmark for personalized, scalable, and seamless B2B engagement.