2-1 Organizational E-commerce Case Study Analysis Amazon Business, Fastenal, and Grainger PDF

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MIS-320-J4975 Electronic Business

2-1 Organizational E-commerce Case Study Analysis: Amazon Business, Fastenal, and Grainger Christopher M Crowell MIS-320-J4975 Electronic Business March 21, 2021

MIS-320-J4975 Electronic Business E-commerce for industrial supplies is growing rapidly. According to Urban Land Institute, by 2025, thirty percent of all retail shopping will occur online. According to Modern Distribution Management, seventy percent of industrial distributors are developing e-commerce solutions. An article published by Industrial Marketer Amazon Business, Fastenal, and Grainger is emerging as the industry leaders in e-commerce. Out of these three giant e-commerce leaders, Grainger has one of the unique business strategies that enabled them to evolve from an idea to a successful business model. First are their branding and PR of their website. When you visit their website, you are greeted by an older user-friendly page layout referred to as the “F-shape.” This F-shape design enables consumers to either perform their shopping by keyword lookup, browsing through the product categories, or looking at the personalized list of items Grainger believes the consumer may be interested in. The second business strategy is their product range with a combination of social and peer behavior. Grainger has taken some insight from other ecommerce businesses to help improve their product description pages. When a customer looks to purchase specific items, for example, a floor scraper, Grainger offers its customer a Customer Also Viewed listing on the right side of the page. This listing aids customers by ensuring that they remember to purchase everything they need to complete their project and increases Grainger’s sales and customer service. Since the authoring of the article “Best eCommerce Websites: Grainger Gets It Done for B2B Retail’ by Mark Boyd, Grainger has made some changes to their website. Grainger has moved away from the “F-shaped” webpage layout to a cleaner and customer simplistic layout. When you visit their site, the main focus is on product category listing that displays generic icons for the products in each of those categories. Interestingly enough, Fastenal has taken the level of

MIS-320-J4975 Electronic Business approach when it comes to their webpage layout. Just like Grainger, before entering the ecommerce business, Fastenal was a brick-and-mortar store. Both offer their customers the ability to order their items online and have the order delivered, or the customer can pick their purchases up at their local store location. Amazon Business, on the other hand, has maintained the authentic Amazon brand. When visiting their site, you brought a layout that looks and feels like the traditional consumer Amazon Prime website. Knowing that the business end-user(s) most likely interacts with Amazon Prime having the same layout provides the user with excellent customer interaction. The user does not need to figure out how to navigate through Amazon Business. In all honesty, determining which business is the most successful e-commerce site is difficult. Unlike Grainger and Fastenal, Amazon does not offer a brick-and-mortar store. Amazon is purely online delivery online. Yet Amazon is still just as successful as the other two, if not larger. Fastenal and Grainger, I believe, had a leading edge of Amazon Business due to the customers that were conducting the purchasing at the beginning of the e-commerce battle. By both being brick-and-mortar stores before getting into e-commerce, they had already built their clientele base. There will be more of a shift towards Amazon vs. Fastenal and Grainger as time and demographic change.

MIS-320-J4975 Electronic Business References Boyd, M. (2017, October 3). Best ecommerce websites: Grainger gets it done for B2B retail. Retrieved from https://ecommerceinsiders.com/ecommerce-websites-grainger-b2b-retail2213/ Gerli, J. (2016, June 19). 3 industrial e-Commerce leaders. Retrieved from https://industrialmarketer.com/3-industrial-e-commerce-leaders/...