Mayer takes 90 years of expertise onto B2B Commerce Cloud

Top ten electrical distributor and one of the largest wholesale distributors in the US 

Mayer was founded in 1930 by Roslyn and Ben Weil as The Electric Supply Company in Birmingham, Alabama. To survive the economic effects of the great depression, Mr. Weil sold the business to Max Mayer, who renamed the company Mayer Electric Supply.

Mr. Weil, who continued to manage the business and thanks to Mr. Mayer, was able to re-purchase the company in 1934 keeping the Mayer name. In 1979, Patsy and Charles Collat, Mr. Weil’s daughter and son-in-law, purchased the company and through their hard work, leadership and vision, the company grew to a leader in the electrical distribution industry.

Today, Mayer is one of the nation’s largest wholesale distributors of electrical products and equipment serving contractors, industrials, OEMs, integrators, institutions, government entities, utility providers, commercial businesses and residential customers. With over 65 locations across 12 states, Mayer is defined by its connected team, unrivaled service and innovative solutions.

An industry leader in an increasingly digital age

Mayer is a regional powerhouse whose leaders are influential in the electrical industry. In fact, Mayer’s president, Wes Smith is also Chairman of NAED (National Association of Electrical Distributors). As a leading voice in the industry, Smith shares his visionary perspective on the digitalization of the electrical industry. Mayer is part of leading organizations like IMARK Group and utilizes the electrical industry’s leader for digital product content, IDEA. Mayer prides itself on giving back to the industry and acknowledging the challenges that electrical distributors face in today’s digital-first world.

As a leader and innovator in the industry, Mayer was an early adopter of ecommerce. Mayer had outgrown their original ecommerce platform and was ready to migrate away from it.

While Mayer prides itself on being a visionary leader in the industry, the previous site no longer evoked that sentiment. Mayer required a site that differentiated them from the competition and provided a user experience that was consistent with what customers have grown to expect from Mayer.

Mayer has long term, generational relationships with their customers. When their customers interact with Mayer, they can expect unrivaled service. However, over time, the online experience was becoming more disconnected from the offline experience. They wanted to represent themselves online, the same way their associates do in-person.

Other pitfalls of the previous platform included a less than one percent customer adoption rate, an outdated user interface, lack of enriched product information and little to no ability to personalize the experience.

Mayer set out to modernize the brand experience, improve the backend integration and scale their product catalog to include partner brands and suppliers’ products. They wanted to transform from a distributor with an online presence, to a distributor with an evolutionary, best-in-class ecommerce presence.

Finding a best-in-class B2B ecommerce platform

Upon establishing the need for a replatform, Mayer’s Executive Vice President and Chief Digital Officer, Barry Carden formed a team of Mayer associates that included ecommerce, product and marketing expertise to assess and select a platform.

Mayer’s ecommerce team had a variety of criteria to make the selection:
• Customization
• Backend integration to their ERP, JD Edwards
• Integration to their product information sourced from IDEA/DDS
• Scalability
• High quality search
• Implementation partner network

Optimizely and implementation partner, Xngage up-level Mayer’s ecommerce offering

Mayer selected Optimizely B2B Commerce Cloud due to its hyper-focus on B2B and native capabilities that covered major gaps that were needed to support their strategic direction including capabilities for search, CMS, personalization, customer segments, promotions and a mobile app.

Mayer went live on Optimizely B2B Commerce Cloud in July 2020. Since then, they’ve enjoyed much more control over the look and feel of the site, enhanced search and more sophisticated integration that enables the flow of important information into the site.

Under the guidance of Optimizely’s implementation partner, Xngage, Mayer was able to successfully bridge integration between multiple systems including their ERP and product feed. Mayer is harnessing multiple technologies to deliver a seamless experience to their users.

There are thousands of details to manage in order to overhaul an electrical distribution website. Xngage led a ground-up rebuild of the existing Mayer site flawlessly. All the content and product information on the website was brand new, refreshed and rebuilt.

Mayer’s new site differentiates them from other electrical distributors

Mayer associates, suppliers and customers have provided unanimous positive feedback about the upgraded site.

Associates can leverage the website to help improve the sales process. It was never designed to replace the sales process, but rather supplement it. In addition, Mayer’s marketing team can easily customize landing pages, product catalogs and content for each supplier leveraging the built-in B2B Commerce Cloud CMS.

Customers now enjoy more information at their fingertips than ever before. They are enabled to easily self-serve and login to find information about their most recent orders, invoices and other important data.

In addition, Mayer offers exponentially more product data on their site. Xngage helped to grow Mayer’s product catalog to over 65,000 products and that number continues to grow using Optimizely’s ability to integrate product data from IDEA/DDS. Many of the products have anywhere from 20 to 30 pieces of attributed content like spec sheets, drawings, brochures, 360 images , videos and other information.

With more product information, a strong solutions-focused configurator tool and customized content, more customers have adopted the new ecommerce website. Mayer is now able to sell a higher volume of products and craft more end-to-end solutions for their customer base.

The website is part of Mayer’s larger omnichannel strategy that aims to deliver a consistent, best-in-class experience whether a customer calls a sales associate, visits a branch or engages with Mayer online.

Mayer continues to push the envelope for what’s possible to achieve with B2B Commerce Cloud and maintains a strong influence in the electrical distribution industry as a whole.