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120,000 Products onboarded, Sourced from 64 Suppliers
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Website Product Pages Increased from 20 to 120,000
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Achieved a 5x Return on Investment
Why
McDurmon Distributing is one of the most respected distributors of propeller and marine parts in the US. With thousands of different product variants, their product catalog is very complex to manage.
McDurmon had the goal of growing their business by opening up an online sales channel to better serve their current customers and reach new audiences. As part of this initiative, they introduced a new PIM system to their business and two new eCommerce sites. They soon recognized the challenge of needing to source, classify, and clean the product data of their 120,000 products to populate the PIM and online stores. This information was currently with vendors in disparate locations and printed PDF catalogs. Without a dedicated team to do this manually, they could see the scale of adding thousands of products to their database was too big of a challenge. Through a recommendation from their eCommerce consultant, McDurmon engaged Vesta as the solution.
How
Over the last six months, Vesta streamlined McDurmon’s product data onboarding process, improving both speed and performance in the following ways:
Data Collection
- Extracted Data for 20,000 products from PDF Catalogs into a workable digital format
- Contacted each vendor and established a channel to receive on-going product and pricing updates directly to Vesta
Product Categorization
Using automated keyword analysis, classified all products into two separate category trees, one for B2B and one for B2C.
Option Set Creation
Extracted attributes such as color and size from the product titles and used these to dynamically build BigCommerce option sets.
Data Cleansing/ Normalization
Standardized attribute values and labels, acronym expansion, and product name creation for a consistent data set optimized for search and SEO.
Integration with Akeneo PIM
The collected product and pricing data is cleaned within the Vesta platform before flowing into their PIM and out to multiple channels.
The Results
Over the past six months, McDurmon has on-boarded 120,000 SKU’s with Vesta sourced from 64 suppliers.
The actions have grown McDurmon’s website from 20 product pages to over 120,000 filled with high-quality product information. As a result, they are experiencing increases in website traffic and revenue. Their website has gone from being almost unsearchable to having consistently growing traffic.
To complete this onboarding work manually would have taken one person, around three years of work, or a team of people to finish sooner. Return on investment for the initial onboarding of these 120,000 SKUs has been a 5x return. The continued value delivered by maintaining the product and pricing data over time will increase to a 10.5x return in the first year.
“Based on my estimates, it would have taken a team of 4 or 5 people to do the job that was done with Vesta in the same time period. Possibly more” Rating = 9/10
- Peter Fougerousse, Digital Marketing Consultant, McDurmon Distributing
“I was impressed with the skills that were used to gather all the scattered data that we had in a variety of ways. Vesta did an incredible job taking what would have taken years of work to do and doing it in a time frame that we never thought possible. (Why we have never done this until now!) Everyone was helpful and quick to answer or do any task that was given. Amazing company and I hope to continue to work closely with the team in the future.” Rating = 10/10
- Meredith Keller, McDurmon Distributing
