Being Adaptable with eCommerce: Producing in a Crisis

Manufacturers Have Come Together to Meet the Increased Demand for Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) as a Result of COVID-19

Healthcare workers, essential workers, and citizens across the world looking for effective ways to prevent the spread of Covid, caused many manufacturers to abruptly transition their production efforts to the creation of masks, hoods, gowns, and other critical PPE. All the while, eCommerce has seen a steady increase as social distancing and stay at home orders dictate the way people conduct business.

To learn what this pivotal moment in history has taught manufacturers about B2B eCommerce. We answer important questions such as:

Which eCommerce features were critical in creating an easy place for PPE buyers to transact?
How manufacturers switched their production lines to help address the PPE shortages?

Register To View Our Webinar: Being Adaptable with eCommerce: Producing in a Crisis

Preview Webinar Transcript & Slides

One Week Retooling Your Production to PPE! - Slide 7

Brandy Moore: We pulled people across a lot of different groups and what we ended up doing was creating a program where you could retool your entire production to PPE within one week, and it had five easy steps.

We would work with the customer to assess what infrastructure they have, what their capacity was, what available materials they had, and really match them with the right products that they could make and easily convert to.

Aligned Positioning Through eCommerce - Slide 9

Kyle Fillmore: Once customers realized that we were going to be using our eCommerce site for this type of messaging we saw more repeat visits and we began to pivot our focus towards the ever-growing PPE market that Brandy was just mentioning.

We were able to not only confirm our current place in the market, but we were also able to start introducing new PPE specific products and packages that we hadn't offered in the past specific to our customers that were beginning to convert.

Open to Guest – Broaden Reach - Slide 23

Kris Harrington: When the masks were made available they put them right on the landing page for all customers to see. For those customers who were in need of PPE they might not have originally thought of Gerber as a source, but by visually seeing the masks available they were able to click and add the needed items to their order.

This is a great example of visual selling and what the marketing and promotion section can do for alerting customers of new products available.

Analytics - Slide 26

Kris Harrington: A must-have feature for any eCommerce store is a great analytics platform. In fact we at GenAlpha are currently implementing our new advanced analytics which allows manufacturers the opportunity to analyze product, customer, and order data from the online store.

As sellers use the flexible and agile features in an eStore to address the new business opportunities, analytics provides the insights into what's working or not working. Questions like who's buying and who's not buying, what are they not buying when do buyers leave the site, what are they looking at when they leave the site, was their product availability when they left the site?