How State Electric Brings the B2C Experience to B2B Commerce with Sitefinity and OpenEdge

Businesses today face a thorny reality. Digital experiences transcend industry lines, with innovators constantly resetting and refreshing customer expectations. Businesses are no longer just in competition with those in their industry, but with every other company.

State Electric Supply Co., one of the nation's largest and best-known electrical distributors, experienced this challenge firsthand. Over the past two decades, the B2C space had been setting the standards for online shopping. To continue to deliver a full range of quality products to partners and customers, State Electric realized its own B2B commerce experience needed to evolve.

State Electric wanted to create a frictionless experience that would increase ecommerce adoption among its B2B audiences. This meant the company needed an integrated platform where customers could log in, manage their orders, research products and make purchases from a single location.

For 20 years, State Electric’s business has run on Infor SX.e, an ERP based on Progress® OpenEdge®, which automates its backend ecommerce processes. But, the company needed a platform to deliver the frontend portion of the new ecommerce experience. 

Working with Progress partner Americaneagle.com, State Electric began building a new, B2C-inspired ecommerce experience with Progress Sitefinity®. State Electric could easily integrate with the Infor ERP and the product information management (PIM) system that handled all the product data and content.

To deliver a truly customer-focused experience, Americaneagle.com suggested taking advantage of Sitefinity’s Hawksearch and ROC Commerce integrations. With Hawkseach, State Electric can provide an AI-powered site search experience, while ROC Commerce can handle its expansive product catalogs.

Launched in 2018, the new State Electric ecommerce experience was an instant success, winning industry acclaim at the Affiliated Distributors (AD) Summit the same year. Sitefinity enabled State Electric to drive major improvements to both frontend and backend of operations.

Sitefinity plays a critical role in the order portal’s workflows. Because it was so easy to integrate the scanner system used for order management with Sitefinity, State Electric is able to reduce the number of errors and streamline the order management process.

Additionally, Sitefinity made the management of the website and ecommerce experience much easier. The digital marketing team is able to quickly build landing pages, facilitating an agile marketing approach.




The new ecommerce experience is driving much more user engagement, including:

·        New user registration (up 25% year over year)

·       Organic traffic (up 43.48% year over year)

·       Conversion rates (up 120% year over year)

·       Sessions with search (up 43.72% year over year)

·       Revenue generated from site search (up 244.79% year over year) 

For State Electric, ecommerce has evolved tremendously, going from a basic, internally developed website in the 1990s to an award-winning, multichannel experience today.

State Electric’s next digital transformation goal is to deliver personalized content to its multiple personas with the analytics and content personalization capabilities from Sitefinity Insight.