Brian Aebig, vice president of sales for Tech Data Canada
Tech Data Canada has updated the e-commerce side of its Web site, bringing some of the new features introduced in recent updates in the United States north of the border for the first time.
With the update to its shop.techdata.ca site, the distributor has modernized its Web presence, said Brian Aebig, vice president of sales for Tech Data Canada, introducing responsive design for the firs time, and greatly enhancing the search and comparison features of the site.
“The pace of change we’re all experiencing, the manner in which technology wants to be consumed, and the interface with which people want to face that, demands that we modernize,” Aebig said. “We’e had a strong and viable product, but the market had the potential to leapfrog us so we had to make some investments.”
David Spindler, global vice president for eBusiness at Tech Data, noted that globally, ebusiness “represents 70 per cent of our total business transactions,” and said the distributor is focused on moving its Web functionality beyond simple making and managing orders, and towards building solutions.
Perhaps the most telling nod in that direction today is a new dashboarding feature, which Aebig called “far more customizable tan any we’ve ever offered in the past,” but the update also helps set the stage for future updates.
The “low-hanging fruit” and the commercial or “velocity” side of the business represent “the bulk of the activity” on the site today, Aebig said, but with a more modern platform in place, the distributor will now start to add in more software and services into its capabilities.
“We want to be more meaningful across more spaces than just the commercial velocity hardware business,” Aebig said. “We are launching here a fantastic tool that gives us some runway on bringing that to market.”
Aebig said the distributor will be much more iterative with the site, updating more often, and taking the site in new directions more rapidly.
“The market will decide what’s next, but software and cloud can and will find its way in,” Aebig said. “Things that we haven’t even anticipated yet will find their way in, we just have to keep our finger n the pulse of what partners are asking for.”
David Spindler, global vice president for eBusiness at Tech Data
Spindler added that some of those plans are already in place, particularly as combinations of hardware with attached subscriptions — think Cisco’s current networking lineup — rise to the forefront.
“This is driving us to close the complexity gap of the traditional endpoint business and advanced solutions business” across its Web properties, Spindler said, including the e-commerce side of the site, and its StreamOne cloud offerings.
The design and functionality changes introduced in the Canadian site this week echo those introduced over the last year in the States, changes which the distributor is quick to point out earned it two awards — B2B e-commerce player of the year, and B2B e-commerce Web site design of the year — at last year’s Internet Retailer Excellence Awards. The site update “is the result of the great work they’ve put into the dot-com site,” Aebig said.
