CDW - Online Commerce Machine!
What caught my eye about CDW is that it is stretching the Amazon/B2C model to suit higher-end products not normally associated with retail sale—including a surprisingly large stock of Juniper Network products. CDW is a revenue-generating machine, and it has been extremely smart about integrating social media into the browsing experiences, including a prominent Twitter feed on the home page and a great “Click-to-chat” feature in the banner.
One of the primary motivators for subscribing to corporate social feeds is “to find deals,” so this hits the sweet spot. In the coming year, it will be interesting to see whether CDW really takes advantage of its Twitter feed and updates it more frequently to promote loyalty. I personally would like to see the company offer methods to share on individual product pages.
Have you seen other successful B2B online commerce models? What are your favorite/least favorite features on CDW?
Tags: eCommerce, Juniper Networks, Twitter
I _almost_ agree…but when you get into the meat of trying to buy something from their site, they come up lacking. For example, you can search on “firewall” and then filter to “Brand:Juniper” – but there it stops. You now have 331 products to search through – all firewall related, but almost none of them actual firewalls. This of course is not limited to Juniper. If you do the same thing with Cisco, you get 256 products – but still now way to distinguish the actual box from stuff that might go with it – like a license. You can try search-within-a-search – for example adding “appliance” – but that leaves a lot of guesswork to the user.
They need a more comprehensive, meta-data driven catalog. Here’s one that truly rocks (on a very boring subject): http://search.tycoelectronics.com/electronics/?ui_mode=question&charset=UTF-8&language=en-US&questionsource=electronics&search_type=Text&question_box=relay (Tyco Electronics; sample query “relay”)