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Ingram Micro's Ecommerce Success with Elastic Search Solution
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Machine Learning
Applicable Functions
- Sales & Marketing
Use Cases
- Supply Chain Visibility
Services
- Testing & Certification
The Challenge
Ingram Micro, a Fortune 100 company operating in 56 countries, is a global leader in delivering technology and supply chain services to businesses. The company's ecommerce business, which contributes significantly to its success, focuses on B2B customers and logs over $12 billion in annual sales. However, Ingram Micro faced challenges with its ecommerce site's search experience. Data showed that 70% of the site's visitors went directly from the home page to the search bar, and 70% of the products added to the checkout cart were added from the search bar. The company's search needed to accommodate complex indexing from their large catalog, variable visibility, variable price, multiple content sources, and additional context required for global operations. However, the existing search experience was poor, with low conversion rates and long search result times. It took over 20 seconds on average to get search results back, and updating the product catalog took over 8 hours, sometimes even 24 hours, limiting the company's ability to quickly display the newest products available.
The Customer
Ingram Micro
About The Customer
Ingram Micro is a Fortune 100 company with over $50 billion in revenue, operating in 56 countries. As a global leader in delivering technology and supply chain services to businesses, Ingram Micro touches about 80% of all high tech products sold around the world. Their business focuses on B2B customers and has logged over $12 billion in annual sales, with an extensive product catalog of over 20 million items on their website. The company's ecommerce business has been a large contributing factor to its modern-day successes.
The Solution
Ingram Micro chose Elasticsearch Service to improve its ecommerce site's search experience. The company needed a new search solution that offered great performance, high relevance, scalability, high availability, and flexibility to support their expansive roadmap for years to come. Elasticsearch Service on Elastic Cloud fulfilled these criteria. In 2018, Ingram Micro started testing the performance of their new search solution in the Canadian market. After realizing the success of their pilot test, they decided to unify their search experience and deploy it worldwide as Ingram Micro’s standard platform. In 2019, they expanded to the United States and 12 countries in Europe, and they plan to implement their new search in Asia Pacific and Latin America for full global coverage in 2020. In addition to the Elastic Stack powering their ecommerce search, they’ve begun utilizing Elastic commercial features, including Elastic APM and Heartbeat to collect and analyze metrics, Elastic machine learning to proactively detect anomalies, Kibana dashboards and Canvas to visualize health and performance, and alerting for real-time monitoring.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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