Kramp Group Case Study

Kramp Group is Europe’s largest distributor of accessories and parts for motorized equipment, agriculture, and construction machines. As most businesses are doing today, Kramp intends to build their online presence and tailor it to its customers.

The business to business and business to consumer markets are two very different customers. Similar as they can seem, businesses and individuals’ consumer purchase for different reason and want to do business in completely different ways. In a B2C market, customers tend to buy standalone buys that don’t require a large amount of follow up. Most consumers in this market tend to be similar and look for ultimately the same things. This is why you see a globally familiar B2C eCommerce checkout process even if they are completely different products. For example, your checkout process for make up can be very similar to ordering groceries from your nearest Walmart.

Business to business consumers are different as they tend to make hard and logical purchases. They will look for what provider meets most of their needs. These customers have someone to above to answer to, therefore the purchaser must make a very considerate and careful decision. In this market, there are usually various people that need to be aware and decide on the purchase. A lot of communication between B2B has to be made before the purchase can go through. In Kramps industry, as the article stated, having a machine that does not work can cost a business plenty in lost revenue. Therefore, having the right parts reach them at a timely manner is vital to the success of their business. Kramp gives customers just that. They have tailored their online presence to be easily manageable by most consumers and deliver within 1 business day. They have also tailored their website to serve 10 different languages. The consumers are generally repeated customers opposed to business to consumer market.

Kramp’s decision to invest in the revamping of their online presence to improve the way their customers buy their products was a brilliant operational decision. In order for the company to grow and better use their resources, it was necessary to find a more efficient and long-lasting way to manage customer orders. According to Forbes Magazine, business to business e-commerce is a trillion dollar industry with a projected growth of 15% each year. With this amount of capital to be made, e-commerce was a great way to shift the way customer orders are handled. Using an online store to take and process orders reduces manual labor hours from the call center staff by placing the burden on the customer to navigate and then order what they want. However, when making the decision to improve Kramp’s online presence, management needed to take into account the fact that 40% of their orders were placed over the phone. With such a large portion of their market placing orders over the phone, a few things needed to be accounted for with the