Royal Brass & Hose: a B2B portal in 10 months
Find out how Royal Brass & Hose, a mobile equipment products distributor with 11 locations, partnered with Ntara and Virto Commerce to build their first B2B ecommerce platform from scratch.
In short
Royal Brass & Hose (RB&H), a U.S. distributor of hydraulic and pneumatic parts, hoses and fittings for mobile equipment with 11 locations, had no digital infrastructure and sold only through direct relationships. With technology partner Ntara it compared seven platforms and chose Virto Commerce for its B2B feature set and APIs. The self-service ordering site launched in 10 months in 2020, and online sales grew 11% over the previous year’s pilot program. Customers now order, reorder and track 24/7 with their own prices, and the team sees receivables, payments, returns and credits in real time.
Virto Commerce offered Royal Brass & Hose an array of scalable and flexible B2B feature sets. Their technology helped us provide customers with a new, easily accessible ecommerce experience equipped with expansive product data.
Challenge: going digital from zero
Royal Brass & Hose had no digital infrastructure in place prior to this project. The company operated exclusively through direct sales relationships across 11 locations, with no online ordering capability for its customers.
The goal was clear: transform the business into a self-service B2B ecommerce company, giving customers 24/7 access to select, order, and track products online. After extensive stakeholder interviews, requirements gathering, data audits, and a pilot website, RB&H and Ntara identified the precise platform needs:
- A powerful catalog management system
- Customer-specific data storage
- A powerful search experience for product discovery across a large SKU range
- Custom payment handling, customer-targeted discounts, multiple price/rules-based price lists, bulk order creation, and event-based notifications
Solution: B2B pricing and ordering, built in sprints
Virto Commerce was selected for its unique combination of B2B-native features, flexible APIs, and scalability. Ntara led the implementation using an agile, sprint-based approach that enabled the team to launch in 10 months.
Key platform capabilities delivered:
- Customer-specific price lists and rules-based pricing across all accounts
- Custom payment handling with alerts and event-based notification system
- Customer-targeted discounts and promotions
- Bulk order creation and real-time order and delivery tracking
- 24/7 self-service portal with full product catalog access
- Real-time product and ordering information for RB&H’s internal team, including visibility into accounts receivable, payments, returns, credits, and adjustments
Result: 11% more online sales than the pilot year
Since launching the Virto-powered solution in 2020, Royal Brass & Hose achieved an 11% increase in online sales compared to the previous year’s pilot program. Customers can now instantly create and manage orders at their convenience. The internal team gained full real-time visibility into customer orders, accounts receivable, returns, and adjustments.
Business Benefits
- Customer-specific price lists and rules-based pricing ensure every account sees the correct, negotiated pricing automatically.
- Real-time order and inventory visibility for internal teams means customer service staff can respond to any account query instantly, without relying on offline records or separate systems.
- 24/7 self-service access expanded RB&H’s effective selling beyond business hours, enabling customers in different time zones or with non-standard schedules to order at their convenience.
