Danfoss Drives and its partners now offer online ordering of the VLT Micro Drive. Customers can order customised drives through a centralised platform and take delivery from their local distributor. The benefits include minimum processing time for orders, direct follow-up and the shortest possible delivery time.
The new website, at www.vltmicro.co.uk, allows users to customise the drive, select their local distributor and pay for the order using PayPal or major credit cards.
“It’s simple, easy and fast”, says Anthony Pickering, senior sales director at Danfoss Drives. “We wanted a platform that reflects the simplicity and ease-of-use of the VLT Micro Drive itself and that allows the customer application to be up and running in the shortest possible time”.
Colm Toolan, Danfoss Drives’ e-business manager, sees this platform as the basis for new relationships with the sales partners: “The Internet has the potential for disintermediation - to take the distributor out of the equation. Danfoss has a tradition of strong relationships with strong distributors. The vltmicro site leverages the technology to enhance that tradition for the benefit of everyone."
He goes on to explain that Danfoss has implemented the website as a broker - matching customers and partners and ensuring that secure payment is guaranteed. The customer does business directly with the local distributor, who can provide local support, products from stock, installation assistance etc. “This is not B2C and it’s more than B2B” Toolan says. “This is B2C2B - Danfoss collects the consumer, brokers the deal and passes the process to our business partners for fulfilment”.
Jacob Thomsen, webmaster at Danfoss Drives, was responsible for the implementation: “It’s an interesting problem - we needed to orchestrate a process with changing roles and responsibilities and to manage the communication between the various system elements. We also needed a common payment mechanism across multiple distributors that could support the detail of our process. The PayPal API gives us the functionality we require and provides reliable acknowledgements of the payment transaction. That way, we know that payment was successful, without needing to know either the customer’s or the distributor’s credit card or account details.” But Thomsen is already thinking about the next versions of this platform: “Real-time assignment of distributors, based on stock levels, would be pretty cool!”