The best digital customer experience in the industry

WS Weinmann & Schanz GmbH is a wholesale  company for the sanitary, heating, and air conditioning industry. Over the past decades, the family business has grown from its origins as a two-man operation into a professional wholesale mail order company with approximately 750 employees today.

Today, a strong team and sophisticated logistics ensure that the range of around 80,000 items is available to customers quickly and in line with their needs. With items from the fields of installation, heating, sanitation, ventilation, electrical equipment, tools, and operating equipment, the range offers everything that specialist sanitation, heating, and air conditioning tradespeople need for their daily work.

Classic B2B interfaces are history—now it's all about experience.

Weinmann & Schanz is one of the largest mail-order wholesalers in the heating and sanitation sector and ensures a smooth supply of materials to affiliated specialist companies. The challenge here is that customers now expect the same shopping experience in terms of usability and convenience in the B2B environment as they do in large, well-known B2C shops.

In addition, all the special requirements of a B2B shop must be met, such as shopping cart imports, connection to price engines, discounts, mapping of large and complex organizational structures on the customer side, personalized product catalogs based on live search results and interests, etc.

Those responsible at Weinmann & Schanz rose to the challenge and set themselves the goal of creating the best digital customer experience in the industry.

Entering the future with experience-driven commerce

Weinmann & Schanz set itself the goal of offering its customers the best digital shopping experience in the industry. To achieve this ambitious goal, the company wanted to create a modern, multi-client capable, and multilingual platform that would impress with live search, product recommendations, AI support, and personalization.

It quickly became clear that an integrated platform solution was needed rather than a “best-of-breed” approach. Weinmann & Schanz required a solution that seamlessly combined content management (CMS), e-commerce, digital asset management, cloud services, and personalization—all from a single source and with a consistent user experience. After an intensive selection process, Adobe was chosen as the central technology partner. Together with implementation partners eggs unimedia and Mediawave, a comprehensive digital experience platform was implemented based on the following Adobe solutions:

• Adobe Experience Manager (Sites, Assets, Dynamic Media)
• Adobe Commerce
• Adobe Analytics
• Adobe Target

These components now form the foundation for Weinmann & Schanz's new digital shopping experience. With the new platform, the company is able to offer its customers a highly personalized, efficient, and inspiring shopping experience. Thanks to the deep integration of Adobe technologies, Weinmann & Schanz also benefits from a future-proof and scalable infrastructure.

<yellow-line> "When making future technology decisions, we don't have to constantly ask ourselves which providers we should use to implement them; instead, we can rely on Adobe's strong portfolio."</yellow-line><yellow-line>Michael Berkhan | Head of eCommerce at Weinmann & Schanz</yellow-line>

Personalization as the key to success

When asked what makes a successful store today, Michael Berkhan, Head of eCommerce at Weinmann & Schanz, has a clear answer: “Personalization! Personalization! Personalization!” This is exactly where the new Digital Experience Platform comes in—it combines commerce and CMS into an intelligent, data-driven shopping experience that appeals to and inspires each user individually.

Personalization that inspires

Weinmann & Schanz creates a digital shopping experience that dynamically adapts to user behavior and interests:

• Dynamic in-store advertising spaces and brand carousels tailored to target groups and brand interests
• Individual banner display depending on target group or brand shop
• Product search with targeted advertising spaces and matching recommendations
• Automatic display of top products – from most trending to most viewed to most purchased
• Recommendations based on current and previous user behavior
• Seamless app integration for a consistent cross-channel experience

More efficiency. More convenience. More relevance.

Power users who place multiple orders every day benefit most from this new level of personalization: they receive their personal product catalogs and irrelevant offers in real time on the main levels. This not only increases efficiency and user convenience, but also creates genuine enthusiasm in everyday work.

Conclusion

With the new Adobe Experience Platform, Weinmann & Schanz proves that personalization is the key success factor in modern B2B commerce. It transforms data into experiences and interactions into relationships, creating a digital shopping experience that convinces and inspires.