Axminster Tools: Publishing 20,000 products to the web in 1 hour

About Axminster Tools & Machinery

Axminster Tools & Machinery is a market leader in the mail-order tools and machinery industry, offering friendly and personal service to many thousands of customers ranging from trade professionals and businesses to amateur DIY and hobby enthusiasts.

Sourcing products from all over the world, their key Product Management for Commerce objectives were to provide a robust and reliable environment for buyers, product managers and marketers to aggregate content and enrich product information, such as copy and related assets, for publication via the web and other channels.

Background

Before using Agility, Axminster Tools & Machinery juggled disparate manual processes for creating and maintaining product information. Multiple data silos across the business impeded time to market for new products; ecommerce and catalog teams often generated conflicting product information.

Key benefits

• With the simplicity of product set-up, Agility has allowed Axminster to introduce new products faster than ever before.
• Since the implementation of Agility, the marketing team at Axminster are able to maintain flawless consistency of product content across all channels.
• With Agility, Axminster has produced many more campaigns and promotions without any additional in-house resources. Agility has wiped out all overtime costs for catalog production, which now consumes only 1/3 of the resources required before implementation.
• Agility has reduced the time it takes to publish 20,000 products to the web to just 1 hour.
• Agility's out-of-the-box XML export tools facilitate scheduled updates to the ecommerce site, reducing the need for bespoke integration.

Future plans

Axminster plans to double its store footprint over the next 3 years, necessitating a solution for automating the production and distribution of visual merchandising materials. Agility's functionality will be extended to feed the mass updating of POS in-store, and will enable store managers to respond to changes in local trading conditions and to quickly create tailored promotions.

"Agility is a fantastic product, with a great team of people behind it."