Briggs® & Stratton enhances B2B ecommerce with VTEX, ushering in a modern customer experience

Briggs & Stratton has held a significant presence in the B2B landscape since its founding in 1908. The company is a global leader in outdoor power equipment engines and manufacturer of lawn care and job site products such as Ferris mowers and Vanguard Commercial Lithium-Ion Battery Packs. Leveraging its extensive product portfolio and industry knowledge, the company provides pivotal solutions, particularly in the industrial and commercial domains. Backed by a vast network of nearly 50,000 dealers, Briggs & Stratton’s extensive reach ensures that its products are readily available to customers around the globe.

Constrained by legacy commerce platforms, the company recently set out to upgrade its B2B ecommerce operations and enhance the user experience for its dealers.

Challenge

Briggs & Stratton was using two separate ecommerce platforms to sell products to dealers, leading to an outdated and inconsistent buyer experience. Dealers needed to select one of the two systems—depending on which branded products they wished to purchase—resulting in operational challenges for Briggs & Stratton and friction for dealers.

Additionally, neither of the legacy ecommerce platforms was supported any longer, underscoring the dire need to update.

Here were the specific obstacles facing the Briggs & Stratton team:

• Outdated systems: Legacy technologies hindered adaptability.
• Complex infrastructure: On-premises servers added complexity and costs.
• Kludgy user experience: Text-heavy ordering requiring part numbers or uploading spreadsheets; lack of features such as filtering.
• Siloed storefronts: Multiple business units created branding inconsistencies.
• Integration issues: Connecting with the SAP ERP was technically strenuous due to sluggish response times that left the real-time demands of an ecommerce storefront unmet.

Solution

With the pending shutdown of one of Briggs & Stratton’s legacy commerce platforms, the team needed to deploy a new system quickly without giving up functionality.

According to Moerke, “With our accelerated schedule, it was critical to choose a partner willing to talk at length at a moment’s notice, which is difficult to get from most vendors. VTEX was the total opposite. Their team of solution engineers, architects, and commerce experts was highly responsive and willing to roll up their sleeves to help us meet our tight implementation deadline without losing any functionality.”

SAP ERP integration with VTEX IO

B2B commerce platforms often require real-time integration with backend ERP systems to manage pricing, inventory, product data, and more. However, a common challenge lies in the intricacies of exporting data from the ERP system and keeping it up to date.

To achieve timely updates, Briggs & Stratton and Northwoods leveraged VTEX IO—VTEX’s own containerized infrastructure that supports the development of client-side or server-side React/Node.js apps for developing extensions to the VTEX core platform.

The integration between VTEX and SAP ensures accurate data throughout the user journey:

1. Single sign-on: Dealers access the storefronts through a single sign-on process that communicates with SAP to fetch customer shipping locations.
2. Shipping agreements: Dealers have predefined shipping agreements in SAP, eliminating the need to enter shipping addresses manually.
3. Part information updates: Daily updates of around 80,000 parts in VTEX are automated through SAP extracts, including part details and the specific storefronts where each part should appear.
4. Product search: Dealers use VTEX’s Intelligent Search and indexing to find parts. Inventory and pricing information is retrieved from SAP when adding items to the cart.
5. Cart calculations: Shipping and tax costs are dynamically calculated during the checkout process using SAP’s Order Simulation API, ensuring accurate cost estimates.
6. Order history: A custom master data entity cross-references VTEX order numbers with SAP order numbers, allowing buyers to track orders easily.

Results

Briggs & Stratton’s transition to VTEX brought the following benefits:

Technology modernization: By embracing a modern ecommerce architecture, Briggs and Stratton is futureproofing its B2B commerce business with the agility to swiftly adapt to changing customer demands, emerging technologies, and industry trends.

Unified operations: By consolidating on VTEX, Briggs & Stratton eliminated the challenges posed by having two commerce platforms. The single, unified platform for Briggs dealers has streamlined operations and eliminated inefficiencies associated with managing multiple systems.

SaaS and API-first approach: Moving to a SaaS model and leveraging VTEX’s API-first architecture allows Briggs & Stratton to eliminate the complexities of on-premises servers. This empowered the company to focus on its core competencies instead of technology maintenance.

Elevated customer experience: The crown jewel in the transformation was achieving an elevated B2B customer experience. With VTEX, Briggs & Stratton can now deliver consumer-grade experiences to its business customers.

Undeterred by the pressing schedule, the Briggs & Stratton team successfully migrated to the VTEX platform within five months.

VTEX is both easy to use and reduces worries about ongoing maintenance.

John Witzlib, senior manager of Marketing Technology at Briggs & Stratton

*DISCLAIMER: All information and numbers seen in the above text were provided and approved by Briggs & Stratton (VTEX's customer).