AD Welcomes 350+ During E-Commerce Summit

AD’s e-commerce solutions team welcomed over 350 attendees across eight divisions and two countries to its fourth e-commerce summit, at the Trump National Doral in Miami, Florida.

AD, the member-owned construction and industrial products wholesale buying and marketing group, launched the eCommerce Solutions program in 2016 to support members as they create their digital presence and launch an e-commerce storefront. Today, AD’s e-commerce solutions has 14 dedicated associates focused on enhancing product content, consulting with AD members, and recruiting supplier partners to the program, and offers a suite of over 15 industry-leading service providers.

The e-commerce summit is one of two program-driven summits AD hosts annually along with the Finance, HR & IT Summit. The summits highlight a major value of membership in the AD community, networking, continuously rated among the most meaningful benefits. The event maximizes the impact of best practice sharing and allows attendees to return to their businesses with actionable insights.

Caroline Ernst, AD vice president of e-commerce solutions, shared some of the highlights of the 2020 summit.

“After piloting network groups and one-on-one booth sessions with service providers at the 2019 summit, we decided to make them a permanent feature of the e-commerce summit and this year added designated network facilitators and a larger selection of service providers available for meetings,” she said. 

“Based on member feedback, we welcomed three best-in-class keynote speakers and offered three different tracks of topic-focused sessions to accommodate all attendees regardless of their role or their level of e-commerce maturity.”

On the last day of the summit, Ernst proudly shared a new milestone for AD’s e-commerce solutions program: over 5 million enhanced and normalized product content SKUs are now available to the AD membership.

Jack Templin, AD president of industrial and safety business unit and chief programs officer, shared how this milestone will directly impact AD’s members who are looking to sell online.

“Delivering enhanced and normalized product SKUs to our members allows them to surpass other B2B e-commerce sites by giving their customers all the product information they need to make a purchase,” he said. “For AD members, access to this database of strong e-content in a member-driven taxonomy lets them focus on other key areas of their business. And with over 110 AD members now live with AD e-content, the continuous growth of our updated content database is a top priority for our team.”