Ingram Micro chooses Elastic to bolster search, sales on ecommerce site

Ingram Micro is a Fortune 100 company with $50 billion plus in revenue and operating in 56 countries. As the global leader in delivering technology and supply chain services to businesses, Ingram Micro touches about 80% of all high tech products sold around the world.

Andre Dykhno, Head of Product for Global ecommerce, says ecommerce has been a large contributing factor to Ingram Micro’s modern day successes. Their business focuses on B2B customers and has logged over $12 billion in annual sales, containing an extensive product catalog with over 20 million items on their website. To scale those numbers and improve the customer experience, the company chose Elasticsearch Service, and was happy they did.

As businesses have come to expect the B2C purchasing process, improving search experience is always top of mind for Dykhno. Data showed that 70% of Ingram Micro ecommerce visitors directly go from the home page to the search bar. And of the people that actually add products to the checkout cart, 70% of the products were added from the search bar. Dykhno says that because millions of businesses around the world interact with Ingram Micro, search needs to accommodate complex indexing from their large catalog, variable visibility, variable price, multiple content sources, and additional context required when operating as a global business.

Conversion rates jump 50% with Elastic

“We had a poor search experience on our ecommerce site with Endeca,” says Dykhno. “After moving to Elastic, conversation rates jumped, relevance of search increased, and null search results were dramatically reduced.”

Before, it took over 20 seconds on average to get search results back and there were low conversions. On the back end, it would take over 8 hours and sometimes even 24 hours to update the product catalog, affecting Ingram Micro’s business because it limited their ability to quickly display the newest products available. It quickly became clear that they needed a new search solution with the following criteria: great performance, high relevance, scalability, high availability, and flexibility to support their expansive roadmap for years to come.

Elasticsearch Service on Elastic Cloud fulfilled their criteria. In 2018, Ingram Micro started testing the performance of their new search solution in the Canadian market. Quickly realizing their pilot test’s success, it kickstarted their plans to unify their search experience and deploy it worldwide as Ingram Micro’s standard platform. In 2019, they expanded to the United States and 12 countries in Europe; on the roadmap for 2020 they plan to implement their new search in Asia Pacific and Latin America for full global coverage.

With Elastic, Ingram Micro’s ecommerce conversion rate improved by 50%, relevance of search went up by 35%, and null search results went down by 30%.

Expanding usage of Elastic

Dykhno and his team are constantly optimizing their search to be even more successful around the world. In addition to the Elastic Stack powering their ecommerce search, they’ve begun utilizing Elastic commercial features. They currently use Elastic APM and Heartbeat to collect and analyze metrics, Elastic machine learning to proactively detect anomalies, Kibana dashboards and Canvas to visualize health and performance, and alerting for real-time monitoring.

“I love Canvas. We have it on big screens in our office, and when executives walk by, we can show them how search is making an impact.” - Andre Dykhno, Head of Product for Global ecommerce