Mass customization in ecommerce is a concept that’s increasingly gaining traction, especially as retailers navigate the complexities of modern consumer demands for personalization alongside efficient scalability. At Shoptoberfest 2024, Grant Morrow, Director of Ecommerce at Orgill, shared a candid look into the challenges and successes of implementing mass customization in the context of Orgill’s journey—and why it’s far from just another buzzword.

Here’s the story of how a 177-year-old hardware company became an e-commerce superstar.

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The Elusive Promise of Mass Customization

“When I talk to ecommerce platforms, they all say they can do mass customization,” said Morrow. “I don’t actually think anybody can do it very well. It’s very hard.” Despite its overuse as a buzzword, mass customization represents a critical strategy for ecommerce platforms to cater to diverse customer needs without compromising operational efficiency. The journey that Orgill, a $4 billion hardware distributor with a 177-year history, has undertaken to make mass customization a reality offers a window into how this concept can lead to substantial business growth if executed thoughtfully.

Orgill’s business model—supplying over 6,000 independent hardware stores, farm stores, and lumberyards across North America—is predicated on supporting small retailers who often compete against big-box giants like Home Depot and Lowe’s. Unlike these retail behemoths, Orgill’s customers are independent operators who rely on personalized support to meet the unique demands of their local markets. Morrow’s role as Director of Ecommerce is to help these small businesses succeed online, a task that involves bridging the gap between the latest technology and the specific, often niche needs of each independent retailer.

A Homegrown Start: Lessons in Complexity

When Morrow joined Orgill about a decade ago, the company had an in-house ecommerce platform that was, in his words, “full of holes and looked awful.” The initial reaction to shut down the platform and replace it with a mass-market solution seemed like the obvious fix. Orgill switched to Volusion, a templated platform that promised mass customization capabilities, and initially seemed to be a fit for Orgill’s needs. However, it soon became clear that simply providing templated websites wasn’t enough to meet the diverse requirements of Orgill’s clients.

“We found out pretty fast that it wasn’t that easy,” Morrow admitted. Retailers began requesting more integrations—connections to their point-of-sale systems, enhanced product data, and other custom needs that a standardized solution simply couldn’t provide. “We had hundreds of sites launched, but every one of them needed something different,” said Morrow. The rigid, one-size-fits-all approach wasn’t flexible enough for the small independent retailers Orgill served.

The Importance of Listening to Customers

Faced with mounting challenges, Orgill went back to basics. Morrow emphasized the value of listening to customers to understand their actual needs rather than simply imposing solutions. “The first lesson I’ll leave you with today is: don’t assume you know what’s best. Go and talk to your customers,” Morrow urged. In Orgill’s case, customer feedback revealed two main pain points: the need for better product data and challenges with integrating point-of-sale systems.

Product data was particularly crucial. “These guys have people sitting there, keying their lives away in spreadsheets,” Morrow explained. Orgill’s solution was to build an extensive product information management (PIM) system, which they affectionately called the “industry pin.” By subsidizing this heavily for their dealers, Orgill ensured that even small, independent stores could compete with much larger retailers by having a rich, searchable database of the products they sold—including items not purchased directly from Orgill.

Customization Through Collaboration: The Rise of Composable Commerce

The next step was finding an ecommerce platform capable of accommodating mass customization in a practical, scalable way. Orgill ultimately partnered with Unilog, a B2B platform that was tailored to handle the specialized needs of independent retailers. However, Morrow noted that heavily customized enterprise projects like this can become a “rat’s nest of requirements” that evolve continuously and often involve costly upgrades.

“Only build what you must,” advised Morrow, sharing Orgill’s hard-learned lesson. The key to success lay not in building a proprietary ecommerce system from scratch but in using flexible solutions that allowed for integration and scalability without reinventing the wheel.

Most recently, Orgill adopted a composable commerce strategy, partnering with Elastic Path to create a modular system that allowed them to develop and deploy features more rapidly. Composable commerce, as a concept, allows for the independent deployment of services and features, which means faster updates and more adaptability—crucial for meeting the needs of 6,000 diverse retailers. “The number one problem in our industry is: how fast can you move?” Morrow noted. “Composable commerce lets us do that.”

Balancing Mass Customization with Scalability

For Morrow, one of the key insights in Orgill’s journey was the importance of balancing customization with scalability. “Even with mass customization, you have to find a balance,” he said. The concept of mass customization can often lead to the desire to accommodate every individual request, but this isn’t feasible from an operational standpoint. “You can’t do it all. It’s impossible. You have to find out what are the right features to put out to your customer.”

Morrow emphasized that the ultimate goal is scalability—mass customization must still be scalable to be effective. For Orgill, this has meant deploying modular solutions that can be adapted based on the needs of the retailer while maintaining a core set of functionalities that are consistent across the board.

The Future of Mass Customization in Ecommerce

As Orgill continues its ecommerce evolution, its journey illustrates both the challenges and opportunities inherent in mass customization. The key takeaway is that mass customization is not about delivering an endless array of individualized options but rather about building flexible systems that can cater to a range of needs while maintaining efficiency.

“Scalability is what we’re really after at the end of the day,” Morrow concluded. “Mass customization is about configuring everything so that you can deploy it at scale. A lot of people lose sight of that and think it’s just about making every single site unique, but without scalability, it’s not mass—it’s just customization.”

With composable commerce and a focus on modular solutions, Orgill is positioning itself as a leader in the mass customization space—demonstrating that even traditional industries can leverage cutting-edge ecommerce strategies to achieve substantial growth. As more companies look towards mass customization to meet consumer demands, Orgill’s journey serves as a compelling case study in both the pitfalls and the potential of this complex but promising approach.