Recently, MSC Industrial Supply announced strong Q2 results highlighted by increases in net sales (2.9% year-over-year), operating income (7.6%) and diluted earnings per share of $0.93, which exceeded expectations. A majority of this revenue, 57.8% of it, was accounted for by e-commerce operations.
This is a growing trend for MSC, whose e-commerce has been a significant chunk of its revenue for a few years now (it was 55.4% in the year-earlier quarter). According to Digital Commerce 360, mscdirect.com, the company’s e-commerce site, is No. 97 in the B2B E-Commerce 300, a list that ranks companies on their annual Internet sales.
The same article points out that CEO Erik Gershwind said that MSC will continue to invest in its e-commerce, by adding about 150,000 product SKUs in the current fiscal year and expanding above 1 million SKUs available online.
Dirxion is proudly involved in buffering MSC’s e-commerce performance through the creation, linking and customization of the company’s online catalogs. The primary project that Dirxion and MSC build together is its Virtual Big Book, a full collection of MSC’s product SKUs organized and displayed through over 4,000 print catalog pages.
Each product number in the catalogs are linked directly to MSC’s e-commerce pages, with an iFrame of the product page displaying the corresponding information directly in the online catalogs interfaces. The image below shows the iFrame view opened on a desktop computer.
Uniquely displayed on their website pages, the Virtual Big Book is embedded in a tab pull-out that can be found on the left-hand side. This custom presentation is enabled by custom coding created and shared among Dirxion and MSC’s website developers. The embed is made easier via HTML5 rather than Adobe Flash technology, which Dirxion successfully moved away from four years ago.
MSC does a great job of maintaining fast-loading e-commerce pages, in spite of such a large database from which to pull information. The same standards of speed and loading efficiency are applied to its online catalogs.
Uniquely displayed on their website pages, the Virtual Big Book is embedded in a tab pull-out that can be found on the left-hand side. This custom presentation is enabled by custom coding created and shared among Dirxion and MSC’s website developers. The embed is made easier via HTML5 rather than Adobe Flash technology, which Dirxion successfully moved away from four years ago.
MSC does a great job of maintaining fast-loading e-commerce pages, in spite of such a large database from which to pull information. The same standards of speed and loading efficiency are applied to its online catalogs. 
