How Zoro.com leverages the flexibility and scalability of MACH® to deliver commerce experiences that exceed customer expectations and drive business growth

*Paul Demery, “Grainger surpasses $15 billion in 2022 sales”, DigitalCommerce360, Feb 2, 2023

Eight years after launching, Zoro’s impressive growth and popularity led leadership to rethink its vision for the brand. Instead of focusing solely on the MRO needs of their audience — industrial workers, machinists, plumbers, electricians and contractors — the new strategy was to offer everything an SMB needs to run their business.

At the time, the company’s platform was already struggling to keep up — customers were waiting unreasonable amounts of time to log in, check out and track their orders. As the team started contemplating expanding from the 4-5 million items in their virtual catalog to 20+ million and beyond, while sourced from thousands of suppliers, it was clear the platform couldn’t scale like that.

Timothy Daneliuk, Senior Director and Chief Architect of Zoro, already had experience with microservices. He led his team into its initial foray into headless and microservices-based architecture. First, they identified an immediate business problem: Whenever their ERP went down,  the company had no access to customer information, because all the account data was in the ERP — and then built a next-generation solution in-house. 

The “guest checkout implementation” project proved that headless and microservices technology, combined with Zoro’s existing cloud-native and API-first foundation, was the right direction to go to build out a full commerce platform. It was a MACH solution before MACH was even a thing.

When the time came to enable the full eCommerce buying experience, instead of building everything in-house, the team opted to find partners with the expertise to speed time-to-market. After completing a side-by-side feature and benefits analysis of all the major vendors, commercetools emerged as the winner. 

Zoro gradually transitioned to their new MACH®-driven platform, adding 5% more users at a time to see how the system behaved under strain and under load. Shortly after it went fully live, there was a 24-hour problem with a core system provided by a third party. In that time period, Zoro’s headless technology implementation in concert with commercetools protected thousands of orders from being lost. As Daneliuk explained, “That speaks to the power of a headless model.”

Currently, commercetools keeps track of all orders, carts and intermediate states for Zoro.com. And, now that his team is confident the eCommerce experience they are delivering is rich, reliable and has proven itself to work at scale, Daneliuk said a lot of increments of improvement are planned for the future. “With commercetools as a partner, we certainly expect that, as we discover new use cases, we'll be coming back and saying, “Hey, what about adding this feature that we thought would be really useful to the system?”