casandoReaching New Audiences and Streamlining Sales with ChannelAdvisor

Company Overview

Casando, an online brand under the parent company Holz-Richter, stocks a variety of products for home improvements.  Established in 1959 by Holz-Richter GmbH from Lindlar, the retailer evolved from a small wood trading company, to be one of the largest and most renowned woodworking centers in Europe.

Casando has a broad mix of products, such as solid wood planks, parquet, laminate, vinyl, tiles and fences, but also room doors and garden furniture. While the wholesale trade is still very important to Holz-Richter, the company has been able to go direct to the consumer through casando. 

Today, with over 100,000 customers, a logistics center, and its own fleet of trucks – casando says the online DIY brand is reaping the rewards going direct to the consumer. 

The Situation

“At the beginning of the 2000s, casando was one of the first companies in the industry to market wood products for home and garden through its online shop,” says Senior Manager Marketplaces Lucas Finsel. ”This involved a lot of manual effort over the years.”

Although casando was doing well with sales and customer numbers, Finsel says it was challenging to scale and target new audiences. The company was selling through its online webstore, driving traffic through digital marketing activities. However, casando says it recognized that expanding to marketplaces would allow it to reach broader, ready-made audiences. 

Casando built its own IT resources to manage orders but quickly realized it might encounter overselling scenarios whilst trying to manage sales across multiple channels. The team reports it set out to find a solution to help manage their expansion across marketplaces.

The Solution

After an intensive search, Holz-Richter selected ChannelAdvisor Marketplaces in 2017. According to Finsel, ChannelAdvisor Marketplaces helped casando centralize its marketplace integrations, automate critical tasks, and optimize performance, which allowed the DIY retailer to operate more strategically and easily expand into new channels.

“The solution appeared to be the suitable building block we needed for the strategic development of the online business,” says Finsel. “What stood out for us was the structured data storage and the central manipulation of product data and product data feeds. Without ChannelAdvisor, our work would be much more complex.”

The Results

Casando confirms ChannelAdvisor is a key platform to target new audiences. “The importance of marketplaces has grown enormously in recent years. It was important for us to reach exactly those customers who feel comfortable on marketplaces and who would otherwise have been difficult to reach,”explained Lucas Finsel.

Casando is currently active as a brand on Amazon and eBay, and intends to extend to ManoMano and Rakuten marketplaces in the coming months.

“We chose ChannelAdvisor because of the ease it gave us to add additional marketplaces and scale. It hasn’t let us down,” continued the head of e-commerce.

The casando team says product data and inventory management is more streamlined and seamless with ChannelAdvisor Marketplaces. Finsel says the platform helped the casando team to manage inventory efficiently, optimize product data to comply with marketplace requirements, and ensure consistency across channels. Additionally, Finsel notes that their use of ChannelAdvisor Marketplaces saves the casando team time and reduces complexity by enabling them to manage casando’s product catalogue from a centralized interface. 

Speed ​​and delivery times play a major role in marketplaces. Thanks to ChannelAdvisor, casando reports that its incoming customer orders flow quickly and automatically into Holz-Richter’s systems so that customers receive their orders in the most efficient way. 

“Without ChannelAdvisor, I would need four employees solely focused on converting orders into warehouse and shipping orders,” says Finsel.

Today, casando is selling on national marketplaces with plans to expand in Europe because the e-commerce team can easily add new marketplaces through ChannelAdvisor’s robust platform. 

“We’ve had a really successful relationship with ChannelAdvisor for three years. So far we’ve been focused on eBay and Amazon in Germany, but because of the ease of adding new marketplaces, we’re considering adding new European channels. One thing is for certain, the future is bright with ChannelAdvisor,” added Finsel.