The Builders Merchant Building Index (BMBI) welcomes eCommonSense as its new ‘Expert for Website and Product Data Management Solutions’. This new category has been created to reflect the continuing swing to online ordering and digital transformation, hastened by the impact of COVID-19.
eCommonSense provides eCommerce and product management software to builders’ merchants and stockists. Users of the platform include many leading merchants including Haldane Fisher, Interline, JT Dove, Kellaway Building Supplies, Lords, Collier & Catchpole, BPS, TJ O’Mahoney and more.
“It’s the only website solution tailored specifically for the industry that can fully translate the branch business model online,” explains Lucia Di Stazio, Managing Director of MRA Marketing and producers of the BMBI. “eCommonSense speaks for a new digital services category, providing insight into the rapid growth of a new merchant route to market from a leading industry expert.”
The BMBI panel of leading brands across construction is an integral part of the Index. Positioned as authoritative voices of their markets, BMBI Experts add perspective, meaning and context to the data, with valuable and knowledgeable insights into key areas of construction and building materials supply. Andy Scothern, Managing Director of eCommonSense, is uniquely qualified to speak for BMBI’s new digital category. An award-winning website builder, Andy started his career as a joiner and builder and combined this experience and later career in technology to digitise a number of global brands in and outside the industry. He designed the BMF’s CPD course on trading online.
Andy adds: “eCommonSense is delighted to join the BMBI’s Expert Panel. The new category reflects the growing importance of digital and online ordering among merchant customers. The trend has been building over the past decade. But the lockdown and the prospect of prolonged socially distanced trading has accelerated the trend, prompting many merchants to quickly kit themselves out for the ‘new normal’.”
Developed and run by MRA Marketing, the BMBI – a brand of the Builders Merchant Federation – is a monthly index of builders’ merchant sales, and the most reliable, up-to-date measure of Repair, Maintenance, and Improvement (RMI) activity in the UK. It has become an effective platform for building recognition of our industry, explaining markets and building brands. The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) includes a summary and link to BMBI monthly reports in its authoritative Monthly Construction Update alongside the ONS, Bank of England and other key resources.
BMBI monthly reports track what is happening in the market, and an in-depth review, including Expert comments, appears every quarter.
Andy’s first comment is published in the Q1 2020 report, available to download here. For all other reports, round table debate videos and to learn more about the Experts, visit www.bmbi.co.uk.
