From One Size to Personalized: Etna Supply's Journey to Industry-Specific Ecommerce
Situation
Etna Supply is one of the Midwest’s largest plumbing and HVAC distributors. The organization operates across several distinct business units and serves a diverse customer base that includes contractors, municipalities, industrial buyers and residential consumers including showroom customers.
Challenge
Etna’s ecommerce program supports various customer segments with tailored experiences for each business unit brand. It integrates closely with back-office systems to manage complex pricing, inventory, and account-specific workflows.
Etna’s previous platform, Unilog, lacked native multi-store architecture and multi-catalog capabilities, making it difficult to manage multiple business unit storefronts within a single environment. Catalog updates required manual intervention, and PIM governance was limited, slowing data ingestion and creating inconsistencies.
Search functionality did not meet contractor requirements for UPCs, UNSPSC codes, manufacturer part numbers, invoice descriptions, and barcode scans. This limited effectiveness for account-based and job-site search scenarios. Content management and publishing was constrained by a CMS that required specialized knowledge for routine updates.
Vendor professional services and support issues further impacted operations, with enhancement requests stalling and downtime response creating risk during critical customer interactions. Etna needed a platform that could consolidate workflows, strengthen data governance, and deliver business unit storefronts at scale.
Solution
After an extensive search for a B2B ecommerce platform that met its business requirements, Etna chose Znode to power a unified, centralized multi-store ecommerce ecosystem. A single Znode instance supports its three ecommerce storefronts and three brochure-style sites. Each business unit storefront has distinct branding, catalogs, and pricing models enabled by Znode’s native multi-store and multi-catalog architecture.
Znode's native PIM integrates with Etna Data X taxonomy standards. It introduces governed product schemas through custom attributes, attribute families, and faceted navigation for scalable catalog growth management. The platform’s robust search configuration tools support typeahead, autosuggest, synonyms, barcode search, and search fields required by contractors. This includes typeahead, autosuggest, synonyms, barcode scanning, and expanded fields mapped to operational identifiers.
Znode’s API-first architecture integrates directly with Epicor Eclipse for real-time pricing, inventory, order history, and account data through the Commerce Connector. Znode’s B2B account structure integrates with ERP and CRM systems. This enables unique pricing and branch-level inventory visibility by integrating account data with HubSpot for customer management.
With Znode at the core of its ecommerce foundation, Etna delivers modern, brand-specific storefront experiences that reflect the organization’s operational strength of serving its customers.
Customer Testimonial
“Etna’s growing… we’ve opened new branches, new showrooms, and the technology is advancing. We needed our web platform to grow with us. We couldn’t just have something that didn’t show all the tech we’re working on in the background. It had to show up front as well.”
- Deanne Walters, Front-End Web Developer