Food and drink buying group Sugro have a special deal to encourage members to start selling online – Head of Commercial and Marketing, Yulia Petitt explains how it works
Hi Yulia, tell us a bit about Sugro
Sugro UK is a buying and marketing group with decades of experience. We’re run as a co-operative for more than 90 food and drink wholesalers across Britain. We specialise in confectionery, soft drinks, grocery, crisps and snacks, but have diversified in recent years to offer even more to the 16,000 retail stores our members service.
As a buying group, what's your relationship with b2b.store?
We’re committed to helping our members become more digitally savvy and take full advantage of the opportunities in the online space, and we work closely with b2b.store to help them do that. b2b.store is the perfect partner because they are B2B specialists and are ingrained in the wholesale sector, so understand the nuances and challenges our members face.
We agreed to recommend b2b.store’s B2B eCommerce module as our preferred solution to our members and work closely with the team to monitor performance and share best practice. Since then we’ve taken on B2B WhatsApp, B2B Open Banking and offer split testing too.
Why is B2B eCommerce the best solution to offer your membership?
It’s tailored for online B2B ordering and offers all the functions you’d expect, such as a clear layout of categories and custom lists to help repeat ordering, but is also a realistic price for wholesalers working on tight margins to adopt. B2B eCommerce isn’t one size fits all and wholesalers can use it in whichever way they see fit, but the addition of digital advertising and split testing to refine different variables make it a powerful tool if used to its full potential.
What has member uptake been like?
Several of our members have introduced B2B eCommerce, with two real stand-out examples, The Soft Drinks Company and R&I Jones, with both wholesalers processing tens of thousands of orders since first launching in 2021 – and their year-on-year revenues are still increasing every month, which shows how the service continues to establish itself over time to become a significant share of a wholesaler’s business.
What is your role your role as a buying group in terms of digital?
As well as working with b2b.store and our members to explore new opportunities and analyse recent figures, we agree activity with suppliers that will benefit the entire membership. That includes providing group-wide digital advertising to appear on all Sugro members’ eCommerce platforms and running split tests on any number of different variables to discover which artwork, product description or call to action has the biggest impact on sales.
Sugro eCommerce in numbers
- 15+ members signed up to B2B eCommerce
- £950k – best group-wide monthly revenue with B2B eCommerce
- 25.3% increase in year-on-year transactions at the start of 2023
