Carrier is the leading global provider of healthy, safe, sustainable and intelligent building and cold chain solutions. While it’s best known for its HVAC offerings, Carrier also provides best-in-class refrigeration and building controls & automation. The company serves a large variety of customers in 180 countries, including dealers, distributors, service technicians, national accounts, and homeowners.
Each buying audience has unique demands and nuances, which create a uniquely complex environment at Carrier. Carrier sought to tame those complexities with frictionless, self-service commerce experiences for all of its customers. To accomplish this, it knew it needed a platform that could handle the complexities of its selling motions—without them needing to become a de-facto tech company.
Steve Duran, associate director of global commerce at Carrier, said that after evaluating Shopify, it was clear that our platform was the best fit for the job.
After migrating to Shopify from their previous platform, Carrier was able to:
- Launch new ecommerce experiences in 30 days, compared to approximately 9-12 months on its previous platform
- Reduce their cost from up to $2 million per ecommerce website to just $100,000
- Test ideas, iterate, and ship new go-to-market motions at the pace of a startup
The challenge: Expensive and time-consuming go-to-market processes
Before switching to Shopify, spinning up an ecommerce website at Carrier was equal parts time-consuming and costly. “At Carrier, building a fully mature ecommerce solution on a traditional monolith platform cost up to $2 million—and it took up to 12 months to build the solution,” says Steve.
Steve knew that ecommerce required more nimbleness than this, so he and his team made the decision to decouple it from the rest of the organization’s business workflows.
With that decision made, Steve tells us that what remained was a philosophical choice: did they want to become a tech company, relying on themselves to tame their complexity and needing to significantly increase headcount to do so? Or should they go with a SaaS cloud based provider like Shopify?
According to Steve, “We’re in the business of creating the world’s best climate solutions. Our commerce platform has to support the complexities of our business, but not at the detriment of our customers.”
With this in mind, Steve and the team at Carrier ultimately chose Shopify so that they could focus their time on growing the business, and less on tech.
Shopify gave us the ability to quickly build, scale, and deploy commerce experiences. It was clear that Shopify was the partner that could help us be successful in the future.
The solution: Frictionless commerce experiences built with Shopify components
As Carrier explored migrating to Shopify, they partnered with EY and Tidal Commerce to ensure they were properly resourced to make the transition a success. “You have all these strengths when you work with delivery partners like EY and Tidal,” Steve says. “They have a line of sight into other businesses that are solving some of the world's most complex commerce problems. We can take that experience and apply it to what we’re doing at Carrier.”
Ultimately, EY and Tidal confirmed that Shopify was the right partner for Carrier—and that we could handle the intricacies of their selling motions.
"We needed to confirm that Shopify was serious about investing in the B2B space. When we took a closer look, we saw thousands of developers, strategic partnerships, and a clear path to being a part of the conversation about Shopify’s roadmap. Ultimately, the answer was yes, and we were very excited to bring Shopify into the Carrier tech stack," states Steve.
To build ecommerce experiences that could support each of their selling avenues, Carrier launched OneCommerce, a central global Shopify accelerator that encompasses about 80% of all Carrier’s shared business requirements for enterprise commerce experiences.
Historically, it’s very expensive to build the types of ecommerce experiences we need. With Shopify, it takes a matter of weeks. At the pace of a startup, we are able to deploy commerce capabilities in the enterprise space. Everything you need for an enterprise selling apparatus, we’ve already built it with OneCommerce, which is built on Shopify components.
OneCommerce allows Carrier to quickly deploy an unlimited number of websites for a fraction of the cost. “We are very bullish on what this means for us going forward. At the end of the day, OneCommerce allows us to monetize any business idea that we would have in 30 days,” Steve adds.
The results: A faster path to growth at a fraction of the cost
While Steve says he’s optimistic about how Shopify will support Carrier over the next decade, the company has already benefited from making the switch. Most notably, Steve tells us that Shopify empowers Carrier to ship high-performing ecommerce experiences in just days, at a fraction of what it used to cost the business:
There’s a massive opportunity for us to unlock new selling motions, channel partners, and other areas of the business. Commerce allows us to get very close to our buying audience. For us to monetize a new idea in 30 days is essentially an opportunity to test billion dollar ideas. Instead of waiting years to do it, Shopify allows us to do it in weeks.
Steve also tells us that Carrier’s OneCommerce initiative has impacted the company far beyond their ecommerce goals. Suddenly, Carrier stands out as an attractive place for top engineering talent looking to work on innovative projects.
"Anytime you bring in an all star, they want to work on solutions that matter and they can be proud of. This OneCommerce solution and investment in building frictionless commerce experiences is a really cool career moment for engineers. They can say they work for this hundred-year old company that’s looking to be more innovative,", Steve adds.
Shopify empowers Carrier to be at the cutting edge of ecommerce
Over the coming years, Steve believes that conversational commerce, mobile commerce, and VR technologies will accelerate the buying funnel for enterprise companies like Carrier. Thanks to Shopify, he also believes that Carrier will be nimble and fast enough to market to stay ahead of emerging technologies like these—and ultimately set the company up to maintain its position as a leading climate technology solutions provider.
Steve also says that Shopify is the right partner for any enterprise company looking for a commerce platform that can reduce costs, accelerate innovation, and treat their customers like consultative partners. He tells us that based on his experience with Shopify and the OneCommerce initiative, investing in commerce components is the best money a company like his can spend. “Shopify has a high internal rate of return, the shortest payback window, and has real impacts on the bottom line.”
If you want lower TCO, rapid deployment, and a platform that is growing at a rate faster than you can develop it yourself, then I would encourage you to look at Shopify.
Watch the entire interview
Watch the full video interview with Steve Duran, Associate Director of Global Commerce at Carrier, and Brandon Gracey, Director of Enterprise Sales at Shopify.