On December 11, 2024, a new IT platform behind toolineo.de successfully went live. This lays the foundation for sustainable growth in the coming years. Customers, distributors and suppliers will benefit from this.
Toolineo – craft supplies from professionals for professionals
Toolineo has been on the market since 2015 and is now an established marketplace for craft supplies. Craft and industrial customers can find everything they need for their work here. To date, Toolineo has built up a range of 850,000 items with a network of 60 retailers and works closely with more than 100 brand manufacturers.
Toolineo was launched 9 years ago as a 100% subsidiary of E/D/E (Einkaufsbüro Deutscher Eisenhändler GmbH) to offer B2B specialist dealers a strong sales channel in e-commerce.
Toolineo is responsible for marketing the offering, ensuring the processes between customers and distributors and operating the IT. The scope of the offer is attractive because, in addition to the many connected warehouses of Toolineodistributors, the strength of E/D/E can also be used. This means that distributors can also offer the more than 100,000 E/D/E central warehouse articles with high-quality article data.
” distributors already generates a relevant proportion of its sales via Toolineo. Both distributors and Toolineo have clear ambitions to generate further sustainable growth via this sales channel. The conditions for this have now been successfully created with the go-live of the new IT landscape,” says Markus Ehehalt, COO Toolineo.
New construction of the entire IT landscape enables growth opportunities
The reason for the new construction was a review of the business model, taking into account relevant trends and market developments. This revealed that Toolineo’s business model precisely meets the market’s needs. Growth accelerators were successfully implemented in the new building. These include, in particular, the scalability of the IT landscape for more products, distributors and offers, the connection of new payment service providers and functional enhancements for customers and distributors. Hendrik Sassmann, CEO of Toolineo, says: “The aim of the new building was to implement these accelerators on a future-proof cloud-based platform so that Toolineo can develop into a successful marketplace with an all-encompassing product range at attractive prices and excellent delivery times.”
The intensive implementation project took two years. As part of the go-live, the IT landscape has now been completely redesigned and offers immediate added value for customers, including a better overview of the site, optimized functionalities, e.g. in the customer account, a good search function and new payment options with credit card and PayPal, and the site also loads faster for customers. The attractiveness for distributors has also been significantly increased through further functionalities in the retailer portal and additional interfaces. This makes maintaining offers and processing orders even more convenient.
A customer data platform has also been integrated. This enables a strong professionalization of the customer approach and tailor-made article suggestions, so that the CRM with Toolineo is raised to a whole new level.
There are also attractive new opportunities for suppliers. For example, the brand stores can be designed much more individually. Collaboration with loadbee and the where-to-buy functionalities are of course still integrated.
Outlook for the future
“This lays the foundations for realizing the planned growth over the next few years. Go Live is just the starting point for this. The focus will remain on acquiring further customers, expanding the distributors and supplier network and the ongoing further development of the marketplace from within the Toolineo team. For specialist dealer and brand manufacturers, this means that now is the time to join the Toolineo marketplace,” concludes Christian Grotowsky, the man responsible for Toolineo at E/D/E Managing Director.
Press release as PDF for download:
Toolineo: All signs set for growth with new IT landscape
