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 award-winning 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, “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.”

Each BMBI Expert speaks exclusively for its market, and comments on the issues, trends, and opportunities. Andy Scothern, Managing Director of eCommonSense, is uniquely qualified to speak for Website and Product Data Management Solutions. 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.

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. For this reason, 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. Monthly reports track what is happening in the market, and an in-depth review, including Expert comments, is published every quarter. The reports and data are based on GfK’s Builders Merchant Point of Sale Tracking Data, which analyses sales out data from over 80% of generalist builders’ merchants’ sales across Great Britain.

The panel of industry Experts is integral to the Index. Positioned as leading and authoritative voices of their markets, the Experts add perspective, meaning and context to the data.

Andy adds: “eCommonSense is delighted to join the BMBI’s Expert Panel. The Index is widely used and referenced by construction trade press, banks, economists, the BBC, and Sunday Times, as well as Government. I understand that in preparation for a meeting with representatives of the industry at the end of March, Government officials spent nearly an hour on the BMBI website learning about the industry from the reports and BMBI Experts.

“BMBI has become an effective platform for building recognition of our industry, explaining markets and building brands. 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 current 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’.”

Andy’s first comment will be published in the Q1 2020 report. For all reports or to watch the round table debate videos and learn more about the Experts, click here.