With industrial tools, the path to purchase often starts long before a customer arrives at the webshop. The customer already knows which machine they have, which tool they need, and often arrives with the exact product code. At that point, the platform’s task is not to persuade them, but to respond as precisely as possible to what they are already looking for. Every additional step, incorrect result, or unclear piece of information only prolongs the task the customer came to complete.
For the Cyber64 team, this meant building the e-commerce experience around precision rather than an excess of content. Product data had to be accurate enough to lead the customer directly to the right tool, but what happens behind the screen was equally important: how conversions are measured, how different markets are compared, in which language the customer finds the product, and how clearly the brand can see what is actually working in each of those markets.
This is where technical and marketing decisions naturally overlap. URL structure affects whether the customer will find the right product, hreflang affects whether they will find it in the right language, and the measurement setup determines how precisely the brand can track sales and growth across different markets.
The Haas Tooling e-commerce platform won the Best Export Platform recognition at this year’s MIXX Awards Croatia. Behind that recognition is a platform that had to simultaneously simplify the purchase of industrial tools, establish a more direct relationship with customers across international markets, and give the brand more precise insight into what is happening in each of them. We discuss how such a system is built when the customer already knows what they came for through the decisions that shaped it.
Customers looking for industrial tools often come to the platform with a very precise request rather than in search of inspiration. How did you shape an e-commerce experience that helps them without getting in their way?
Haas’s typical customer is a machinist or someone working in procurement. They know which tool they need and often search by the exact product code (SKU) or based on the machine they already have in the workshop. We see this in the traffic as well: a large share comes from direct and brand search, while behavioral analysis shows typical B2B patterns, including multiple orders in the same session and purchases made from shared computers within a company. This is not a customer who is exploring; they know exactly what they came for.
That is why we invested our energy in product data, because this is where you can help this type of customer the most. Anyone who enters the exact name of a tool needs to land on the exact product, not on a category page where they are left to figure things out on their own. For this reason, we cleaned the Merchant Center product feed down to the level of URL structures by SKU segments. The campaigns follow the same logic: brand search for those who know what they want, and Shopping and PMax for those searching by specification. The best e-commerce experience for this type of customer is one they do not notice, because nothing slowed them down.
When moving to the new platform, how did you decide what from the existing digital ecosystem was worth carrying over, and what would only burden the new system?
We carried over what generated revenue or what we needed for measurement continuity, and nothing else. The e-commerce operation previously lived on haascnc.com, which is also the corporate website for machines, and data from that period served as our map. We knew which categories sold, which channels worked, and which markets had potential, and that became the foundation for the new platform.
What we did not want to carry over was the old tracking setup. Measurement on the old setup had grown organically over the years and reached a point where it could no longer serve as a basis for decision-making. The new platform therefore started from scratch, with a clean event structure, server-side tagging, and a properly set-up consent layer. The only thing we made sure of was that the results could still be compared with the old setup year over year, because without that, the first year of growth would have lacked context.
Which decision on the Haas Tooling project best demonstrated that a technical solution can also be a marketing decision?
The move to server-side tagging with a properly set-up Consent Mode configuration. It sounds like infrastructure, but the consequences are marketing-related. When a large share of visitors refuses tracking, ad platforms lose conversion signals. Smart Bidding then learns from incomplete data, attribution undervalues channels, and budgets are distributed based on a distorted picture. A server-side setup on your own subdomain brings that difference back into the system, so for me this was never an IT project but a decision about how hard every advertising dollar works.
The same applies to hreflang architecture. Formally, it is a technical SEO task, but in practice it determines in which markets customers can find you in their own language. On serious e-commerce projects, I do not think those two worlds can be separated.
How do you build a consistent brand experience when users in different markets do not expect the same way of searching, purchasing, and receiving support?
The brand, product data, and measurement standard are the same everywhere. We track every market using the same metrics within the same structure, so the US, Belgium, and Poland are compared on the same basis instead of each market having its own version of the truth.
Everything else is adapted. Seven language versions and US/EU segmentation exist because a German machinist does not search in English, while hreflang ensures that everyone receives their own version without duplicate content. The same logic applies to privacy. European markets require a stricter consent framework than the US, so that layer is set up by market, while measurement remains comparable. Regular country-by-country reporting then shows what works where. Europe is not managed as a single market; every country has its own numbers and its own decisions.
What did the Haas Tooling platform need to enable for the brand across international markets in order to become more than an e-commerce channel and earn the Best Export Platform recognition?
Haas already had a distribution network across all those markets, but it was built around machine sales. Tooling is a different type of purchase: consumables that are ordered frequently and in small amounts, and for that type of purchase every intermediary in the chain creates friction. The platform had to enable three things. For the customer to find you in their own market and language. To order the tool directly, just as easily in Belgium as in California. And for the brand to have direct insight into those customers, by country, category, and channel.
The results confirmed this. Across European markets, both purchases and revenue increased, with the strongest growth coming precisely through channels that had practically not existed on the old setup. Alongside this is the Winners Circle loyalty program, which moves the platform from a transactional channel toward a relationship with the customer base.
