A buyer types "2 aluminum" into the search bar. They mean thickness. The engine thinks they mean width. In most webshops, that's a minor annoyance. At Alumeco, where buyers are metallurgists and procurement specialists who know exactly what they need, it's the moment they close the tab and call a competitor instead.
Alumeco has been supplying the industry with aluminum, stainless steel, copper, bronze, and brass since 1983. Today they employ around 250 people in Denmark and more than 1,000 internationally across 12 countries, and a clear strategic ambition: to be the best in the industry - also in the digital space.
"We launched our online push modestly in 2018, with a solid foundation to build on. You could say we started with a Ford Focus, but our ambition is a Ferrari," says Niels Findstrup, Group Commercial Manager at Alumeco.
That ambition is what's shaped the partnership with Ecreo ever since - the frontend, CMS, PIM and commerce platform that helped Alumeco become the B2B digital player they are today.
Alumeco's buyers are specialists. They arrive knowing exactly what they need: a specific alloy, a specific dimension, a specific grade.
For a while, search on their site wasn't holding up its end of the deal.
When customers are experts, vague results aren't just unhelpful. They're a reason to go elsewhere. Standard webshop logic wasn't built for this level of precision.
What Alumeco needed: smarter synonym handling, precise attribute weighting, and a search engine strong enough to make product results consistently relevant.
Alumeco looks for partners who know their domain deeply and challenge them to stay ahead. That philosophy shaped how this project came to be.
Ecreo, already embedded in Alumeco's digital setup, brought Relewise into the picture to drive search relevance and personalization - turning structured product data into search results that match what customers are actually looking for
Together, we worked closely during implementation, and particularly around mapping the right product attributes from Alumeco's existing data stack - including their Struct PIM, where Alumeco centralizes all core product features, synchronized with SAP and the customer portal - into the Relewise engine.
The harder work was internal - before the engine could perform, Alumeco had to be razor-sharp about their own product structure.
The numbers show a strong general picture of search performance on Alumeco’s Danish site.
Buyers are landing on relevant products early, with an average click position of 1.37. Nearly a third of searches lead to a product click, and the conversion rate shows that search is not only helping customers browse – it's helping them move toward buying.
In B2B, a quiet support inbox is its own kind of proof. No tickets asking if a grade is right. No abandoned carts over the wrong dimension. No calls double-checking a spec.
Silence is actually a metric worth tracking.
Prices shift daily. Stock moves across two central and 15 local warehouses. The roadmap ahead is about feeding the engine with more transaction history, behavioral signals, Power BI, SAP - so customers don't just find products faster, but find more relevant results and choose the right products with confidence.
What started as fixing search on the Danish site has become something more fundamental: a buyer searches, finds exactly what they need, and gets back to work - no second-guessing, no wrong grade, no wasted call.
That's the foundation Alumeco is now building on for its specialist buyers everywhere.