Ahlsell Denmark is a B2B wholesaler supplying technical products to customers with very different needs, from tradespeople placing repeat orders to large production companies. Ecommerce is a core part of how Ahlsell serves both customers and internal teams, where search relevance, speed, and accurate results directly impact whether orders get placed.
We sat down with Søren Borg, Director of Digital Business Development, and Peter Højer Jørgensen, Digital Business Analysist, to discuss their approach to B2B personalized search as a strategic capability, and how that choice reflects their way of working with data, customers, and digital priorities.
Read the quick and dirty version below or see the full interview!
When search results ignore customers' reality
Search in B2B is one of the most business-critical touchpoints in the customer journey. B2B professionals come in a rush often with a job to finish and a part number in mind. This is their reality and they expect search to understand this context.
In a conversation with a customer, Peter Højer Jørgesen, Ahlsell's Digital Business Analyst, the customer expressed frustrated that the search results didn't reflect his buying habits. When searching for “Bosch,” search returned broad category matches, such as power tools, despite not being what the customer typically purchases.
Ahlsell’s digital team initially believed their data quality and product structure would make search straightforward. However, they repeatedly heard feedback similar to the one above from both customers and internal stakeholders: search delivered results irrelevant to purchasing habits.
That conversation established a key requirement for Ahlsell: search needed to become a driver of relevance and conversion, not a frustrating step customers had to work around.
The challenges search had to solve for Ahlsell
Search has a unique way of exposing everything that is hard about B2B commerce. The assortment is large, product data is technical, and customers search using shorthand, abbreviations, and highly specific terms. Many searches are not even complete words, but language that only makes sense if you work in the trade.
Søren, Peter and their team saw that complexity show up in several recurring patterns:
- Long technical search queries: Professional buyers are zoned in on precision, so they often type detailed strings that include product attributes, dimensions, and specifications.
- Abbreviations and shorthand: Customers use internal or industry language, product nicknames, and shortcuts that don't match what is written in product titles.
- Brand-driven shopping: Many customers search by brand first, because brand acts as a shortcut for quality and compatibility. But brand searches need context to be truly valuable.
- Search as navigation: Customers expect search to help them narrow down quickly before they even begin filtering.
The team knew they needed to address this to remain competitive. B2B customers rarely abandon the relationship immediately, but a bad search experience that goes on for too long will eventually affect renewal and long-term loyalty.
Creating proof of concept (PoC) with Relewise
Søren and Peter's original assumption was that search was too business-critical to outsource. They expected they would need to build their own solution to fully control the logic and ensure it matched their commercial reality.
But after seeing an initial proof of concept from Relewise, Ahlsell's digital team saw a level of quality and relevance that exceeded expectations even before personalization was applied. As part of the PoC, Ahlsell supplied a dataset of 500,000 products, which demonstrates both the complexity and scale of their assortment.
Alongside this, B2B assortments change and customer needs shift, so relevance needs to move with these changes to remain trustworthy. Søren and Peter valued Relewise's ability to let them configure key search behaviors from a business perspective without turning every change into an IT project.
Results: 20% increased conversion rate
Søren and Peter's original business expectation was that improved search relevance would drive conversion. They compared data from the first half of the period, before Relewise was implemented, with the second half, when it was up and running. They could clearly see around a 20% increase in conversion rate due to search.
Beyond performance, Søren and Peter highlighted the value of a cost-efficient, lean implementation process. They also gained more functionality than originally scoped, including opportunities tied to retail media and faceting based on purchase history.
They also point out that search improvements typically show up in behavior rather than feedback. Fewer workarounds, more self-service orders, and higher conversion indicate that search is doing its job.
In that sense, the conversion uplift is not only a performance KPI. It is a measurable indication that ecommerce is performing better at the moment where intent is highest.
Why it matters for B2B ecommerce leaders
For digital leaders looking to strengthen ecommerce performance, Ahlsell’s case underlines a simple but high-impact lesson: in B2B, search is a competitive capability.
Search relevance shapes whether customers complete orders independently and whether ecommerce becomes a scalable growth channel. Ahlsell’s results show what can happen when search is treated as a strategic lever.
Looking ahead, Ahlsell sees first-party data as a long-term advantage and wants to use it more broadly to improve relevance, efficiency, and trust across the customer journey. They've since also turned that data into vendor value with Relewise Retail Media.
What are the steps involved to get Relewise on your site?
Below you can get an overview of the 6 steps you will go through together with our team to get Relewise implemented on your site. It's also the place for getting a free trial and seeing Relewise in action for yourself.
