Akopia & Canon Photocopiers

Discovering and exploiting an unfair advantage to give a new direct sales channel a big boost

Background: In the mid to late 90s, lots of companies had caught the vision of how the internet could transform their business, but were still uncertain about the specifics. APIs and platforms that companies rely on today to facilitate communication and commerce didn’t exist. My company, Akopia, had developed an extremely customizable ecommerce platform that many medium to large firms were using for B2C and B2B commerce.

Problem: After rolling out their first-generation ecommerce site, Canon wanted to increase direct sales of copier toner through that site.

Solution: When consulting with Canon's sales leaders and engineers, we discovered that they had an unfair advantage they weren’t exploiting: their high-end copiers were net-connected and transmitted data about consumables back to headquarters. By enabling an integration between this "phone home" service and their ecommerce site, we helped Canon design and build a system that monitored toner use and emailed an alert to a designated individual prompting them to purchase toner when it was running low. That email contained a one-click link to make reordering easy. Sales more than doubled after rollout.