Watsco said at its investor relations day that digital commerce has become a central operating engine across its HVAC distribution network.
Billions of dollars in annual sales now flowing through its online platforms, reshaping how branches, sales teams and customers interact. Speaking at the investor relations day, executives said Watsco currently generates about $2.5 billion in sales through digital channels. Carrier Enterprise accounts for $1.6 billion of that total.
In some regions, executives said, Watsco now moves as much as 80% of sales through digital platforms. That underscores how deeply it has embedded ecommerce into day-to-day operations.
Pivotal moment in Watsco’s digital transformation
The effort dates back a decade. Watsco leaders traced the start of its digital journey to March 3, 2015, when Carrier Enterprise processed its first online order — a $1,163 HVAC purchase placed at 8:28 a.m. by a contractor in the Northeast. What began as a pilot inside a single business unit has since been expanded across Watsco’s operating companies.
Carrier Enterprise, a 16-year-old joint venture with Carrier, now spans nine business units across North America and has served as a testing ground for Watsco’s broader digital strategy. Executives said all Watsco’s operating companies now sit on a shared technology platform and a unified data layer, allowing digital investments made in one region to scale across the organization.
That infrastructure now supports 300 to 400 digital orders per hour. It represents 750,000 online orders annually, with volumes rising and falling seasonally. Executives said customer service teams or sales representatives previously managed those transactions. Now, automation has shifted order entry online, freeing sales staff to focus on customer support, system design and business development.
What drives Watsco’s increasing shift toward digital commerce
Company leaders emphasized that the shift is not simply about efficiency. Watsco designed its digital strategy to support deeper, longer-term relationships with contractors by meeting them where they prefer to transact and communicate.
One example is live chat, which Watsco rolled out several years after launching ecommerce. Executives said annual chat interactions have grown from about 5,000 to more than 100,000, supported by extended hours that allow contractors to place orders and receive assistance outside traditional branch schedules. Watsco’s “virtual store” opens earlier than physical locations, remains available later in the day and, in some cases, operates on weekends.
The company’s digital platforms also support English, Spanish and French Canadian, reflecting the geographic reach and workforce diversity of its contractor customer base.
Improving Watsco’s ecommerce technology
Watsco built much of that customer-facing experience on what executives described as the most complex element of the initiative: product information management. Watsco maintains a centralized PIM system covering approximately 900,000 SKUs, complete with images, descriptions and as many as 40 attributes per product. Work on the database began about 18 months before the first online order was placed, executives said.
That scale has allowed Watsco to work closely with suppliers to standardize product data, a challenge many distributors face as they move online. Because the PIM system is shared across the company, enhancements made by one operating unit are immediately available to others.
Executives said the data is also producing tangible commercial benefits. Watsco tracks the number of line items per order and consistently sees higher counts on digital transactions than on offline purchases. Online customers are prompted to add accessories and installation supplies tied to each HVAC system, driving higher margin sales without increasing delivery costs.
Watsco did not outline specific artificial intelligence (AI) deployments during the investor day. However, executives described the digital ecosystem — including centralized data, automation and customer interaction tools — as the foundation for more advanced capabilities over time.
A decade after its first online transaction, Watsco told investors that digital commerce is no longer a supplemental channel. It is now a core operating model that is reshaping sales roles, customer engagement and margin performance across one of North America’s largest HVAC distribution platforms.
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