IRVINE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Bluon, Inc, the rapidly growing company focused on upgrading the HVAC industry from the ground up, today announced the launch of BluonLive, the first truly viable e-commerce platform for HVAC technicians. BluonLive is a web app and e-commerce network that connects technicians in the field with their local distributors to acquire parts and materials in the most efficient way. This saves both technicians and distributors countless hours of research and frustration.
The HVAC market is saddled with extraordinary complexity and fragmentation, with parts referred to by multiple part numbers and carried by many brands. BluonLive mitigates this challenge with a streamlined solution. Within seconds, technicians on the Bluon mobile app can find the specific model number they are working on, see the original OEM parts and then select the parts they need to repair or service a piece of equipment. With a few easy clicks, they can send an order request to their local distributor to obtain a quote related to the specific parts and materials they require. BluonLive delivers this request to the selected local distributor along with all relevant specifications and known compatible replacement options for the parts requested. This saves the local counter staff the daunting task of researching what parts may be viable in that specific situation and what parts they can provide.
BluonLive fundamentally changes how technicians in the field communicate their needs with their local distributors. Historically, due to the complexity and fragmented nature of HVAC replacement parts, local distributor counter staff were tasked with the nearly impossible burden of researching and cross-referencing millions of part numbers to determine what specific part they could provide their customer as a viable replacement option. This often resulted in the technician receiving the wrong part, creating hours of delays. With BluonLive, receiving an incorrect part, an issue that has historically plagued the HVAC industry and more importantly its technicians, is no longer a concern.
“The launch of BluonLive represents the culmination of Bluon’s metamorphosis into the industry’s first truly viable e-commerce platform, connecting technicians with their local brick and mortar distributors,” explained Peter Capuciati, CEO and chairman of Bluon. “Technicians in the field get to enjoy the immediate benefits of accuracy, simplicity and efficiency associated with true e-commerce that only Bluon and the BluonLive network can provide.”
BluonLive is a unique asset to the HVAC space, as no other company provides this type of service. The app enables productivity gains for HVAC technicians as it cuts down hours from the time-consuming process of identifying and purchasing replacement parts. Capuciati elaborated: “Distributors can instantaneously provide their counter staff with more knowledge, in effect adding decades of experience to novice employees. This allows a counter staff, with little to no experience, to provide quality customer service with quick response time to technician customers.”
As a brand-agnostic platform, BluonLive has an advantage over all other HVAC platforms that only offer specific brands. Since almost all HVAC contractors and technicians deal with a wide variety of HVAC equipment brands on a near-daily basis, a technician would need five or more e-commerce apps to do their job, an impractical solution. In addition, other e-commerce platforms depend on the technician in the field knowing the specific part number of what they want to purchase - a nearly impossible task without a massive database and cross-reference engine. In most cases, technicians don’t know the part number they need until a distributor takes the necessary time to conduct the research, which could take anywhere from 10 minutes to more than an hour in some cases. With BluonLive, Bluon does the research for the technician and the distributor.
Bluon has over 120,000 technicians on its platform. BluonLive launched today with 1,600 brick-and-mortar distributor stores connected to its network. Over 2,000 stores are expected to be part of its network by the end of summer, representing over 30% of the HVAC wholesaler market. This includes national, regional, and local players such as RE Michel, FW Webb, Johnstone, WinnSupply, Ferguson, Morsco, Geary Pacific, Slakey Brothers, APR Supply, US Air and over one hundred others.
About Bluon
Bluon offers something truly unique to the $100B HVAC industry, providing support and an e-commerce platform to increase the productivity and efficiency of 120,000+ HVAC technicians and thousands of brick and mortar distributors. With Bluon, techs finally have a brand agnostic, single source for documentation, tech support, and identification and acquisition of specific parts for specific units. This saves technicians hours of time daily and increases the profitability of their business. Now, Bluon is supporting distributors with the industry’s most comprehensive parts and equipment database enabling next-level, cross-reference capabilities while connecting them directly to over 120,000 technicians through Bluon’s e-commerce platform BluonLive. By streamlining the parts purchasing process and facilitating orders placed by these technicians to their existing local distributors, Bluon dramatically increases the efficiency of this process for both parties, supplying the distributor with all the compatible part options that technicians require. Bluon makes navigating the complex world of servicing HVAC equipment much easier for techs and distributors alike with a real solution to the skilled labor gap that weighs heavily on the HVAC Industry.