AST? Bearings is a supplier of miniature and precision bearing products, including engineering and design solutions, to enhance performance or reduce costs to a wide range of applications and industries. “Over the past few years, we’ve noticed that the buying process has changed. We recognized that customers now often research and select products online *even before* talking to a supplier. To support this change, AST is launching a new online catalog to make it easy to find the right bearing product and downloadable CAD models. This should save engineers and designers time as they specify products into their designs,” said Paul Wharton, Director of Marketing, AST Bearings. Enabling our customers to search our online catalog of over 7,700 bearing and related products with 3D CAD models is a first in the bearing industry. From our website, our customers can now easily find the right bearing for their design via a powerful parametric search that avoids the common search frustration of ‘no results found’.

Wharton continued, "We selected Catalog Data Solutions as our online catalog and online CAD service provider based on their proven Software as a Service technology, supporting professional services, ability to brand the solutions to AST Bearings, request for quote and CAD download integration into our Selltis CRM system, and the ability to syndicate our catalog and 3D CAD content across the internet. We look forward to offering our customers this powerful new product search and selection experience."

“AST Bearings is demonstrating thought leadership in the bearing industry and their implementation of this online technology is the most thorough and extensive we’ve seen to date. For example, in the Angular Contact Ball Bearing category (see TIFF image) AST Bearings offers 554 separate products. While that is a large number of products in a single sub-category, users can still easily and very rapidly search for the right product through a parametric search on attributes that include, ‘Bore Diameter’, ‘Outer Diameter’, ‘Width’, ‘Dynamic’ or ‘Static Load Rating,” said John Major, CEO Catalog Data Solutions. “AST Bearings are also right that the buying process has changed, that industrial suppliers need to appear in and influence online research by prospective customers and that CAD downloads are the best online content to offer. Of all types of online marketing content (e.g. white papers, case studies, brochures, videos, demos, recorded webinars, reviews, CAD model downloads, etc.) only one is known to lead to a sale nearly 50% of the time! CAD downloads may be the most efficient and effective website visitor conversion tool available.”