Zero Downtime, Zero Misses

Founded in 1962

60,000+ SKUs across 100+ brands

225+ employees

Headquartered in Clearwater, Florida

Serves heavy equipment and industrial sectors

Hercules Sealing Products is a leading provider of aftermarket hydraulic seals, kits, and cylinders, serving repair shops and industrial maintenance teams across North America.

The company supports customers through an extensive product catalog and a distribution network built for speed. Its fulfillment operations are designed to deliver parts quickly, often within the same or next day.

For its customers, downtime is costly. When equipment goes down, every minute impacts productivity, revenue, and operations. Finding the right part fast is critical. As ecommerce became a primary channel, the challenge was to deliver that same level of speed and precision in the digital experience.

As ecommerce became a core driver of the business, Hercules’ digital experience needed to keep pace with the speed and precision of its operations. Instead, search became a bottleneck.

Hercules’ catalog includes highly complex, long-tail SKUs, with part numbers that can run 18–19 characters long. As Andy Patel, Vice President of Commercial Services at Hercules, explains, “We previously required perfect findability. You’d have to remember or type in 18 digits correctly.” A hydraulic seal might be cataloged as “MRTU-40X50,” and if a customer typed “MRTU-40x50” with a lowercase x, they’d find nothing. Miss the dash, nothing. Type 50 instead of 50.0, nothing.

At the same time, customers encountered separate search and product-discovery experiences that did not always provide consistent results.

The result was inconsistent experiences, missed searches, and a system that couldn’t scale with the business.

Exact-Match Dependency

Search required perfect input. Customers needed to enter part numbers perfectly to get results. Even minor variations in formatting or syntax led to failed searches, creating friction for users trying to resolve urgent downtime issues.

No Intelligent Discovery

Search and discovery lacked AI-driven relevance and recommendations, limiting the ability to adapt to user behavior or guide customers to the right products.

Duplicate Product Data

A single seal kit could exist as dozens of separate entries, sometimes up to 55 variations, across different categories. This created unnecessary complexity, reduced accuracy, and made the catalog difficult to manage and scale. Most importantly, it contributed to a slow search experience for customers that needed speed.

Hercules turned to Coveo to handle the complexity of its catalog while delivering the speed and precision its customers depend on. By unifying fragmented data sources into a single index and improving relevance with AI-driven search, Hercules created a faster, more scalable product discovery experience.

AI-Powered Search

Improves findability by handling partial, imprecise, and varied inputs, eliminating the need for exact matches.

AI-Driven Recommendations

Uses behavioral signals and recommendations to surface relevant products and guide users to the right results faster.

Listing Pages

Allow a single product to appear across multiple categories without duplication, reducing catalog complexity and improving product discoverability.

Dynamic Faceting

Allows buyers to filter by dimensions and specifications, helping them quickly narrow results and find the right part.

Coveo delivered measurable improvements across search accuracy, speed, and operational efficiency, directly impacting how customers find and purchase products.

More Accurate Search, Fewer Misses

Customers can now find products without exact part numbers. Partial, imprecise, and varied inputs return relevant results, helping reduce failed searches and friction for customers trying to find products quickly.

Faster Performance at Peak Demand

Site speed improved significantly, delivering 30% faster results even during peak demand, eliminating slowdowns that previously impacted high-intent users. “The number one complaint on our site was that it was very slow. We no longer hear complaints of speed.”

Faster Filtering with Smarter Facets

Buyers can filter by dimensions such as inner diameter, outer diameter, and height. Instead of scrolling through long lists, they can narrow results and find the right part more efficiently.

Simplified Catalog, Less Duplication

A single product can now appear across multiple categories without duplication. This eliminated thousands of redundant entries and made the catalog easier to manage and scale.

Smarter Discovery with Recommendations

AI-driven recommendations, including “recently viewed,” “customers also viewed,” and “frequently viewed together,” surface relevant products and help guide shoppers toward a purchase.

Customers can now find the right part faster, with less friction at exactly the moments that matter most. That speed translates directly into measurable business impact. Better search accuracy also means customers rely less on support. With more effective self-service tools, they can complete orders independently, reducing the volume of manual support the team has to handle. As search adoption grows, it increasingly becomes the most efficient path to purchase, capturing high-intent demand and converting it more efficiently.

AI-powered recommendations take it a step further. Behavioral signals and smart suggestions help surface the right products even in a dense, technical catalog where the connections between parts aren’t always obvious to the customer.

The operational impact is real: Hercules now does twice the business with fewer service reps. By improving search and cleaning up data structure, they’ve created a system that can handle more volume without adding headcount or complexity.

Andy is often asked at industry events what advice he would give peers looking to drive similar transformation. His answer centers on two key areas.

Don’t take on everything at once.

While implementing Coveo, Hercules was also navigating several internal changes, including structural and system upgrades. Andy’s advice is to stay focused and prioritize what will have the greatest impact.

“Take a step back and decide. Nurture the two or three things you really want to go for, rather than trying to do it all at once.”

Know your digital journey and your metrics before you start.

“Really understand what your digital journey is and scale it from there. Have a clear view of the metrics you’re trying to drive.”