Watsco Inc., one of the biggest public distributors of heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) products, in recent quarters has been downright chatty with stock analysts about its ecommerce plans and digital sales results.

But not for its most recent quarter ended Sept. 30. For the third quarter, ecommerce grew “15%, 16%,” vice president of corporate development Rick Gomez told analysts on Watsco’s latest earnings call.

The company made only one mention to ecommerce on the call and none for its emerging digital technology strategy and made no mention of its growing number of mobile app users.

In contrast, Watsco CEO Albert H. Nahmad brought up ecommerce six times on the company’s earnings call for the third quarter of 2020. He also made eight references to digital technology and one reference to mobile apps.

Relying more on digital selling tools

In recent quarters, ecommerce has accounted for about 30% of all sales for Watsco. Using that metric, Digital Commerce 360 projects that online sales grew year over year by 16% to $534.8 million from about $461.0 million in the third quarter of 2020.

Total Q3 2021 sales grew by 13% to $1.78 billion from $1.54 billion in the Q3 of the previous year. Net earnings were $168.8 million in the third quarter compared with $126.2 million in Q3 2020.

Watsco says it serves “approximately 350,000 contractors and technicians, increasingly through the use of digital tools, including e-commerce and mobile apps.”

“Our technology strategy was defined several years ago and is intended to transform a complete manual process into a complete digital process,” Watsco says. “In addition to evolving our customer’s experience, we have launched and are scaling technologies to transform the homeowner experience, which, in turn, will help our customers grow.”

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