We are clearly encouraged by what we’re seeing. And I think the execution has been really good. Have there been any surprises sure, there’s always going to be surprised. I would say nothing though that rises to the level of kind of a big picture surprise. But in this kind of effort, the devil is in the details. And what I mean by details is down to — we’re managing this project at a SKU, at a customer level to make constantly there’ll be fine-tuning that gets done through the balance of the fiscal year. So again, this is not a light switch that goes on and it’s done. This is an ongoing effort of refinement. But what you’re hearing from us is early encouragement when we look across — we have a scorecard that goes into a lot of detail, but gives us a very clear dashboard of how we’re doing in terms of growth prospects, profitability measures, leading indicators like I talked about in terms of early customer behavior and voice of customer and what they’re telling us, what you’re hearing is encouragement that early signs are good, but by no means saying its done.
Operator: And our next question today comes from Stephen Volkmann from Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Stephen Volkmann: Kristen, you gave a pretty long laundry list of sort of what the inflection might be in the second half. But I was curious because you didn’t mention the destock that Erik kind of called out. So is that part of the — is that a fifth thing? Or is that part of the 4 things?
Kristen Actis-Grande: No, I’d say we’re putting that in with macro, Steve.
Stephen Volkmann: Okay. So macro up 1 to 2 points, even with the end of the destock. Maybe that’s .
Kristen Actis-Grande: Yes. And I guess the other thing I’d add is like we have seen the last year or two I don’t know if I’d call it just destocking but sort of an end of calendar year sales pattern that it seems like it’s sort of becoming the new normal. So I suppose if that’s in your first half, the second half seasonality assumption, like when we calculate that, looking back at prior years, you probably are inherently picking up some of that in the seasonality number, too. It’s probably just not destocking necessarily in prior years as much as just like year-end belt tightening.
Stephen Volkmann: And then slightly differently, just any evolution in how you’re thinking about price cost for the rest of the year?
Kristen Actis-Grande: Yes. So broadly, we still expect price cost to be more favorable in the second half of the year. Feeling really good about pricing assumptions in the second half. And then if you kind of run out gross margin for the full year, which we now expect to be at Q2 levels or slightly above the — really, with the countermeasures that we’ve had in place we’ve been largely successful in offsetting the transactional price cost headwind. So certainly happy that the worst of that headwind is behind us, but then broadly, just really pleased with how the countermeasures have been performing.
Operator: And our next question comes from Chris Dankert with Loop Capital. Please go ahead.
Chris Dankert: I guess hoping to dig in a little bit more on the product discovery and that digital revamp here. I mean any — and you highlighted what the overall benefit is, I guess, but just what gives you confidence in that expected benefit into the back half and ’25? Maybe what’s been driving some of the delays there? If you could just give us a little bit more fleshed out color on that digital rollout, that would be great.
Erik Gershwind: Yes, you got it, Chris. So we’re — there’s basically two fronts that we’re moving on in terms of our digital experience, our website, in particular. And those two fronts are the platform, meaning the transactional engine that customers go through and the search or product discovery function. And we have improvements lined up on both. They’re really aimed and anchored in two overarching principles. One is continuing to make the website the customer experience more frictionless, more seamless and just a great — better and better experience as time goes on. And the second thing is to make it more personalized for the customer. Those are the overarching principles and those are the two areas in which we’re moving.
On the platform front, we actually got a bunch of stuff over the finish line this month through Q2 and into this month. What we’re tracking there Chris is metrics such as we’re looking at basically conversion rate. So we’re looking at customer sat numbers and then we’re looking at conversion rate, which is for every 1,000 customers, 10,000 customers that come to the website, how many converts to an order, which is a good barometer for us, that ultimately leads to revenue improvements. On search, we are slightly delayed. We had expected all of the search changes or the bulk of the search changes to be in by Q2. Those are pushed out and will be done basically over the next quarter and into Q4, it’s going to be a series of improvements. I would say there really two principles, Chris, first was we focused — we saw some opportunities on the platform to make the experience better, wanted to nail those first.
And the second kind of overarching principle that we have, while time lines are important, quality is more important. We’ve always felt that way. And what we found with search is the architecture is good. We’re confident in the new platform, but there were refinements that we could do to make it better. And so we went with the mantra of quality over time line. And so that will be rolling out in the back half. What we’re going to be looking for internally there is we’re going to be looking at the conversion metrics because we can get close line of sight, Chris, from conversion metrics into revenue performance.
