The New B2B Commerce Ecosystem: Turning Chaos into Full Transparency
With the latest innovations in artificial intelligence, advanced search and data management tools available, full in-house transparency of the eCommerce ecosystem is possible.
What this means to you as a manufacturer or distributor is that, at the push of a button, the status of your internal product development efficiencies, inventory, in-depth sales analysis, supply chain status
are all visible. It also means your customer is able to check real time inventory to meet their needs, take advantage of any product and shipping discounts and much more. One key to remember as we are designing these ecosystems is that procurement teams are mostly comprised of millennial and Gen X buyers heavily influenced by B2C shopping experiences and expect efficient Amazon-like B2B digital processes both pre-and post-purchase.
What makes the 2024 eCommerce ecosystem work?
When we look at the current state of B2B eCommerce, we find some disconnections. Internally, product information is kept by different departments depending on their own particular needs. Accounting/Finance may have SKUs, pricing discounts, Product ROI on electronic spread sheets. Marketing may have broader product descriptions to manage the website, catalogs and descriptions for each market place. Sales people are more order takers than sales people simply because they don’t have a full inventory view and perhaps they can’t find old products which are still being sold on the website.
But prospects and customers cannot see all the product line up or SKUs available on site or in marketplaces. Items are not easily kitted and you have to know exactly what product you are looking for. It’s a great way to frustrate both your internal team and your customers.
buying experience in a B2B world of complex buying. Your ERP is fully able to handle transactional data from your accounting and finance departments while a PIM elevates the buying experience and enables marketing and sales teams to work smarter while using AI to anticipate the buying activity.
The pieces in play
Foundational tools like advanced site search, site speed enhancements and image optimization work behind the scenes to create that seamless customer experience your buyers crave. Advanced site search not only brings your products to the forefront using both machine learning and artificial intelligence but we consistently see cart conversion rates increase 80%. Site search works both contextually and visually, thus enabling buyers to scan and order while walking the warehouse. Image optimization allows you to show off every product while still keeping site speed light and easy.
PIMs allow you to add digital pipelines to all internal & external product information sources to vastly expand your catalog’s site search parameters. Once optimized, it forms a central index, or several integrated indexes, which staff can pull from for sales, marketing, & merchandising activities.
Moreover, a PIM sets the stage for leveraging advanced navigation & merchandising that increase customer engagement, conversions, & average-order values (AOV). PIM optimized taxonomies categorize SKUs by attributes or features which offer product teams the granularity to design innovated promotional campaigns, merchandising offers, & content syndications around shared attributes.
ERP product description fields aren’t sufficient for designing rich, targeted customer experiences on front-end e-commerce platforms. Optimal taxonomies allow you to tailor the buyer journey for each customer with highly relevant multi-select navigation, fast, accurate search results, and targeted merchandising offers that instantly engage buyers to reduce bounce & abandonment metrics and increase conversions & average-order-values.
Rob Neumann, Chief Digital Officer at CSS Commerce, says
“If someone’s searching for a specific product brand, you can offer the brand as well as equivalent products like a lower-cost, higher-margin equivalent to see if the buyer values price over brand name. I can search for binoculars, and I’d like them black. Here’s what’s good about this search. It’s not just black ones in the product selection. The second one is grey and black but less expensive. I may not want to spend the $361, so lower cost items are presented. It gives you a set of product options around price point.”
Build BOM & Assembly Hierarchies
Manufacturers and assembly operations, particularly those that sell aftermarket parts, can create their Bill-of-Material hierarchy inside a PIM at the granular level. An automotive manufacturer can create & optimize the entire BOM, and data map finished products & individual components (down to the nuts & bolts) to pre-configured digital channels automatically. For example,
“We have a new client that sends a data packet based on a buyer request. Buyer goes in and enters a BOM, a pre-filtered product catalog gets assembled in PIM, and automatically sent to the buyer” adds Rob.
Other tools developed by CSS Commerce
Our client wanted to develop efficient web-based portals for their Enterprise customers that offered multi-buyer, multi-destination purchasing functionality from a single order page. The problem was that most standard shopping carts were designed for consumer marketplaces where orders are typically shipped to one address. So, we developed SKU by Store!
“I had a vision of a shopping cart that didn’t handle just one door (store or warehouse) at a time. If you’re a cell phone dealer & you have 100 stores, all the systems on the planet make you go through one door (store) at a time or upload a bulk file and hope that it works,” says client Ted Wichman of Superior Communications.
Time-to-Market in 30 Days
When it comes to a Merger or Acquisition, getting to market fast is the best way to ensure ROI quickly.
“We’ve got a way to extract the transactional information out of your ERP fast. Our secret sauce is how to get it (product data) out of your new acquisition faster! We can typically have them (products) optimized in a PIM & available for sale in under 30 days including automatic language & currency conversions,” shares Rob.
Data mapping new acquisitions from ERP to ERP is a time-consuming project that could take six months to more than a year to complete. But a PIM’s no-tech REST API integration allows you to import, optimize, & sell those products on your website in as little as 30 days:
- Enables omnichannel commerce with no-tech channel & storefront creation preconfigured for global markets with built-in cultural, language, & currency conversions.
- No-tech syndication allows you to bulk publish product information to all relevant sales channels instantly. Real-time product information updates & inventory availability.
Trends to watch
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More than 87% of millennial B2B buyers will pay a price premium for Amazon-like customer portals that offer more efficient order management, faster checkouts, & contextualized product content that preemptively answer FAQs.
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Contextualized AI/ML-driven content delivery will be a critical e-commerce brand differentiator for many manufacturing & distribution companies transitioning to digital procurement services.
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There's been a noticeable shift from selling by SKU to offering a tailored buyer experience driven by AI/ML data analytics & product team expertise.
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ERP product information is not expansive enough to deliver fast website product discovery & intuitive search bar navigation demanded by the new Enterprise B2B Buyer.
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Roughly 90% of B2B buyers would switch to a competitor if their current supplier didn’t provide efficient digital buying experiences.
The eCommerce ecosystem continues to evolve and mature. Are you keeping up? Get a free consultation with the experts at CSS Commerce. Click here for an appointment.
