As ecommerce increases in relevance for B2B, Matt Clarke, chief technical officer at Amaze, offers advice on implementing the right platform
B2B solutions are a hot topic within the ecommerce community at the moment. While most solutions look to address large-scale enterprise requirements, this is not always the best route as these projects can take a substantial amount of time to get up and running, or even to get the necessary business case together. Ecommerce in the B2B space however, does not always need to begin big, and by looking at things a little differently you can see how.
When entering the ecommerce world, the key is to start small and think about what your customer base wants and what is important to them. This, more often than not, is the ability to access information quickly, or to place an order or check delivery times and product availability. These are by no means simple requirements, however, with the right platform they can be quickly implemented, simply by following these seven steps:
1. Provide rich product info
Choosing the right platform with good Product Information Management (PIM) will get you 70 per cent there in your B2B journey while allowing you to easily update product information. Most of the key ecommerce solutions provide a comprehensive PIM that will support your product data.
2. Get data ready
Once you have your PIM up and running you can work with the front end of your commerce platform to make that data discoverable. All of the major commerce platform vendors offer accelerator technology to expose product data and enhance that data and make it discoverable on your B2B portal. To keep it simple, stick with the programme templates to start with, to prevent large-scale customisation. The trick is to get your solution up and running and start information sharing with your customer base.
3. Invent your inventory
Once you can expose product data you need to think about pricing and inventory information. Inventory is the easier of the two to tackle, all you need to do is get and export the information on a scheduled basis from your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) team or your warehouse management system. Again, all leading commerce platforms can take this inventory data and update it using in-built inventory management tables to keep stock in sync.
4. Manage the pricing data
Most B2B solutions require customer-specific pricing information. There are only a few commerce vendors that support this function out of the box, a service such as Hybris offers this through its dedicated advanced personalisation or B2B module.
5. Sort out the ordering process
Now we can provide product, inventory and pricing information, we need to start thinking about taking orders. Most B2B solutions do not consider this until a later phase in platform development so that the order process will direct customers to their dedicated account management team. However, if you are ready to take the jump, you need to think about your credit processes as these often require more consideration around your business processes. My recommendation is to start off manually by using the tools within the platform and make sure your back office team is there to pick up orders and complete the necessary checks. If you are more adventurous you can look to fully automate this service, which will require close integration with your business processes. Finding the right partner to help with this integration is key but begin by using your existing teams to streamline the processes. You will be surprised how much more efficient your team and your customers’ purchasing teams can become.
6. Maximise your content
The above steps will get you where you need to be to offer basic B2B ecommerce functionality. There are however a few more steps that should be considered to ensure maximum success. The first is by using rich campaign and marketing related content, which can be handled by the general content management functionality, which is offered by most commerce platforms. It is important to really make use of this function, provide the best content you can, streamline your information and provide the assets for your customers to use. Equally, enhance your content to reflect campaign related offers around your product offering. With most platforms you can use the concept of collections that will enable you to seed product data into wider bundles and content. The final thing that requires consideration is delivery and shipping information. This often requires integration with your existing systems if you are shipping products on mass and/or with your logistics partner. All platforms can achieve this function with relative ease.
7. Allocate the right budget
The final step is to establish how much a project of this kind will cost and what platform you should select. To keep both license and customisation costs to a minimum it is essential you choose the right platform with the right amount of out-of-the-box templates and modules. You need to focus on the full ecommerce suite providers and I recommend not homing in to dedicated B2B functionality as all of the above can be provided straight from the ecommerce world. It does not have to cost the earth, or take a long time; however, the trick is to invest time in researching how to organise license requirements, the order that you should purchase them in and how to work with the out-of-the-box templates and accelerators, as this will save time in the long-run.
