Customer expectations are steadily rising across all industries and verticals. To retain business, companies must continually innovate, embrace digitization, and prepare for the future. Don’t think of this as creating something completely new. It is just not possible to walk away from your current business model and transform. Instead consider the critical gap areas of your business and focus upon those. The critical gap areas, whether it be not providing a direct-to-consumer business, a poor e-commerce strategy, inventory management, or the inability to digitally work with distributors and offer a streamlined ordering process, are where you can likely shine and innovate the strongest. Gap areas, once accomplished, will offer your business the largest edge against your competitors.
Identify Your Gap Areas
By creating a strategy and roadmap for your future, understanding market trends, and embracing digitization you will be able to clearly identify gaps. One of the most common gap areas our clients come to us for is guidance on is being able to satisfy both B2B and B2C processes on a single e-commerce platform, often called a hybrid e-commerce platform solution. Choosing an e-commerce platform that can provide the e-commerce growth you require should be considered one of the core foundations in moving your business forward. Implementing the right e-commerce platform with hybrid capabilities will allow you to see success and growth in the near and far term and ultimately save you both time and money.
What qualities should you look for in a hybrid e-commerce platform?
Echidna has put together a short list of top requirements organizations should look for when reviewing e-commerce platforms for hybrid capabilities to ensure scalable e-commerce growth is within reach.
- -Bulk Ordering: The ability to make it easy for your customers to enter SKU and quantities needed with their pricing coming up is extremely important to allow them to avoid calling or emailing in, which will then defeat the purpose of your e-commerce site. Having a platform that can avoid doing this with multiple product pages and forcing them to head right to check-out is also preferred from user experience and sales standpoints.
- -Quote Request: Often times your B2B buyers will need customized pricing or shipping options depending on the size of their order. Having a Request a Quote feature that is easily integrated into your site will allow your customers to create a draft order which can then be updated by someone on your team to provide the final quote, to which a customer can immediately purchase or edit.
- -Account Management: You will want to be able to leverage the same branding and mobile responsive design for both B2B and B2C, but will want the storefronts to ultimately have different capabilities which will be designated upon account log in. From having specific catalog and pricing structures, messaging, varying promotions, and even B2B or B2C focused articles this are all important to create a unique experience.
- -Catalog/ Inventory Management: Having a single source with a simple way to oversee inventory management is extremely important when choosing a hybrid e-commerce platform. You should have the ability to toggle products on and off for certain users or certain markets (B2B vs B2C). This should created increased efficiency and transparency for catalog/ inventory management by removing the need to oversee multiple catalogs.
Final Thoughts
B2B buyers increasingly want to order their products in the same fashion that they purchase many of their B2C goods, via a straightforward online experience. With trends showing these numbers are continually growing, it is important to prepare for the future of e-commerce by choosing a best-in-class hybrid e-commerce platform. The technical work put into making a hybrid e-commerce platform specific for your unique requirements (in some cases) may seem extensive, however once live it is typically much more efficient and paves the way for scalability and improved efficiency. With one website you will have consolidation with system integrations like ERP and CRM, plus the transparency between the various markets and your internal teams. If you would like help navigating the options available to you regarding hybrid e-commerce platforms please contact us to start a conversation.
Download our Future-Readiness eCommerce Platform Report to learn:
- How to develop a foundation to support the future of e-commerce for your brand
- Insight to choose an a platform built for future-readiness, including examples
- Research tips when reviewing e-Commerce platforms and e-commerce strategy
- Costs associated with e-Commerce platforms