Last year, 85% of B2B companies invested in improving their eCommerce sites. While a number of factors are influencing this trend, one of the most significant may be the market opportunity.
Online B2B eCommerce will grow from $780 billion (in 2015) to $1 trillion by 2020
– Forrester Research
Investing in a best-in-breed solution for your commerce platform will help you deliver an exceptional, B2C-like experience that B2B buyers expect while also increasing revenue from your online channels.
In this series, I’ll address the top questions our clients ask when they are building or improving upon their B2B commerce sites.
When designing a B2B omni-channel solution, where should you first focus your attention?
Look at commerce, content, and customer service with an outside-in approach. That means you need to address your customers’ (or prospective customers’) needs when designing an omni-channel experience. The combination of specific content for your target personas is the foundation for designing the solution.
What’s the benefit of implementing a strong PIM-Commerce solution?
Throughout the omni-channel experience, you gain consistency by reusing and re-purposing content across sales channels. Therefore, content is one of the key differentiators in making a dramatic improvement in online catalogs that support B2B commerce purchases. A more informed buyer has the information they need to make decisions faster and purchase more products.
Additionally, your customer loyalty improves based on the services and content you provide.
How does a PIM-Commerce solution improve product data quality and integrity?
Compartmentalized organizations and siloed data systems drive unnecessary costs. With a combined PIM solution, data silos are eliminated. This reduces costs, increases time to market and consistency across channels, and alleviates the frustration of associates, customers, and suppliers.
In the omni-channel world, eCommerce is merely one of many channels. While PIM is the hub between ERP, CRM, suppliers and other sources, it can also be used for:
- Producing printed material
- Supporting traditional sales and marketing channels
- Managing product-related images, attributes, and text localized for each market
Learn more about the value of PIM and eCommerce in our latest guide.
“PIM is the hub between ERP and CRM.” Well said. A solid PIM implementation should be the first step of any B2B company looking to get into eCommerce.
Structuring your data in such a format creates a central repository for product data that can easily be used by sales, marketing, product management and many others.
The silo approach, as you refer to it, makes for confusion, inconsistent data, and difficult implementations.
Great article!