What is your long-term strategy for success?

Most B2B organisations do their due diligence when gathering project requirements and creating implementation timelines for their ecommerce initiatives. However, the initial project scope often concludes with the ecommerce sales channel going live and does not consider the total life cycle. The concept that an ecommerce site is finished when it is available on the Web is a bit short-sighted. As a lot of B2B ecommerce sites are implemented as a primary sales channel for the organisation, and as such, they should be viewed in line with a large software deployment initiative. Such software deployments plan for quarterly and annual upgrades, as well as new versions of the software over the first three years after the installation is completed; ecommerce is no different.

Like so many instances in the world of technology, consumer expectations are constantly evolving and changing. To remain relevant, your site must keep pace. The easiest way to do this is to plan for future changes at the start of the project. Scheduling revisions and updates allows a B2B company to add new features and functionality while planning for the time, cost and testing that is necessary to successfully add such features.

What is your on-going budget?

Too often B2B companies consider the initial costs of launching an ecommerce initiative, as in, “What will it cost to get it live?” While this is a valid question that addresses the initial cost of launching a B2B ecommerce site, it does not consider total cost of ownership. Maintaining a B2B ecommerce site over time requires ongoing investment to ensure that the site stays up to date and ahead of the competition.

Examples of essential on-going investment activities for ecommerce include design updates, adding new functionality, adding new products to the site, updating photography, images, data and regular site promotions. Planning a budget for Years 2 and 3 will ensure that your company stays ahead of the rest.

What impression do you want to give the user?

Quite often, organizations spend significant money on their public websites, but spend little-to nothing on the design of their B2B user site. These channels are often created by developers who are not accustomed to building a user interface for a large audience of customers and, as a result, the channel falls victim to poor design and lack of usability. Additionally, a B2B user channel is often thought of in terms of its function, not on how it looks or whether it is appealing to its users. Many are ecommerce eye-sores because of this overemphasis on very basic functionality. B2B buyers are people who probably use B2C commerce systems outside work, so will be expecting simple search, browse and checkout functionality, they will also be susceptible to upsell and cross selling.

Questions to be asked

• Do I need multiple experiences required for different sets of customer s/ users?
• How do we present complex product data?
• How do we present fixed and pre-negotiated prices?
• How do we target customers with relevant promotions, volume discounts?
• What access could we give customers to manage their account, roles and permissions?
• How can we give access to the service desk and admin teams to manage orders, cost centres, budgets, sales reports, credit management and sales quotations?
• How can we incorporate our order processes: standing orders, credit checks, open to buy POs, approval processes?

Have you got the right people involved?

As well as partnering with the right ecommerce supplier, putting the right internal project team in place is often one of the most crucial phases of a B2B ecommerce launch. Teams can make or break any project and ecommerce initiatives are not exempt. A potential ecommerce project team issue for a lot of B2B companies is creating a team that is composed of people from one department or area of the business. Projects led by one area of the business, be it sales and marketing or IT, for example; without collaboration and buy-in from other areas of the company, are fated from the beginning. If sales and marketing is in charge, IT will feel that its concerns are not being addressed. If IT leads, sales and marketing may not secure the promotional functionality they need to meet their sales goals. When forming your project team, keep in mind that ecommerce touches all areas and levels of your organisation, even if it doesn’t seem that way at first. A combination of resources will help ensure your site’s success.

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What integration is required and desired?

Integration means different things to different industries, but it is an important area to consider if you wish to maximise the power of your B2B ecommerce sales channel. Integration of your ecommerce solution with your ERP and back-end business systems is a must, as without this link between systems, the business will generate multiple databases, silos of information, and inconsistent pricing and product details between systems. Lack of integration also increases labour costs to manage the manual updating process for each system and increases the chance for human error. Integration eliminates double entry of information and out-of-stock issues, allows you to show customer-specific pricing, manages whether or not tax is applied to an order, pushes shipping costs back to the ERP for easy billing to the customer, and expedites the order fulfillment process. Consider the types of integration, it is relatively low cost to integrate via scheduled import and export of data between systems, but some data needs to be integrated with real time API’s to ensure up to date information. The cost of integration will definitely increase your overall cost of the implementation, but the associated cost is worth it, as you avoid creating an untethered and expensive monster that must be dealt with further down the road.

[Download PDF to see Diagram]

Have you chosen the correct ecommerce partner?

It is important when you are selecting an ecommerce partner that choose the right one for your business, these are the types of questions that you may like to consider asking both internally and to a shortlist of prospective ecommerce partners.

• Can they provide advice in the planning stage?
• Will they be available for regular meetings?
• Will we get a dedicate team to work with throughout the project?
• Do they supply a proven B2B ecommerce platform?
• Have they worked with companies of a similar size to us?
• Do they have the skills and people to meet our time scales?
• Do they have the infrastructure to support and maintain the solution on an on-going basis?

It is really worth thinking about the type of ecommerce partner that matches your company requirements and core working values as this in an on-going relationship. Large enough to have the infrastructure skills and resource to execute your project, with the economies of scale to be competitive, yet is hands on enough to enable you build a strong working partnership.

Make sure that they have a track record of integration, into backend systems as well as the ecommerce experience. The reality is that many ecommerce providers are not capable of providing you with complete integration to your back-end systems, though many will still say they can.

How will you benchmark success?

This question might seem obvious; you want your ecommerce site to help you sell more products. However, “selling more” is probably not the benchmark you will use one year after your site goes live to determine whether the project was successful. Create some bench marks; you can always revise it later. Having clear and measurable goals will ensure that you can benchmark your success in the future. For example; would a 20% adoption rate by your customers constitute success? Do you have the marketing support to create awareness?

Other goals may be to reduce calls to Customer Service by 25%, or reduce order errors by 50%, increase dispatch time by 50%, realise orders from 2% of lost customers. There’s no right or wrong answer when setting targets for your new sales channel, but knowing what you are measuring from the outset and having the plan and the resource in place to support you, will help you benchmark and realise success

Final thoughts from Eclipse Group Solutions

There’s no doubt that more and more B2B organisations are taking their products online with ecommerce. The shrewd ones are not only considering how to get their products online, but how to maximize their site’s success over the long term. Considering your long-term ecommerce strategy, budget, goals and project team will ensure that your site is successful for years to come.