B2B eCommerce – 4 Priorities when Diving into Digital Transformation

B2B eCommerce – 4 Priorities when Diving into Digital Transformation

If you’re a B2B merchant still relying on email, spreadsheets, faxes, pen and paper, and other legacy technologies to run your business, you’re leaving a ton of revenue on the table for your competition to snatch up. The single biggest way to expand your business and scale is by diving into digital transformation or adding an online selling channel. 

 

An online selling channel can go by many names, an eCommerce store, an online buying portal, a customer marketplace, or a self-service digital selling platform. They all have one thing in common, giving customers access to buy products digitally, at their own discretion. 

 

Keep this number in mind: 

When compared to the highest revenue-driving sales models, eCommerce beats out email, online chat, video conferences, and phone calls by a wide margin, according to McKinsey and Company’s research. 

 

ECommerce is driving more revenue, and buyers prefer merchants who sell online through eCommerce.  

In the same report, McKinsey found eCommerce was also the single most effective sales channel, beating out even in-person meetings, for the first time ever. The proof is in the pudding, as they say.  

 

With more merchants selling via digital channels this year than any other year in history, the sprint to eCommerce has never been more important or more saturated. 

 

So, what do you do? 

 

As a merchant jumping into eCommerce and online sales channels for the first time, or if the first time didn’t go as planned, there are a couple of things you need to lock down before you dive straight into eCommerce platforms, integrations, feature sets, and all that other good stuff. 

 

Before picking an eCommerce platform on which to build and hire developers, here are 4 things you need to think about on this journey to set yourself up for success:

1. Data Clean up and Consolidation

 

 

We’ve been there… and it’s not pretty 

 

A problem plaguing many merchants, and even more out in the B2B ecosystem, is a seemingly impossible amount of data living in many separate sources, unconnected to each other. Some product data in this sheet, some customer data over here, with no way for these data points to talk to each other besides manual analysis.  

 

This lack of organization/consolidation is the first hurdle you must overcome before you dive into the deep end of eCommerce. 

 

This may seem more daunting than it really is, and one of the fastest ways to alleviate the pressure of organizing and consolidating all your own data is by looking into an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) Solution. A software solution like NetSuite ERP can often really help with data clean-up and analysis. ERPs are an all-in-one business management solution that help businesses run more efficiently using technology. There are also more niche solutions, like BTS-it, an ERP solution specifically for the metal manufacturing industry. Sunshine Metals integrated BTS-it into their eCommerce solution BigCommerce, you can see how they managed it here. 

 

Specifically for product information, a PIM (Product Information Management) solution can help by digitizing and organizing your product data all in one place. There are many ways you can do this, but in our experience, PIMs tend to be the most user-friendly and easy to set up, with a trusted team to help along the way. 

 

If you plan to introduce commerce on your website, these solutions will be paramount in setting yourself up for success down the road. The only way to analyze these data points is to have them all live in the same place, and analyzing data is the best way to decide what your next steps are without guesswork and trial and error.  

 

If your data is clean and able to be analyzed, you are already closer to being the next success story in B2B eCommerce, able to be agile and make data-driven decisions when the time comes. That said, legacy data is RARELY (if ever) “clean,” so it would be prudent to begin data cleanup and standardization as an ongoing practice. 

 

Our friend Amy did a further deep dive into how to clean up your data and get the most out of it in her article, Turn Data Into Dollars with these 6 Tips on Product Data Governance.

 

 

2. Streamlining and Digitizing Admin Processes

 

 

Once your data lives in one platform, allowing us to pull reports and analyses easily, it is time to streamline and digitize the rest of your processes.  

 

But what exactly does this mean? 

 

Well, there are many processes that go into running a business on the back end, from your fulfillment and logistical workflows to payroll, taxes, sales, and many more. 

 

After identifying your data stack, organizing, and digitizing it, your next step is to do the same for all the business processes that take up many hours on a day-to-day basis. No more manually inputting hours and calculating payroll and taxes, gone are the days of spreadsheets and written order forms going to the warehouse for fulfillment.  

 

These legacy processes are stealing hours and hours of your workweek, hours that could be opened for business development and scaling if they were streamlined, digitized, and automated. 

 

A couple of key things to identify when moving to automation and digitization are: 

  • Identifying repetitive tasks done every day, or on a weekly basis, that can be automated by software 

  • Creating standard operating procedures and inputting these standards into software that will keep this standard up. This may include how reports are structured, the correct workflow for getting an order into fulfillment, the process when a new customer is received and onboarded, etc. 

  • Finding the right software and partners that can connect to your website, so all these processes and workflows live in one place, making it easier to maintain and optimize than if they all lived in various spreadsheets and other areas. 

 

With these 3 things in mind, Guy Harvey (an Intradeco company) digitized and automated many of their business processes, like their inventory management, fulfillment, and sales processes. Almost immediately, they saw improvements in productivity, fulfillment efficiency, and overall employee morale. Finding a partner agency to help with the best practices of automation and digitization may be something for you to think about.  

 

For now, let us continue to our next priority.

 

 

3. Security

 

 

Now, let’s talk about security. 

 

At the end of 2020 and into 2021, more than 2,000 websites running Magento 1 post-End of Life were hacked. These breaches gave the hackers access to customer data, like payment information, and brought many of these businesses to their knees. 

 

One of the most important things to think about at this stage of the game is the security of your website. Before moving into eCommerce, you must prioritize security now that your data and business workflows are digitized. One of the biggest mistakes eCommerce merchants make is leaving their security as a “minor priority” or something to worry about in the future. Security is a proactive priority, not a reactive one, and you need to have strong security features in place before your customer’s data gets breached, which can cause major headaches in the future. 

 

The biggest thing to keep in mind when it comes to security is whether you have the resources to deal with it in-house, or if you should look for a security partner, like our friends over at Webscale. If you do not have the capabilities to stay on top of web security with your team, looking externally for help will ensure there is always someone around to deal with site breaches, outages, slowdowns, and more.

 

4. Understand Your Buyers’ Wants and Needs

 

 

The last step before building out your self-service buying portal, selling marketplace, or eCommerce website is knowing what your customers’ wants and needs are. 

 

Of course, this is important for any business, digital or non. However, here are some key things for you to think about pre-eCommerce: 

 

  • How do your customers typically purchase? Credit? Purchase orders?  

  • Do your customers browse your entire catalog, or do they usually utilize search to find specific products or parameters? 

  • Do your customers need advanced shipping options, due to having multiple warehouses, brick-and-mortar locations, or other needs? 

  • Do buyers need to be verified or have a log-in to access your catalog? 

  • Do certain customer segments or profiles get special pricing?  

 

If you are asking yourself these questions, you’re on the right track.  

 

But why do we need to know how our buyers think and interact with the site? Well, this will allow us to plan for what premium B2B features your website is going to need to provide your customers with the buying experience they desire from you. 

 

The Binding Source, a B2B distribution company, took these things and more into consideration before they chose an eCommerce platform for their site to live on. They needed custom product filtering for the search functionality, purchase order acceptance and auto-tax exemptions, advanced shipping options with ShipperHQ, a gated buyer portal requiring log-in verification, and more. 

 

After evaluating what their needs were and what types of site functionalities and features they would need, they chose BigCommerce to build their site on. While BigCommerce is not a one-size-fits-all platform, it fits TBS’s needs perfectly and helped the distribution company improve its conversion rate by 170% post-launch, with a 33% boost in transaction volume.

 

 

Next Steps

 

 

Now, We know it is a lot to process, but these are the 4 most important things for B2B’s to be thinking about before they jump into implementing eCommerce into their online presence.  

 

At this point, we have all our data organized and structured, our business processes digitized and automated, our site security at the forefront of our minds, and our customers’ needs and wants fleshed out. 

 

To take that leap off the diving board and dive in, it’s time to decide whether you have the resources to build out a fully-fledged eCommerce website in-house, or if it’s time to call an eCommerce agency, like Redstage.  

 

The difference between calling an agency and simply dedicating a developer for this is the experience, the expertise and the dedicated time to ensuring your eCommerce implementation is successful.  

 

If you have any questions or want to know the next steps in implementing online selling for your business, you can get a hold of us here.

 

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Visa Issues “Urgent Action Required” Warning for Magento 1 Users

Visa Issues “Urgent Action Required” Warning for Magento 1 Users

Visa’s April 2020 Aquirer Advisory report outlines steps Magento 1 merchants need to take in order to keep their online stores PCI compliant, as Magento 1’s “End of Support” (colloquially known as ‘M1 End of Life‘) approaches this June. Visa advises acquirers to encourage merchants on Magento 1 to migrate to a Magento 2.3 or another PCI compliant eCommerce platform. Moreover, the announcement clarifies the dangers for businesses and their customers if payment card data exposed, and includes a roadmap for businesses to seek compliance.

Excerpt below:

Overview

Visa is committed to enhancing both the security and quality of payment services available in both Card-Present and Card-Not-Present environments. This fact sheet provides useful information related to the upcoming end of life for all Magento 1 websites. Merchants must be cognizant of their responsibilities in securing their environment to help prevent the loss of payment card data. Acquirers should use this information to take risk-based decisions and encourage their merchants to migrate to a supported version or alternate platform to remain PCI compliant. Merchants who suspect or confirm a compromise involving payments data must adhere to the requirements outlined in Visa’s What To Do If Compromised guide.”

Click here to view the full report .

 

Redstage’s CEO Adam Morris has this to say, “We continue to hear from our payment partners that they are planning necessary actions to prevent breaches from out of date Magento 1 sites. This is the first public statement that we have seen –and we expect more to come in the next few months– zeroing in on the consequences of non-compliance. The risk of not being able to accept payments has to be factored into any decision to stay on Magento 1 at this point.”

 

About Magento 1 End of Life

We’ve been raising awareness about the dangers of Magento 1 End of Life since early 2019. To help merchants migrate fast, we’ve developed several accelerated migration solutions to help B2B and B2C companies make the switch as fast as possible. Merchants can also receieve free assistance as part of the Offline2On initiative, or receive funding from PayPal’s Magento migration loan builder program.

10 Articles To Strengthen Your Holiday eCommerce Strategy

10 Articles To Strengthen Your Holiday eCommerce Strategy

As Thanksgiving quickly approaches, retailers and e-marketers have a lot on their minds. With touchpoints coming from multiple directions across your customer journey, it’s easy to overlook critical components that can immediately affect your revenue goals. To keep you on track, we created this holiday roadmap that covers every part of your funnel. Grab some hot chocolate, scroll through our list, and rest easy while your holiday sales jump like Jordan.

1.   The Difference Between Good & Great Content.

There are multiple ways to leverage content to hit different audiences. However, doing so well enough to generate leads, encourage customer loyalty, upsell, and build trust can prove challenging. In these 3 blog posts, we share a few gems to help you produce content that engages and will continue to drive value far beyond the holiday season. If your content marketing strategy doesn’t utilize these key principles, it’s not too late to inject them into your plan. Take a look and maybe grab an idea or two to spice up your content.

Content marketing should be a major cornerstone in your marketing arsenal. By providing valuable, free content, that builds customer empathy, you will attract and convert new prospects into brand-loyal customers. The caveat to producing great content is having the foresight to produce content that aligns with customer interests, while continuously delivering new content that your customers hunger for.

— Christopher Yin, Creative Director, Redstage

Revenue Increase With Good Content

Key Take-Aways:

Know your audience and create content that hits them on a personal level. What are their interests and hobbies? What are the causes they care about? With a more complex buying process, B2B companies may want to consider producing content that hists each part of the sales funnel. Are you helping your audience think critically about the industry? How can you make your customers better-skilled professionals Furthermore, how can you align your brand with these things in a way that’s authentic and true to your brand?

The Difference Between Good & Great Content Marketing.

Top 5 Trends in B2B Personalization & Social Selling.

What Prime Day Can Teach Us About Holiday Sales.

2.  How to Stop Your Store from Crashing

Thanks to your engaging and authentic content, customers are flocking to your store. Lucky for you, holiday spending is expected to increase by 5% this year, but most customers won’t be visiting your physical location. More than half (around 53%) of your holiday customers will shop exclusively online. This surge in traffic has the potential to cause a lot of stress on your server, causing crashes or bugs that leave your customers aggravated or empty-handed.

You’ve worked hard to build trust and develop customer loyalty, you can’t fail them now, and with our help, you won’t.

The holidays are a time of increased profits, but that comes with a huge load on websites. So if you haven’t done proper stress testing to account for higher demand, you won’t know how your online store is going to react.

Adam Morris, CEO at Redstage

Revenue loss and Conversion Rate

Key Take-Aways:

Proper preparation prevents poor performance. Your customers won’t let you off the hook if you give them a poor experience, especially if you’re a wholesaler or manufacturer who has an inaccurate count of inventory. Twitter can be your best friend or worst enemy. Check out these articles to ensure you stick with the former by properly monitoring your site and completing our performance checklist. These 4 articles will help you optimize and digitally strengthen your store for the holidays.

Ghosts Of Black Fridays Past: 3 Crucial Warnings For Retailers.

Black Friday Countdown: 4 Critical Last-Minute Store Optimizations.

Black Friday Countdown: 8 Omnichannel & Back Office Final Touches.

Q&A with Redstage’s Adam Morris: Prep for Black Friday 2018.

3. How To Unlock More Mobile Holiday Revenue

By now you have done the research and collected the data. You know your customers’ buying habits, likes, and dislikes.  You now only have 1 shot and a couple of seconds to impress them with frictionless and secure customer experiences. 32% of consumers change their minds about making a mobile purchase by abandoning their carts. Getting this step right can potentially cut your mobile cart abandonment in half. A part of stress testing your site is assessing your checkout funnel and you can do so with the Mobile Optimization Initiative. This blog can get you thinking with a mobile-first customer experience mentality so that you are not missing out on your share in over $500 billion.

Smart A/B testing based on data-driven analysis gives you insights that lead to successful, simple changes that can have a big impact on increasing your revenue per visitor.

Benjamin Shapiro, Solutions Engineer, Redstage

Revenue Loss and CART ABANDONMENT

Key Take-Aways:

Doing it right the first time can save you the trouble in the end. Potential consumers and corporate buyers want to check out with ease, the sooner you begin simplifying the check-out process the better your site will perform The sooner you start, the better your site will perform. Better performance means staying one step ahead of your competitors.

How to Unlock More Mobile Holiday Revenue.

4. How to Defend Your Store from Cybercriminals

You have done your due diligence and can sit back and enjoy your holiday. Not exactly. While customers are increasingly shopping online, there is a huge risk that their data can be exposed. You may have heard of some common hacks such as phishing, payment fraud, and account take over.  With an expectation of a $22 billion loss this year due to fraud this section is a must-read. Here you will find the top 3 tactics hackers will use to attack your eCommerce site and how to keep your store and customers safe. We also joined forces with our trusted partner Trustpilot to give you 7 ways to improve your website’s trust signal.

Merchants need to start with an honest evaluation of what fraud costs your company. This isn’t just the money you lose on fraudulent orders you ship; it also includes all the time your staff puts into screening orders as well as the revenue lost to rejected orders which may have been safe. When you add up all these costs, the price of top fraud prevention solutions starts to look a lot more attractive.

— Oliver Sosinsky, Sr. Solutions Engineer, Redstage.

Revenue loss through payment fraud

Key Take-Aways:

Your customers deserve the same amount of protection as your store and protecting their privacy must be a priority. Monitoring is both crucial and necessary in keeping your customers and store safe. However, investing in a well-vetted Anti-Fraud Solution can ease your worries.

7 Ways to Improve Your Website’s Trust Signals.

3 Tactics Hackers Will Use Against eCommerce Store Security This Holiday.

3 Stopgaps to Ensure Your Holiday Strategy Goes As Planned…

Ready or not, the holiday rush is coming, and it is up to you to properly prepare. B2C companies are rising at a steady pace and facing many challenges starting at the top of the sales funnel. However, B2B companies can learn a thing or two as they play a key role in ensuring B2C’s and their customers are benefiting from their product or services. Customers and their unpredictable demands and expectations are inevitableTo produce a safe, frictionless, shopping experience, both B2B and B2C companies must work in sync to increase conversion.

Whether it be online or a brick and mortar, your ultimate goal for this holiday season is to make a profit while increasing brand loyalty. If you want to stay ahead of your competitors here are 3 action steps, you should take.

  1. Learn more about the Mobile Optimization Initiative and sign up for a free consultation here.
  2. Schedule a free consultation to find out what testing feature is best for your site here.
  3. Schedule a consultation to find out which security bundle fits your site’s needs here.