Do you have the right tools in place? Is your eCommerce platform well-positioned to make you succeed on Black Friday and the holiday season? Do you have the right solution installed on your platform? Is your commerce platform equipped with the right core features you need to leverage online shopping and increase your sales? How is your customer journey? Is it a smooth check-out process?
Gearing up towards the holiday shopping season, and with the in-person shopping coming back this year, there is a challenge for every business that exists. How to keep their online customers on!
As we all experienced this past year, online eCommerce is growing rapidly and it’s not going to change. According to data from Adobe Analytics, per BigCommerce research, “the last holiday season saw two years’ worth of growth in a single year. Increasing by a whopping 32% from 2019 to reach a total of $188.2 billion.”
Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce survey, published August 2021, states that by 2024, 15% of B2B organizations will use digital commerce platforms to support both their customers and sales reps in all sales activities. Also, by 2024, leading commerce organizations will generate 10% of online revenue from services attached to physical products.
Thus, if your business goal is to boost your online eCommerce sales, for this or the next holiday shopping season, you should have a strategy in place! The first thing to consider is optimizing how you do business with your online customers. And, how to facilitate their online shopping experience! Configuring the right solution that fits your company’s business and customers’ needs is vital and very powerful in accelerating your online business growth.
How to Leverage Power of B2B Solutions to Increase Online Revenue During Holiday Shopping Season?
Achieving a robust modern digital commerce presence may come with many complexities. With the many commerce solutions options available in the market, it could be challenging to decide on which way to go. Thus, here is some advice.
It’s crucial to choose a complete solution that fits and meets your current business and customers’ needs. You should equip your platform with the right core features to enhance your customer journey. And to have a smooth, hassle-free online shopping experience to retain your customers.
You should consider implementing a fast, modern, and efficient solution that fully integrates with your current existing platform. If you already have one in place. A Headless B2B Solution is a solution that seamlessly integrates with Elastic Path, BigCommerce, Commercetools, and others. For example, if you have an existing commerce platform, this solution would seamlessly integrate with your current platform without complexities.
Not only this, but you should deploy the key core features you need to facilitate your customer’s shopping journey. Look into implementing rich features that enhance your brand’s visibility to your customers. A solution that is optimized for SEO practices. Also, you need a solution that can manage your media libraries and videos. Needless to say, a solution that has personalization capabilities for your customers’ shopping experience.
Another solution to consider is a Pre-Composed solution. DigiCommerce in partnership with Elastic Path developed a Pre-Composed Solution for B2B Commerce. This solution pre-configures B2B commerce functionality from Elastic Path Commerce Cloud with pre-built experiences for B2B customers.
By all means, you should optimize your commerce platform with a multi-store front, preconfigured for B2B, B2C, and D2C experiences. In fact, this is key for facilitating your customers’ journeys, retaining loyal customers, and thus increasing your online sales.
What Do You Need To Do To Facilitate Your Customer’s Journey?
Implementing a flexible commerce solution, with modern architecture, allows you to tailor your customer journey, based on your customers and business requirements. Simply, a Headless B2B Commerce Solution is a complete solution, equipped with many core features that facilitates your customers’ online shopping experience. Some of these key features you should consider implementing are:
- Simple Order Processing
- One-Click Checkout
- Elastic Search
- Integrated CMS
- Re-Order
- Saving Carts
- Different Payment Options
- Fast Automated Quoting
- Tracking Previous Orders
- Flexible Return Policy
- Promotions and Discounts
- Multi-Lingual & Muli-Currency
- Different Account Level Pricing
Managing simple, smooth order processing is vital. SAP‘s order management system is arguably one of the most advanced and robust on the market. DigiCommerce, partnering with SAP Commerce Cloud, provides the most intelligent selling features for your B2B and your B2C customers.
By facilitating your customer’s journey, you basically invite them to come back shopping on your online store. You are not only retaining loyal customers but also inviting new ones. Research proves that these features are key for achieving a smooth and entertaining shopping experience.
How to Manage Complex Catalogs?
Managing the complexity of your products or services catalogs can be overwhelming and very time-consuming. However, optimizing them online is very essential for sustaining and growing your business. These are some of the many challenges you can encounter while managing your complex catalogs. For example, keeping your products/services information up to date; managing them across multiple sales channels and normalizing suppliers or third-party product data. Also, you may need at one point to expand your catalogs with new products or services. Thus, needless to say, you must facilitate this complexity, as it can either make or break your business!
Integrating a Headless B2B eCommerce Solution into your platform can simplify this complexity! A B2B eCommerce solution allows for creating an interactive digital catalog. It can also manage complex pricing for different account levels and personalize your customers’ journeys. As a matter of fact, it is highly recommended to choose a smart solution that is a Single Stack where you can take advantage of core B2C features and use them for B2B or vice versa. This will allow you to have a fully functional back office for managing and facilitating your customer’s online shopping journey.
How To Handle Pricing, Promos & Discounts for the Holiday Season?
No doubt, eCommerce online promotions, when executed correctly, boost sales and customer loyalty. Customers are always searching for the best value purchases, with the most efficient, flexible, shopping experience possible. Promotions have a significant impact on the customer shopping cycle and their loyalty. However, on the other hand, handling pricing, promotions, and discounts could be complicated. Especially if your business deals with different customer tiers, as B2B, B2C, and B2D customers, for example.
B2B Pricing is complex because pricing may be different based on country, region, or account type. Managing different pricing levels requires a robust, flexible eCommerce platform equipped with advanced pricing and quoting features for different account levels and different pricing levels in order to customize and apply for promotions on different levels. Also, some of the core features, you need to deploy in your solution, if you don’t already have them, are split orders, different payment options, multi-currency, and advanced quote management, flexible return policy. Needless to say, the more you expand your commerce platform with different account levels, allowing for customizing of promotions and discounts targeting different customer tiers, B2B & B2C, B2B2C, the more you will generate and capitalize on sales!
In summary, with the massive growth of eCommerce, businesses have no choice in transforming their digital platforms and increasing their online presence. It is inevitable to ignore the power of upgrading business eCommerce platforms in order to achieve measurable results. In other words, if you are planning to boost your online sales for the holiday shopping season, either this year or next year, you should consider revisiting your business strategy!