Today, businesses are realizing that digital adoption is no longer enough to help them grow and increase their conversions. In fact, future-proof eCommerce became a business trend for many growing businesses. Many businesses are looking at adopting new technologies to consolidate and capitalize on reducing their technology cost. Leading businesses are reconsidering their business strategies. Some are looking to upgrade their commerce infrastructure. Others are looking to change their commerce platform. Indeed, by adopting a “future-proof” eCommerce approach, businesses look for a commerce platform that will scale alongside their business needs. Flexibility and multi-channel integration are vital for any business to get ahead of the competition. As new technologies evolve, businesses have no choice, but to adopt future-proof eCommerce tendencies for their businesses to succeed.
What does “Future-Proof” eCommerce mean?
According to Forrester’s research, “future-proof eCommerce allows you to evolve your customer experience and adopt any new touchpoint without being dependent on your eCommerce vendor to enable that touchpoint. With little effort, you can add or replace new experiences.”
Future-proof your eCommerce platform is best utilized when businesses leverage the power of headless architecture. A headless structure is flexible enough to accommodate and adapt to the need of coping with the changing dynamics of today’s customers’ behavior.
What businesses are looking for while future-proof their eCommerce?
There is no doubt that businesses considering “future-proof” their commerce system are looking for a platform that provides agility, scalability, flexibility, customization, and personalization. Clearly, the best value for many businesses is to implement a single solution that can meet all business needs and complex technical requirements. In other words, growing businesses that have multiple types of customers are looking for a fully integrated B2B, B2C, and B2B2C solution to implement in their headless commerce platform.
In fact, these days, businesses are keen on providing customizable, flexible storefront experiences for their customers. They are anxious for a fast and secure solution with a back-office that includes advanced features as well as increased performance and productivity.
Future-proof eCommerce became a business trend for many growing businesses – looking for a commerce platform that will scale alongside their business needs.
What is the B2B Connect solution and how it can help future-proof your eCommerce?
B2B Connect is a headless precomposed solution for B2B, B2C, D2C, and B2B2C commerce. It is a business-ready solution providing a quick start, and can rapidly launch simple to complex eCommerce experiences. It includes an array of features such as advanced quoting workflows, account management hierarchy, subscriptions, complex catalog support, role-based access, and much more!
B2B Connect is engineered on the latest technologies with the core logic built on Java/Spring. The storefront and back office are both built using React and NEXT JS. The solution is component-based which allows businesses to select only the features they require that best fit their businesses’ needs. It has the ability to integrate any third-party solution into the business headless platform.
B2B Connect is pre-integrated into your preferred headless platforms such as elastic path, fabric, and BigCommerce. It is equipped with pre-built integrations to many third-party applications and ERP solutions, including Avalara, Digital River, Contentful, Salesforce, Stripe, WorldPay, Oanda, Intact, and more.
“We see today that future-proof eCommerce became a business trend for many growing businesses. That is to say, if you are looking to future-proof your business, you should be looking for an agile, fast, flexible, scalable, and customizable solution that grows with your business. B2B Connect is a component based features solution which can be configured based on both your business and technical requirements.”
DOMENICO D’AVIRRO
DIGICOMMERCE PRESIDENT & CEO
What are the key features businesses need within their eCommerce platform?
1. Advanced Quote Management
No doubt, businesses agree that they don’t have streamlined purchasing processes. Nevertheless, their customers are always looking for a fast and error-free purchasing process. With B2B Connect, clients can send and/or modify quotes. The business sales rep will be able to update, modify, and provide discounts, on both line-level or for the entire quote. Business sales reps can also send offers to their customers to review and approve. B2B Connect allows customers to request quotes, additional discounts, returns from their sales reps, and add more items. In turn, this allows customers to move smoothly through the purchasing process. Needless to say, a satisfied, happy customer is priceless!
2. Advanced Account Management
Businesses are always on the lookout for a solution that will allow them to manage multiple teams with different levels of hierarchy, with the ability to manage all their offices/divisions. Thus, with B2B Connect’s advanced account management features, organizations will have the ability to create and manage their users and assign permissions and budgets to their staff/divisions. Consequently, they will be able to have a self-service portal, 3600 view, to manage and track their quotes, orders, accounts, invoices, and much more.
3. Purchasing & Payment Flexibility
Today B2B customers require their suppliers to offer them efficient digital payment methods. Thus, businesses have to keep up with their customer’s digital demands to keep themselves ahead of the game. B2B Connect enables businesses to define which payment method their customers can use and apply to their orders, such as traditional payments to purchase orders to cryptocurrency, which will be appended to their orders. In addition, B2B Connect provides the options for partial payment, split shipments, and multiple payment methods to pay for a single order. And generating a PDF document for their orders.
4. Search Capability
Many customers cannot easily find what they are searching for on a supplier’s website. Thus, this is a challenge that faces many businesses today. Businesses with diverse catalogs, usually have to provide a manual guide to their buyers to guide them to easily locate a product on their site. B2B Connect has a solution to this challenge. It has Elastic Search capabilities to extend the online experience and Elastic Search AI features. Elastic Search is fast and robust allowing for scalability. B2B Connect is pre-built with elastic search capabilities, out of the box. Not only does it allow sellers to pre-program categories, and keywords, and display product images. But also, results will only show account-level products and content as the buyers’ type within the search bar.
5. CMS – A fully Integrated CMS Solution
Similarly, a fully headless Content Delivery Solution (CMS) is a key capability of B2B Connect. The CMS solution allows for seamless creation and management of any content type including transactional items across different channels and different jurisdictions to properly engage with clients. It includes Role-Based Control, Single Sign-on, Content-based geo-location, and user group creation is all included as part of the solution. Also, the solution includes a digital media library capability. It a fully integrated with the CMS to manage the rich media elements. In addition, it has the capability for multi-users, and multi-lingual to manage and update content.
6. Advanced Order Management
A key factor in the success of any organization is for the Order Management Solution (OMS) to easily adapt to your logistics and processes easily and efficiently. B2B Connect includes an OMS solution that does exactly that in simplifying the order management and omnichannel experience. The solution provides the ability to split orders across multiple locations, dynamic pricing for accounts and/or end clients, features such as partial and full returns and backorders, and much more.
7. Punch-Out Catalog & eProcurement
Nevertheless, organizations are under more pressure than ever to find ways to cut costs and streamline their purchasing processes. A punch-out catalog allows buyers to buy directly from a supplier from their electronic procurement system.
B2B Connect has an integrated punch-out solution that provides flexible and seamless integrations to procurement systems, orders, pricing, and invoicing for connecting with thousands of corporations, universities, and government entities.
8. Multi-Currency and Multi-Lingual
B2B Connect has both the store-front and back-office supports multi-lingual and multi-currency capability. This allows global organizations to easily launch sites in the country’s local language and currency. In addition, having the ability to expand to emerging markets.
Moreover, in today’s dynamic digital world, future-proof eCommerce became an inevitable business trend for growing businesses. Most importantly, when it comes to meeting their customers’ ever-changing behavior. Simultaneously, thinking about the future of your business, there is a lot to be excited about!
In the final analysis, are you considering migrating your platform to future-proof your online presence? Thus, the right technology, the right partner, and the right eCommerce digital strategy are key to your success. B2B Connect, a leading-edge pre-composed solution, developed by DigiCommerce, can play an integral role in the success of future-proof processes for your organization. Together we can shape your future innovations.
