We attended the worlds largest Ecommerce show in June 2017 and attended the pre-show B2B Ecommerce Expo Review/symposium. We attend shows and seminars to save you time and money.
New word of the week.
Prologue :
Searchandizing
Yes its all about making money out of search.
Cocoa Cola B2B ecommerce gave an insightful presentation.
My coke.com b2b ecommerce platform for selling their product to retailers
Searchandizing !!!! Is that a word? It will be in 6 months.
B2b ecommerce part of their business is now the majority of their b2b transactions are now online. It’s ahead of the curve at 83% of transactions where the average in the USA is at 55%. Compare that figure with 25% of transactions for Europe, and 20% in Ireland.It’s not solving all of their issues , coke still need the personal touch for some elements. Sales reps are still on the road but they are tasked with introducting new products, finding retail pain and feedI got this back to b2b development teams.
Segmentation of customers.
Mycoke are constantly mining their database of retailers. They then segment the retailers into smaller groups.
Linking customer patterns in purchasing, this is notified to the Sellors as apposed to a clumsy cross sell. One clumsy cross selling is an irritant to retailers. Correctly mined data can create meaningful cross sells. It is the cross sells that creat the growth in sales.
How to implement this in a small market is difficult. In this case you link and look at the bigger players in like marketplaces . You take part in larger data data gathering groups where data is anonymised but still meaningful.
Don’t be afraid to get customer feed back, works in the states. Customer focus groups and even online comment forms are a good place to start. Most of us run a mile from asking a customers opinion but in truth it’s the cheapest form of research you will do.
Customers expect realtime information where hate having to email for updates about orders. Updates have to be relevant and contain some new information. In a world where there is information overload it’s important to review your automated customer updates. This is an area where customer feedback is essential so as to ensure you are providing concise easy to understand updates.
Mobile is used for proximity and priority for b2b. Hand held sim connected devices are the tool of choice. Offline options are soon not going to be necessary as we approach 99.99% network coverage.
Search drives the majority of new traffic to their site. Lots of b2b operators are keen to hide their offering from the public. Our advice is show it all as most b2b purchasers are searchers too and find their product through search.
Paper Catalog is still used but they see it transitioning to a more specialised publication that is transitioning into a magazine format with articles, spotlights, products etc.
Presentation no 2
Andy Hoar Forrester b2b analyst
B2b are approaching 50% of total online sales , Europe is at 25% ( our comment : thats optimistic its more like 15% )
Manufacturers are starting to sell direct. Direct into Amazon and bypassing distributors for non perishable goods.
Some customers will always want to have a human interaction. Some will always want to call up and drop in. It’s a generational thing and won’t last forever.
Digital transformation is not a project it’s a digital journey.
If the board is not taking an interest in digital, then the organisation is at risk. This is In the Gartner ecommerce report too.
Forrester maturity model to test your b2b readiness.
Sense of urgency and disruption in b2b is huge.
Warning about companies viewing digital as some sort of experiment that we will continue doing if it works. This is possibly the biggest mistake. It has to be front and center, unless you want to to loose 50% of your sales to your online competitors.
Hardest quality to find in a director manager is IT , ecommerce and entrepreneurial . It’s required for success.
Customers put up with a lot of bad ux in b2b but this is disappearing. They expect the same ux that they get on b2c sites they shop at.
Sales rep, call centre, ecommerce
It’s about making the customers life easier but also your employees lives easier.
Providing their sales rep with real time pricing makes the sales rep get a better turn over.
Reps are measured on profitability not on sales volume.
Since 2015 60,000 customers on the internet.
Ecommerce is an and and not an or. It has to go hand in hand with the sales rep.
Vendor managed inventory. The retailer is controlling their inventory.
They run a customer loyalty scheme rewarding with hotel points. This keeps retailers coming back to re order and provides tax free benefits to the customer.
Replenishment customers,
Show discontinued product and a link from this to the product that has replaced it. This method informs the retailer at the right time if the new replacement product.
Coke gives the sales reps the same commission online and off line. So the sales reps are encouraging their customers to buy online. It means they can cover more clients in a period.
Sales reps can preload the cart for the customer. Customer has to simply go in and confirm the selection or amend it quickly.
Customer and define the delivery date, this means the customer can order in advance and prevent shortages.
They went responsive first instead of going for an app.
Vast majority of their customers are using iOS devices. It’s because of its security.
Customers are using last order to start to create their orders on mobile
App is only required where there is no connectivity or you want to use the camerA on the device.
Sits on top of sales force.
Sales team and the customers are the ecommerce departments
Sap and vantage are the backbone systems they are using.
Never looks for a platform that can do everything. Instead they look for a strong api interface.
Tax information is stored in the erp.
Customer support is done through the portal. All offline Comms are recorded in the online rep for the customer to view.
A lot of systems do everything but they don’t unify it in a nice ux.
no matter what you do you always end off with sap and oracle.
Our comment Large opportunity for a sage 200.
Arro
( they sell electrical components for the assembly market )
Vertical a market place for niche electronic components complete
They purchased all the media sites that speak about electronic parts so as to control the information flow. Quite machielvion !
Main challenges have been translations of company slogans. What’s cool in the US is creepy in the UK.
Wrong content costs more to correct than create.
They have a crowd funding platform to enable engineers to create new product, this gives them the knowledge of what engineers will need and what the demand is likely to be.
They outsourced all their translation as local translation worked better.
Search on the site customers convert better. Search should be bigger, test search and tweak it as it’s conversion is tops. The word “type your search term here”
Images in mega menus are gold dust
Create alternative categories for use cases. I.e. Cat shop. Dog shop, dads store,
Swipe left right don’t forget
Measure the pdp to cart daily.
Bundle products to get the transaction value up.
Questions and answer options on products
Add to cart make sticky
Amazon don’t have an option to click back to product once you have gone to the cart.
Email,me my cart, saved for later actions.
Email me my cart allows the sharing of the cart across devices.