Executive Summary
As the global usage of B2B eCommerce matures, manufacturing (and distribution) industry verticals have shifted their attention to capturing multi-billion-dollar business growth via Web technologies. Their focus is on new customer acquisition, brand recognition and customer experience improvements to build loyalty — online. Electronic commerce is no longer just for retailers.
What is the industrial marketplace seeing as the biggest impact to driving demand to the eCommerce channel?
Topping the list is people, especially in-the-field and in-house sales staff and customer service representatives, vendors and other trading partners.
What marketing tactics are successfully engaging industrial customers?
Mobile-friendly and search engine optimized (SEO) websites — which offer login-required special access to customer-specific pricing, technical product information and purchasing options — are leading the way in driving results.
In this publication, you’ll discover business-to-business (B2B) online relationships differ from and are influenced by online business-to-consumer (B2C) expectations.
You’ll learn how using B2B eCommerce — tightly integrated in real-time with back-office accounting, inventory and production — gives your business team a significant advantage over your competition. You’ll discover how implementing a Web-based solution will improve customer service and allow more time for scaling your company growth and fulfilling orders. You’ll see that by placing up-to-date materials online, product information is suddenly at everyone’s fingertips. Your customers will search and browse entire catalogs of products and make more purchases online more readily than over the phone. No more wasting time on double-entry and belaboring sales staff with phone order-taking.
We’ve defined important B2B eCommerce features solving problems for small- to mid-sized businesses, as well as large enterprises.
- Executive Summary
- Introduction —
- Are you generating the greatest value for (and from) customers?
- The times they are a-changin’
- What’s your return on investment (ROI)?
- Three Ways B2B eCommerce Benefits a Manufacturer
- How Can You Meet Customer Demands for B2B eCommerce?
- Chapter 1 — Sales Growth
- Chapter 2 — Pricing Schedules
- Chapter 3 — Marketing or ERP Content
- Chapter 4 — Customer Engagement
- Chapter 5 — Multiple Locations
- Chapter 6 — Omnichannel Customer Experience
- Chapter 7 — Sales Reps and Vendors
- Chapter 8 — Customer Complexity
- Chapter 9 — Customer Service
- Glossary of eCommerce Terms
- Conclusion
