3 Advantages Of A Unified E-Commerce Platform

As any business grows, they must contend with increasing buyer demands as well as market pressures. This shows that it is important to provide a great customer experience across all customer channels, with an evolving need to serve all customers for both B2B and B2C businesses through digital channels and Unified E-Commerce can be classified as all about that.

Customers are always looking for meaningful interactions that can streamline the path to them getting what they want from you, but it is not always easy to integrate the various tools, technologies and teams in order to achieve this for your customers.

The capabilities of unified E-Commerce prove to be very beneficial for businesses that are looking to streamline their online businesses, by providing the following advantages.

1. Fast and Flexible business efficiency

For any leader in the digital age, managing a wide range of people, tools and the overall business direction is a part of the job. Technology should not add to these concerns but rather serve to alleviate some of the stress of planning. A single, integrated E-Commerce platform helps integrate the back-end systems with technologies such as CRM.

A simplified reduces the overall complexity as:

Staffing requirements are simplified, so you do not need to look for people who have skills across different platforms or hire multiple teams for the different E-Commerce platforms operated by your business. With separate platforms, teams working on other platforms cannot be utilized when another has a high workload.

Need for external partnerships is reduced, a single platform means you only need to work with a single solution partner for all your needs rather than multiple for each of your projects.

Cost and time for training reduced, for learning maintenance and integration for a single platform as opposed to variety, which would take more time to learn.

A centralized platform reduces the management responsibilities for business leaders and frees up resources to focus on other important things like enhancing the buyer experience.

2. Providing a seamless Customer Experience

Something desired by both B2B and B2C buyers is a compelling user experience. An E-Commerce platform should allow you to manage your audiences shopping experience and allow you to control them from a single interface.

This allows an efficient way to maximize your time and energy by keeping the various assets developed for your store within arm’s reach for you to customize, enabling differentiated and relevant browsing experiences for your customers.

This is where unified B2B and B2C E-Commerce can help businesses grow their customer loyalty and revenue, with features such as:

• Custom catalogs and price lists
• Options to for meeting the requirements for both individual and bulk shipments
• Customer targeting, allowing you to target various types of buyers to receive custom product recommendations, promotions and content
• Management capability for multiple sites ( different brands, product lines)
• A full set of content management features to easily create compelling, optimized sites

A single platform can also differentiate between B2B and B2C customers by:

• Allowing B2C customers to check-out as a guest but requiring B2B customers to log in
• Control the product recommendations shown to different shoppers
• Set different prices for individuals versus groups
• Allow you to configure and customize promotions and catalogs
• Allow customization of banners, widgets and blocks from the same interface

3. Support the unique needs of each Buyer

It is apparent that an increasingly larger proportion of buyers now choose to buy online, even directly from the vendors. In the B2B marketplace, an easy, intuitive experience is a demand that must be met for the buyer, much like the B2C experience. If not us, a competitor will meet those demands. By providing all the information the buyer wants and eliminating the need to contact a customer service representative, we can keep the buyer happy.

We can make sure that our business is ready for growth by:

• Providing exhaustive product information including thing such as manuals, high-quality images, installations guide and so on
• Providing a quote from the site, without the need to call
• Showing prior order information, credit balance and shipping information
• Wishlists for B2C customers
• Requisition lists allowing for quick re-ordering
• Rapid re-ordering from previous orders, especially for B2B
• Allowing quick order entry

A customized experience for the buyer may be the most important tool in the arsenal for an online business. These experiences are proven to build customer loyalty and maintain growth for a business. Unified E-Commerce is an efficient method to do so across a wide range of buyers, and is starting to be utilized by some of the most successful businesses across the world.

Tags: ecommerce customer experience, unified ecommerce,