For many sellers, establishing an e-Commerce presence is an intimidating proposition. They view site design and organization as obstacles in a long, labor-intensive process that can stretch on for months, and even more than a year.
To support this view, recent research conducted by my company, Unilog, revealed that 51% of B2B e-Commerce implementations took more than nine months to go live. One of the major reasons for this seems to be the desire of many companies to reinvent best practices for e-Commerce sites. Why is this the case, when early adopters have already invested millions of dollars on research and development, creating standards for delivering a high-quality e-Commerce experience?
I’m here to tell you that the days of year-long implementations are in the past. The B2B manufacturer and wholesaler space, perhaps more than any other online seller, can find great value by embracing the commoditization of online storefronts and getting their e-Commerce operations up and running quickly.
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The first step is understanding that commoditization is not a bad thing. Best practices already exist for most components of the e-Commerce experience. These practices have been refined over time to conform to buyer needs. Why try to design a unique site search or shopping cart experience when effective processes are already widely available?
Even a B2B seller that thinks their checkout experience is different must understand, on some level, that checkout is fundamentally just a click or two to finalize a purchase. We already know that shipping information should display on the initial cart page and that you need clear and obvious error messages that explain why cart fields are declined.
In fact, Forrester Research echoes this sentiment in its Must-Have eCommerce Features report (April 2019). According to author Sucharita Kodali, “Familiar checkout features are essential to strong sales. Simple checkouts that mimic successful e-Commerce sites are often the most effective because consumers will frequently abandon unfamiliar experiences.”
The same goes for product detail pages and the homepage. So much science has gone into the absolute best way to organize the content on these pages, down to what products and options should go above and below the fold. Why redesign a layout when we know users require detailed specs, images, pricing and related items, above all else?
Yet many B2B sellers still think that they need to spend time and money strategizing how to make their e-Commerce sites fundamentally different from their competitors. All sellers need a strategy, but rather than focus on the design and organization of a site, that strategy should focus on how a business will sell its products online, develop robust product content, deliver orders as fast as possible, and create a true omnichannel — or unified commerce — experience for customers.
To grasp what truly matters, look no further than Amazon. The retail giant’s site is not particularly well designed, and likely wouldn’t win any awards. But Amazon excels at the functional components of e-Commerce that align with their buyer’s needs: intelligent search, top speed, quick checkout and comprehensive information. Customers order from Amazon because they can find what they’re looking for and, come hell or high water, whatever they buy will be delivered in one or two days. It’s this strategy — quality service, the right product, and the best price — that fuel Amazon’s growth. Not the site design.
Rather than fussing over site design and a long implementation, online storefronts should be treated just like any tech product: there is a launch, followed by continued adjustment to evolve the product. The minute an e-Commerce store goes live, the business makes money and collects sales. For some B2B companies, that’s $200,000 to $400,000 a month in revenue. Companies that spend nine to 12 months working on a site before launching their first foray into e-Commerce are potentially leaving millions of dollars in online revenue on the table during the implementation period.
Things are a little different for suppliers that already have their sites live and are simply looking to make updates, but if the e-Commerce site drastically needs updates to improve engagement and functionality, it’s probably losing money as well. What matters most is having a functional site live, as quickly as possible.
Of course, building an e-Commerce site is far from a one-time effort, because online buying behaviors and technology continue to evolve in both the B2C and B2B spaces. Sites need updating, but that doesn’t mean every seller needs to start from scratch with each new change. Instead, they need sites that are easily updated and are interoperable with a variety of systems, to ensure minimal downtime and no risk of becoming outdated. If a checkout provider launches a new version of its system, a site should be able to install that system quickly, without a major transition or rebuild.
This concept is very similar to what Tesla does with its cars. While the auto body and its machinery stay the same, the company improves the vehicles through software updates that affect the acceleration, handling, and overall performance, while also introducing features that make the vehicle feel like a brand new car with each update. Modern e-Commerce sites are very similar, in that they are technologies that do not depreciate, and can actually improve in functionality.
At the end of the day, the B2B seller needs to change their mindset, focusing on getting a site up and running rather than focusing on what the ideal site will look like and how it will differ from others. For the wholesale distributor, a good plan right now is better than the perfect plan tomorrow.
Suchit Bachalli is the CEO of Unilog, a global technology company which specializes in e-Commerce solutions and enriched product data for the B2B marketplace. He brings nearly 15 years of technology sales and management experience with a particular focus on wholesale distribution, retail and online commerce. Under his leadership, the company is now a multi-million-dollar business with 800 global employees and hundreds of customers across diverse industries. In 2017, the Unilog Board of Directors unanimously voted to appoint Bachalli as the Chief Executive Officer of Unilog Content Solutions and all its global subsidiaries.
