4 reasons for having an SAP Commerce system

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Web shops are not a novelty anymore. Almost everyone has bought something online already, and the heydays of businesses growing big on top of this novel business to consumer (B2C) platform seem to be over. So why would you still consider an SAP Commerce system for your business to business (B2B) company then? In this blog we give you 4 good reasons why web shops in a B2B setting are still an excellent idea.

1. It reduces your cost of doing business

You SAP Commerce platform allows for a wide range of business functions to be fulfilled. It can make information available to customers, take in orders, give automatic discounts, act as a product information management system, and much more. The system will most likely help you increase the efficiency of at least some of your current processes.

For example, sales representatives could spend less time answering the phone or e-mails to take in orders if your customer would create those himself SAP Commerce. SAP Commerce would even validate them against your current stock availability to make sure that they can be fulfilled!

Also, new and corrected product information could be immediately available to the customer. There would be no more need to gather all the product information and send out new catalog information to your customers.

Because SAP Commerce is well integrated in the SAP ecosystem, it immediately allows for optimization of your business processes because data can flow automatically to where it is needed.

2. It reduces your customers cost of doing business

The same point can also be made for your customers. A well thought out SAP Commerce will also optimize the processes of your customers, which in turn will increase the likelihood that they will be doing business with you.

If you offer your customers detailed track and trace information directly in your platform, your customers could plan around this information.

When you allow scheduled ordering, the customer would not even have to spend time anymore on replenishing his stock.

By providing these extra features that improve the life of your customer, you can increase your share of wallet with your customers!

3. It allows for experimentation

SAP Commerce is a modern web shop platform with many features aboard. This means that you can experiment with all those features to improve your business.

You could use A/B testing to compare products against each other, just like in the B2C market. You could release a new product to a select number of customers. You could try all those buzzwords that you keep hearing about.

But you could also use it to expand into new markets. It is suited for both B2B and B2C thus giving you the confidence to maybe try your hand at selling directly to consumers. Or perhaps you want to expand into a new country. Because SAP Commerce alleviates the work of your employees, you could do with a much smaller investment than if you had to start up a whole new sales division in that country.

4. You don't miss the boat

People might be used to current way of working, but every day the workforce is joined by new employees. The Amazon web shop already existed before those customers were born. They have not known a world without an iPhone. In 10 years, the workforce will consist for 25% of these younger people.

Are you willing to bet against your main target group, which is growing every day? Your customers might be companies, but they still consist of people.

Opening a web shop now is not the same experience as it was for those first web shops of the 1990s and 2000s. It is still a fast growing market however. Investing in it now might prevent you from losing revenue in another 10 years because you are the only one not offering the new, mainstream way of doing business.

Who is to tell what the future holds? Sometimes you must play to not lose, not to win.

References

[1] Testimonials of customers who experienced a reduction in their cost of doing business can be found on the official SAP Commerce web page. You can also reach out to TheValueChain to discuss in person some of the solutions we realized for our customers.

[2] TheValueChain can also give you a detailed session about use cases that we implemented which improved the life and workflow us web shop customers. Other statistics can also be found in the whitepapers on the official SAP Commerce web page.

[3] A broader overview of personalization and experimentation features can be found on the SAP Commerce features page. In case you are more interested in the results that you can achieve with those, then check out the following whitepaper: The Total Economic Impact™ of SAP Commerce Cloud and SAP Customer Data Cloud.

[4] Assuming an average career span of 40 years, about 25% of the work force is renewed every 10 years.
The global Business-to-Business (B2B) E-commerce market size is projected to reach US$ 13630 million by 2027, from US$ 7659.4 million in 2020.

Feel free to reach out to me via the official SAP Commerce community in case you have additional questions.