Trends in eCommerce: Lower the Cost of Selling and Increase ROI

By Tim Allen, Vice President of Management Consulting

	Tim Allen is VP of Management Consulting at Pragmatek. His specialties: process improvement, operations/manufacturing assessments, IT and strategy alignment.

Improve B2B order management with self-ordering processes using eCommerce sales approach

Due to the rising costs of traditional business-to-business (B2B) sales, more companies will be turning to eCommerce by 2020 to remain competitive. Yet, according to Gartner Research, well over 60% of B2B transactions in the United States still occur offline — representing a significant chunk of missed saving opportunities.

A closer look at Pragmatek clients conducting offline B2B sales and order entry indicates a reluctance to eliminate human intervention. Why this hesitancy to reduce or remove the so-called “middle man”? There’s a perception among customer-centric or sales channel-centric companies that web-based ordering systems cannot handle the complexity of their product/service configurations, rules and pricing.

The reality to overcome this perception is the arrival of B2B platforms, such as Four51 Order Cloud, that provide hard business savings by significantly reducing sales or call center personnel time and decreasing errors and missed information. This mirrors the increasing trend of customers’ preference to directly place orders via the web.

Pragmatek can help companies to improve B2B order management and cycle time by integrating self-ordering processes with proven eCommerce platforms.

Better B2B success for Papa Johns, Turtle Wax

Four51 Order Cloud is one B2B platform that Pragmatek has found easy to navigate and intuitive, with the ability to reflect specific customer-ordering profiles. It can be easily configured to reflect a variety of ordering conditions, ordering rules, order configuration scenarios, and customer or sales channel-specific product catalogs.

This B2B platform also provides workflow automation when some personal intervention is desired, as well as pre-built integrations that allow easy linkage with a company’s back office ERP system.

For example, Turtle Wax and Papa Johns are Four51 Order Cloud users. Both companies have a long list of product SKUs and product combinations that, in the past, required extensive human intervention for entering and processing orders from distributors and franchisers. Now, both have reduced ordering errors, costs, complexity, order cycle times and captured additional real-time information about their customers’ ordering profiles and habits.

How to lower cost of sales

Is your B2B company a candidate for eCommerce order-entry savings? Here’s a quick assessment:

• Poor Order Accuracy – accuracy rates less than 99%
• Customer-specific or sales channel-centric product lines that require extensive product catalog and/or pricing management/maintenance
• High cost for order entry and order processing
• Frequent customer ordering complaints
• Lack an eCommerce means for ordering goods/services
• High sales and selling costs
• Long order-processing cycle times

If you are experiencing these symptoms, consider deploying an eCommerce sales approach. By choosing a B2B platform, such as Four51 Order Cloud, you will gain a turnkey approach that can easily integrate with your other systems and provide a clear ROI. Email me if you’d like to hear more how Pragmatek can help steer your eCommerce course.