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Making Data Desirable!
Recognizing that an individual is clicking on the purchase button is fundamental to your B2B e-commerce success.
Up till now organizations have focused B2B e-commerce initiatives on giving customers access to their data. The assumption has been that if the data is laid out, then business partners will be ‘instant adopters’. The result has generally been that the interface is data driven and not user driven leading to less than satisfactory adoption by customers. What gets forgotten is that ‘business partners are people too’. They’re pressed for time, they won’t invest effort for uncertain returns, and they resent being ‘made to do all the work’.
A usable web interface is your online showroom. It should give your customers an experience that will make it easy and profitable to transact with you – not a burdensome chore.
The problem:
A major distribution company had developed their own B2B e-commerce site to enable its
clients and sales reps to place and track orders, and pay invoices online. The system had grown piecemeal over time, building on existing stock management and finance systems. Yet uptake of the site continued to fall below expectations.
Retailers found the interface confusing: interactive features were poorly labelled and unpredictably located on the screen the process of filling a cart and checking out the order included too many steps, for no obvious reason product information was incomplete and not all up to date the registration process was also confusing and could not be automatically managed within the site.
The solution:
 Wired talked to key stakeholders and users of the system to establish what their needs were, and to identify the ‘stress points’ outlined above. We found that the distribution company were assuming that because they had a B2B relationship with retailers, they would ‘put up with’ a system that worked more like a warehouse, and not like a show room.
Implementing Wired’s e-catalogue tool over the company’s existing product information provided an interface that retailers could intuitively understand, as well as the ability to more easily manage their client profiles and to structure their view of the company’s products accordingly.
Gaining proper control of the client profiles meant that the company could incentivise the use of their online sales tool, by tailoring marketing and special offers directly to individual retailers.
The ease of use of the e-catalogue tool helped the sales staff keep product information up to date. Profile control also helped manage price structures so product information could be entered once but presented differently to different customers. Finally the online sales tool was able to benefit from its inherent advantage over hardcopy catalogues, by being truly dynamic and changeable. Client relationships could be managed on the basis that different relationships have different needs, and promotions and marketing could be rolled out ‘as and where needed’ in real time.
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