Today’s businesses are presented with a tremendous opportunity to digitalize the B2B operating model. More brands are embracing e-commerce to better serve buyers, create compelling customer interactions, and grow sales. Companies need to keep up with customer expectations and competitors, but going to market quickly and economically with the right technology can be challenging.
Where are you Today and Where do you Want to be Tomorrow?
Where are you on the curve of digitalizing your business? Do you already have a B2B store? Or maybe you’re new to digital commerce and not sure how or where to begin? Maybe you’re finding it complex or time-consuming to maintain your platform? Of course, you want to increase your customer base and revenue without increasing your workload! But how? Your business customers want to find the right products for their business through an efficient process that doesn’t add hurdles to their job. Maybe you need to think about customer-facing product catalogs, customer-specific pricing, volume ordering, and role-based purchasing. Is it much harder than you thought, to extend your platform to stay ahead of the curve?
So What’s Holding Back your B2B platform?
It’s not always smooth sailing while implementing and onboarding a B2B e-commerce platform into your business. Till now, the market has been addressed by platforms that require upwards of 6 months for a project to land a solution ready for business operations. Why, you ask?
- Unclear requirements requiring weeks of analysis and documentation. New digital forays are more prone to this due to low experience.
- An inflexible platform that can’t meet requirements or limits enhancement.
- Misuse of a platform to make it behave in a non-intended manner. This usually happens when migrating and attempting to replace like-for-like with incompatible platforms.
- Lack of an end-to-end delivery process without collaboration. For example, the adoption of new technologies like the cloud without pre-built components, processes, or tools for the team.
- Legacy commerce platforms (aka monoliths) make pinpoint alteration difficult without side effects. Workaround for these side-effects caused by the tiniest modifications can take up to 80% of the entire project duration.
The bottom line remains the same – ROI is achieved much later than expected or desired. You are late to the party and you lose market share. What you need is a platform that has fewer constraints around modification and eases the pain of integration. A platform that lets you address the market in the shortest time possible, flexible, and adaptable to future needs and enhancements.
Crafting your B2B Digital Experience
You need a strong partner who can deliver pre-built B2B workflows, components, and the right technology, to eliminate complexity, speed up implementation, and minimize cost. From our years of experience with B2B clients, competing solutions, and market research, we can tell you that taking your online B2B platform to the next level needs a robust delivery process, and the right tooling, to accelerate requirements capture and the software development lifecycle. How do we achieve this?
Building up from headless commerce
Whether you are just beginning your B2B e-commerce journey or you’re looking to upgrade, you can get up and running quickly, with a strong, cloud-based commerce engine. For example, a flexible headless platform like commercetools. On top of this, we deliver APIs that satisfy the majority of B2B use cases. For example, a company model and the organizational hierarchy of members are supported with a fully extended security model that grants only permission to allowed activities per member. Other examples include efficiency measures for order creation, including workflows and functionality for features like upload from a file, repeat a previous order, create a periodic subscription, etc.
MACH design principles
The MACH Alliance was recently formed to promote the adoption of Microservices, APIs, Cloud, and Headless architectures. The benefits of these technologies all combine to bring agility to businesses. Mindcurv has always followed these principles in the solutions we deliver. The APIs are modified to fit your precise process requirements and rapidly tested in cloud environments, giving your platform all the flexibility it needs to propel your business. MACH solutions pave the way for cost reduction, the optionality of vendors, increased operational efficiency, better tooling and security, and more empowerment and autonomy for teams.
Customer Centricity Matters
For a long time, there was very little focus on customer-centricity in B2B scenarios. Today, in an attempt to keep up with the evolving customer demand, many companies are trying to re-platform like-for-like without putting the users, employees as well as customers, at the center of designing new experiences. We believe in understanding the before, during, and after of the customer’s journey. Multichannel feedback collection expands your understanding of customers, and provides more context for the analysis of feedback, for insights. Focusing on the customer benefits sales, reduces the cost to serve, and improves operational efficiency.
Delivery “railings”
Our approach provides delivery “railings” while upgrading your B2B operating model. This includes a governance process wrapping the software delivery. The first lines of code can be written on day 1, built, validated, and deployed into the cloud for testing. There’s no need to wait for extensive setup processes to be completed, or CI/CD pipelines to be created.
Prescriptive discovery
If you’re new to digital commerce, your priority would be faster launch and quick ROI. Platform features can be rapidly built based on pre-defined user stories with user experience wireframes to accompany them. These elements become living documentation that the project’s own requirements start from. Walking through pre-documented materials avoids misunderstandings and simplifies the capture of any gaps.
Integrations
The notorious bugbear of many projects has been the integration of a solution into your environment. We take this pain away by standardizing the APIs exposed to any front-end devices, thus enabling switching many common packaged capabilities for others. We propose standard patterns for API, file, or message-based integrations.
Maximum Value at a Rapid Pace – The B2B Accelerator+
Achieving rapid ROI with a new B2B platform doesn’t have to be complex and time-consuming. You can always use Mindcurv’s B2B Accelerator+ for commercetools. This is a rapid-deploy solution for online B2B platforms, delivering the fast and cost-effective implementation of commercetools. This out-of-the-box solution combines the agility of MACH technology and our years of experience in B2B, to bring your e-commerce platform online with minimal time, effort and investment, and maximum value at a rapid pace. Lay the foundation for future enhancements, scale-up and add new features as demand increases, and get pre-built functionality that aligns with your roadmap.
Author
Markus Tillmann
Executive Vice President
