Five common pitfalls on the road towards your first and smart B2B online shop
Interestingly, while online shops did become a commodity in the B2C space, it is still uncharted territory for many hidden champions in the B2B space. Not that they did not introduce digital sales at all, but their digital sales channels are typically confined to larger and established customers who can place orders in their e-procurement systems and transfer them to the vendor’s ERP system by a classical EDI interface. This type of digital sales is not well suited to acquire new customers on the web.
As B2B companies increasingly explore new digital sales channels, it’s becoming clear that delivering true value requires more than just a digital presence. Businesses need smarter solutions that not only enhance customer acquisition but optimize operations for long-term growth.
Based on the hope to increase order intake in a challenging economy we see a general trend among the hidden champions to stop turning a blind eye on new digital sales channels. “We want an online shop, which technology suits as best?”, is the question that we hear from them, lately.
Selecting the right technology is important, but quite often not the biggest challenge. Those who attended the diconium Commerce Masters events in 2022 and 2023, have been watching the top five B2B e-commerce vendors pitching their solutions based on the same briefing. Interestingly, everyone had a convincing answer to the challenge. The systems have their differentiators, but at the core they are fit to do the job. This blog post will focus on some common pitfalls beyond the technology decision, that we frequently observe when working with B2B clients, who do their first steps towards eCommerce. It’s better to be aware of them before you commit to a product and start implementing it.
Unaligned expectations
Obviously, every unit in the organization will expect something from a new digital sales solution. But are these expectations well aligned, and are they realistic? Sales might expect more orders, while Operations might expect reduced internal costs. IT bring their own constraints to safeguard secure operations.
Without clear alignment among stakeholders, it becomes difficult to prioritize effectively. By addressing the concerns of all departments early, you can ensure smoother execution that meets both operational and strategic needs. Scope and timeline may grow, while the ROI decreases, and the project team gets frustrated. That’s a vicious cycle that leads you nowhere.
We strongly recommend starting with a smart, scalable MVP (Minimum Viable Product), ensuring the foundation is adaptable to future needs without unnecessary complexity. This approach maximizes efficiency and prepares your business for growth while avoiding resource waste. But what is “viable”? It depends and needs to be negotiated with the stakeholders. To keep such negotiations short and focused, common goals are important.
Let’s look at an example: B2B companies usually have individual prices for different customers, or customer groups. Better customers have lower prices. Showing the individual prices in the storefront is a complexity driver, as it may cause a lot of manual effort (to maintain prices), or the need for an extra interface to regularly import the prices from a leading system, e.g. the ERP system. Thus, individual pricing might be a backlog candidate, and not included in the MVP scope. But if the main target group does not use the new sales channel, the project might miss its goal, and the budget for the next phases might be at stake. Is it “minimum” to start only with list prices or is it “viable” to have individual prices right from the start?
Luckily, there are several smart approaches to solve this apparent dilemma, but each one has its tradeoffs. Prioritizing scalable solutions from the outset, with a clear understanding of what is essential for the first phase and what can be added later, helps keep projects on track and prevents scope creep. That’s where experienced consultants can contribute a lot – to shape the expectations and clarify the priorities.
Without clear alignment among stakeholders, it becomes difficult to prioritize effectively. By addressing the concerns of all departments early, you can ensure smoother execution that meets both operational and strategic needs.
Missing your target (group)
Getting the priorities right is crucial to the MVPs success. But too much focus on your own organization, and the products and services you want to sell has its dangers. Don’t forget your target group. How can you make their tasks easier? What will attract them most to use the new channel. Don’t forget, that the customers’ expectations are driven by the champions in B2C sales. That is where your customers buy as private persons. Convenience is the key differentiator here.
We have seen many interesting ways to use a digital sales channel to drive the customer’s satisfaction and loyalty by providing better convenience. This can be a holistic order history, that includes the orders that have been placed by fax, telephone or otherwise.
While this is good to please existing customers, what if your main priority is to acquire new customers?
Becoming a new B2B customer is often a time-consuming process. New customers need to apply with their company data, then a credit-check is done, and so on. It can take days until the first order is cleared for fulfillment. Sounds familiar? If the acquisition of new customers is high on your priority list, think of their convenience.
Digital Payments can reduce your risk of payment failure and assist you to create a fast lane for new customers. Self-registration with a mandatory VAT-ID enables you to do a quick validation check via web-services automatically. This is an elegant route to do the first orders with new customers. If the customer appears attractive to your sales organization, you can still run a credit-check and promote the customer to another group.
Ignoring the end-to-end processes
When the first orders come in, it’s too late to think about the fulfillment. Your customer is waiting, and their customer experience is at stake. Before you implement a shop software many organizational questions need to be clarified. Some examples:
- If your business is international, where do you start and in which sequence are you going to roll out? It’s a general practice to start with a region in a similar time zone, but there are always reasons for exceptions to the rules.
- Which legal entity is closing the contract with the customer. Is it an existing sales organization in the respective locale, or would it be better to have a separate “eCom” legal entity?
- How does the money flow? Are different currencies involved and do you need to transfer them. Do you need to involve a Payment Service Provider, e.g. to handle credit card payment. Is the financial department happy with the approach, or will they drown in manual work to book between various accounts?
- How does the customer receive their goods? Is any of your existing stores prepared to deliver e-Commmerce orders, or should you rely on a 3rd party logistics partner to stock and ship the goods? Note that this may also vary by the country, that you are starting with. Products on embargo lists and customs regulations may need to be considered.
- How does the order get into the fulfillment systems?
- As a B2B, do you only sell to existing customers, or how do you handle onboarding of new ones?
- … and so on.
Such questions are certainly food for thought, and getting them answered might take some time, and careful consideration. The answers will impact the geographical rollout sequence and thereby the planning of the MVP scope and the next stages, thus it is crucial to gain these insights as early as possible.
No IT “development plan”
Rome was not built in a day, as the famous proverb goes. A city is virtually ever changing. New buildings, roads, and places appear, while others vanish. That’s why city planners rely on a development plan to maintain structure and avoid chaos. The same should be true for the enterprise IT. Any new technology should connect seamlessly with the relevant existing and future systems to maintain the digital foundation for your organization’s success. When you create new digital sales channels, they may stand alone in the beginning – remember the MVP principle.
But they will become more and more interconnected with other systems to enable highly automated end to end processes on the long run. Ignoring foreseeable future needs can lead to “roadblocks”, that should be avoided. A structured approach like capability-based planning will help you to see the big picture without losing the focus on the aspects that matter most right now.
Data quality is another other elephant in the room
Sales, order fulfillment, and financials are driven by data that lives “deep down” in business systems, and sometimes even in spreadsheets. As these data have originally never been intended to be shared with clients, they quite often contain jargon and abbreviations, that make sense to insiders - the subject matter experts in the organization - but not to other people outside of this group. Along comes e-Commerce, The e-shop needs a lot of data like products, prices, and availability. To automate the process and to establish a “single source of truth” such data are usually imported from the leading systems, i.e. the existing business systems via interfaces. This is where things go wrong: Suddenly, we expose the insiders’ jargon and abbreviations at the storefront.
Take for example product attributes, that define the differences between product variants in the same category. Knowing these differences helps the customers to select the right products for their needs. But such data may also be used in the storefront to organize the product presentation and support the customers with useful features like category filters, or a facetted search. If the data quality is poor, such features won’t work as expected, up to the point where the user experience is broken.
Issues with product data often already start at product development, when the same thing is called differently by a different team with its own jargon. Too bad, if there is no taxonomy in place. Then it trickles down the data chain into other systems. If you rely on product data from external sources, you may need some measures to sanitize the data in your systems. If you’re the manufacturer yourself, start to fix data at their source. Ensuring that data quality is addressed from the start will enable features like search filters and product presentation to work as intended and provide users with a seamless experience.
Know your weaknesses. Better avoid features that heavily rely on data, until the data quality is fair enough. If the data are not supportive then the results will be more confusing than helpful to the users.
Conclusion
It requires a strategic approach to succeed in the digital world. But by focusing on scalable, smarter solutions, businesses can mitigate many common pitfalls.
You probably still want to ask the question for the best technology / vendor to suit your ambitions. It’s easy to sketch out a complex process with longlists and shortlist, vendor demonstrations and bakeoffs, which is the traditional way to reach such conclusion Yes, we can assist this as well.
But we suggest starting from a mutual understanding of your plans and shape them to be most realistic to avoid the common pitfalls. At diconium, we’ve seen that success lies in aligning these goals with scalable, future-proof solutions that drive long-term value. Once your ambitions and limitations are well-defined, the technology question becomes much simpler, and the path forward becomes clearer and more straightforward.
