Overcoming the 4 Barriers to e-Commerce Success for B2B Retailers  (Part 1 of 2)

Overcoming the 4 Barriers to e-Commerce Success for B2B Retailers (Part 1 of 2)

Even before the pandemic, we’ve been seeing a shift in the expectations of the modern B2B buyer. In their personal life, they experience intuitive, tailored B2C purchase journeys. However, at work, their B2B e-Commerce experiences are more likely to be cumbersome, slow and frustrating.

New systems, new opportunities

Having a more customer-centric engagement (thinking about what the end buyer needs from an e-Commerce system) will give any business which sells online a better chance of keeping their existing customers – and of finding new ones. Implementing a new system also creates opportunities for streamlining operational processes. In turn, this will reduce costs and free up team members to be able to pursue new business opportunities.

But what tends to stop e-Commerce businesses from delivering a more advanced B2C-style experience? There are four main barriers to success which regularly come up in my conversations with prospective customers at senior management and board level. Let’s take a look at these and explore how you can overcome them:

Overcoming Barrier 1: Old Technology

B2B retailers can struggle to deliver, using their legacy systems, the customer experiences and services that today’s B2B buyer demands. A common perception is that changing old, heavy tech will be too difficult and disruptive to the business.
We created Hylight Commerce for B2B to overcome this barrier to successful B2B e-Commerce. This SAP Qualified Partner Package combines software and services to digitally transform organisations for a fixed price and an accelerated implementation time. Costs can be blended into your cap-ex or op-ex structure, and you can expect to be live in as little as 18 weeks.

Hylight Commerce for B2B combines our knowledge of industry best practices with SAP Commerce Cloud. SAP Commerce Cloud is a digital selling platform which provides optimal buying journeys for B2C, B2B, direct-to-consumer and B2B-to-C. It is fully international and inherently flexible, making it possible to deliver lots of different experiences based on user profiles and to deploy many brands within the same technology stack. It is such a wide, large platform that you can use specific elements of it and choose to add functionality as the business grows.

Overcoming barrier 2: Upfront Investment

Traditionally, e-Commerce projects demanded a large upfront investment. B2B retailers needed to raise a large amount of financing or make big capital investments to cover the server provisioning, infrastructure and implementation costs. It can be extremely challenging to secure funding, especially during an economically turbulent time. Thankfully, that old school model of financing technological transformation is now changing.

We offer a cloud subscription model which effectively spreads the organisation’s investment in the software, infrastructure and Greenlight Commerce services over the length of their agreement with Greenlight Commerce. If a company wants to increase the scope or continue any of our services on an ad hoc basis, we can support their cashflow needs by managing the desired ‘extras’ as an ongoing commitment.


How can B2B businesses better meet the demands of the modern buyer?

Find out how you can compete in new spaces and better serve your modern, digitally savvy B2B buyers. Watch this on-demand webinar hosted by myself and our fellow Kinship Collective member, Edenhouse.
We’re more than happy to explore this with you in further detail, just contact info@greenlightcommerce.com to start the conversation.

Greenlight Commerce remote working

If you are concerned that any future Covid-19 restrictions could delay your e-Commerce project, rest assured that we have been fully set up to work remotely for many years now. We can remotely consult, demo, scope, setup, onboard, host, train, support and continue to partner with you. All of our systems are cloud-based so our clients can check progress, reporting and even access ‘show and tell sessions’ during a build, at any time and from any device.

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