the greatest growth differentiator in b2b ecommerce: speed to market

First to Market and First to Pivot

Getting to market fast is a business advantage that can impact sales and customer acquisition. As a manufacturer, it means creating and fulfilling demand. As a distributor, it means optimizing the sale and support of an offering. Regardless of the business type, it means gaining market share over the competition, quickly supporting merger and acquisition activity, or launching  digital channels for additional business units. Without the capability to act quickly, merchants can lose customer accounts, margins, and market share.

Reducing time to market has always been a challenge, and as ecommerce becomes a mainstream sales channel in B2B commerce, it will remain a differentiator. The  biggest challenge for 66% of manufacturers when launching a new product is beating the competition to the market.*

But having speed-to-market capabilities as a merchant doesn't just mean the ability to be the first. It also means speed to release. A key to long-term success in B2B ecommerce is rapidly iterating and maximizing the customer experience. Having the  configurability to launch new products and promotions quickly is also necessary. When businesses need to launch new sales channels and storefronts or integrate new technologies, an ecommerce platform becomes the differentiating factor in speed.

*Driving Digital Commerce in Manufacturing,  VANSONBOURNE

The Pitfalls of Being Slow to Market in Ecommerce

When  distributors compete in an unrestricted online market, the first to market gain a sales advantage. But the first to market doesn't always reign supreme; Google AskJeeves about that. If a merchant can provide a better buying experience than the first to the market and not become a laggard, the initial leader could lose the advantage. Znode's native B2B functionality allows merchants to be competitive in getting to market and maintaining market share. The native B2B features include configuring  product catalogs, pricing models, shipping methods, payment methods, and more for any complex B2B scenario. Configure, not code.

Addressing customer experience expectations is crucial. The faster a merchant can deliver an exceptional customer experience, the sooner it can capture more sales. If a merchant ignores the market demands of customer experience, it'll end up like Sears or JCPenney. Ecommerce expert Brian Beck has called out both former  leaders in the retail space for not addressing the shift in the market to ecommerce as a sales channel, "B2B leaders across the globe must sit up and pay attention or suffer the fate of companies like Sears".

Ecommerce managers who are forced to rely on IT and developers also rely on increasing  cost structures and slower time to market. Many legacy and monolithic ecommerce platforms claim to reduce time to market through simplified integration and accessibility of data. While accessing data is needed to deliver a great customer experience, there is also the need for a user experience where the customer can interact with that data, which is not native to these ecommerce platforms. This creates the need for experience creation and integration.  Nothing in B2B is simple, especially integrations. Time, a rare resource, is required for both creation and integration.

Znode delivers native B2B features and configurability to address market and business complexities. Znode's  API-first architecture also provides for extensibility of the platform's native functionality for integrations and in presenting data in the user experience. As a headless platform, Znode offers unlimited flexibility in the user experience design.

Speed to Market Platform Considerations

When determining a B2B ecommerce platform's speed to market potential, organizations need a strategic vision for pursuing digital commerce and  documented business requirements. With the vision and requirements in tow, merchants can consider platforms based on the following speed-to-market capabilities:

1. B2B Ecommerce Configuration vs. Customization

   Understanding what aspects of a platform business users can configure versus what will require development resources to customize allows merchants to gauge the resources necessary to get to market with new products or shopping experiences, launch in new markets, and more.
   

   • Product Information Management:  Centrally managed product information provides efficiency and the ability to push data from the ecommerce platform to all other sales channels. Znode's centralized approach to  ecommerce product data management accelerates speed-to-market at scale ​while maintaining across-the-board visibility & brand governance. Merchants can reduce time to market in the following ways:

     1. Launch unlimited customer and channel catalogs
     2. Create account-specific and user profile segment-specific catalog offerings
     3. Maintain brand consistency
     4. Produce locale-specific product catalogs for new geographic markets
     5. Personalize product assortments, getting buyers to convert quicker
     6. Update product specifications as new product attributes are identified
     7. Manage complex products, including bundled, grouped, configurable, and more
        
        
   • Pricing Transparency: B2B buyers expect to see all costs before placing an order. This means an ecommerce platform must enable quick configuration of all contract pricing models. Administrators can apply pricing rules at the storefront, account, user, or user profile segment level and natively configure via Price List association in Znode, including:
     
     1. Retail or MSRP pricing
     2. Sale pricing
     3. Tiered volume pricing
     4. Customer tiered pricing
        
        
   • Native B2B Features: An ecommerce platform's native features eliminate the need to build. Building and customizing become unsustainable as platform updates are debuted. More importantly, the time to build could mean lost market share. Znode is built for B2B and allows merchants to configure business requirements and get to market fast. Native Znode features that can be configured are:
     
     1. Customer Management: Accounts, users, and user profile segments
     2. Approval workflows for orders configurable budgetary limitations
     3. Quotes: Buyers can submit carts as quotes for conversion to orders
     4. Complex inventory management, including multiple warehouses
     5. Administration Console: Quick links, recent sales information, general statistics, and account lists, all with quick filter options
     6. Sales Enablement: Reps can view account activity information
     7. Saved for Later lists, list management, and re-order capabilities
     8. Multiple shopping carts for procurement teams building numerous orders
        
        
   • Content Management: Merchants must be able to quickly adapt a storefront customer experience for a new market, industry segment, or product line by updating content in a B2B ecommerce platform. Many  headless commerce platforms do not include a native head for a storefront. Each time a merchant needs a new storefront experience, it must establish another integration. Znode eliminates that challenge with a native head to configure unlimited storefronts. This head calls APIs in a true headless fashion but increases speed-to-market. Administrators can update content across storefronts via Znode's  native CMS and the following easy content modeling features:
     
     1. Page Templates: Use prebuilt page templates.
     2. Native Theme: Apply ADA Level A compliance to existing storefront themes.
     3. Content Blocks: Create content blocks and components that showcase the correct content for the experience.
     4. Content Containers: Build personalized and structured content for different user groups to display on the storefront when logged in.
     5. Widgets: Easily apply widgets across multiple pages. Widget examples include images, videos, banner sliders, product lists, forms, and facets.
     6. Global Content: Znode's CMS is headless, allowing content to be published globally across any platform with an API connection to Znode.
        
        
   • Multi-Channel Ecommerce and  Multi-Store Management: Znode allows merchants to quickly launch and  manage multiple ecommerce storefronts using a single platform and administration console. Administrators can apply catalogs, categories, profiles, rules, and attributes at a storefront level to serve new accounts, enter new markets quickly, and more.

2. Ease of Implementation and B2B Ecommerce Integration

   Beyond B2B ecommerce configuration, the ability to launch a minimal viable product (MVP). Integrations to enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, customer relationship management software, shipping software, and other third-party systems create risk and slow a project and often a website. Znode's architecture enables rapid MVP implementation and business system integration through:
   
   • Znode Commerce Connector is a framework for integrating business systems with the ecommerce platform in less time and ensures integrations will be sustainable through platform updates. The Commerce Connector is a prebuilt component of Znode's software development kit (SDK).
   • The Znode storefront SDK enables merchants to customize Znode's native storefront and administration console applications through  .NET code. The Znode SDK provides code samples and allows a faster compilation of code than writing customizations directly to the API layer.
   • Znode's API-First Architecture provides access to all native features and data points for communicating with API endpoints rather than through native frameworks.

3. Ecommerce Platform Capabilities vs. Team Size

   Data shows that B2B organizations are lagging in comparison to B2C counterparts. [...] Only 27% of leaders at B2B organizations say [they have the talent and performance to drive and deliver their digital commerce strategy].*

   Digital maturity impacts a merchant's ecommerce strategy success, but a capable team should be able to make any ecommerce platform function. What if a platform didn't constrain teams?

   Znode delivers more native B2B ecommerce capabilities than any other platform. Its multi-channel capabilities allow the repetition of channel launches exponentially faster than other ecommerce platforms on the market. Merchants can define business processes, clean data sets, load data,  configure entities and search and launch an MVP in Znode.

   *CMOs: These Are the Digital Commerce Trends to Know for Long-Term Growth,  Gartner

Speed to Market Success

Proof of configuration and flexibility:

• Summit Group provides memorable branded merchandise and creates storefronts for business customers, selling its products through digital pop-up shops and customer-branded storefronts. To quickly  deliver personalized shopping experiences, Summit Group needed to set up nearly 20 different configurations for storefronts.

  Znode's dynamic schema enabled Summit Group to build additional storefront attributes without the need for the database to be touched by an outside developer. With Znode, administrators can create unique storefronts personalized to customer-specific requirements. Time and effort required of the technical team were significantly reduced. Read the full  Summit Group customer profile.

• Bradley Corporation, a leading manufacturer of commercial plumbing fixtures and washroom accessories, strongly believes that creating great customer experiences, increasing sales, and differentiating from competitors requires investing in technology.

  Znode solved Bradley's primary need for a single centralized user interface for sales, distribution channels, and customers. Bradley now releases UX every two weeks. Read the full  Bradley Corporation customer profile.

Ecommerce Time to Market Questions

Ask  these questions when evaluating speed-to-market capabilities:

• What data points are natively configurable within the ecommerce platform?
• How easily can data be migrated from the current platform?
• What ecommerce use cases are natively supported by the platform?
• Does the ecommerce platform provide frameworks to iterate and evolve?

Unlock speed, the greatest growth differentiator in B2B ecommerce. Request a demo of Znode today.