Making E-Commerce Fit Your Industrial Distribution Business
Austin Lowery, Founder & CEO, TraceCX discussed what distributors and manufacturers in the industrial distribution space need to know about e-commerce no matter what stage of the journey they are on.
Common Mistakes When Getting Started
* Falsely thinking your-commerce platform can“takedown” the big competitors. Larger companies have resources, dedicated staff, and deep vendor relationships.
* Thinking e-commerce is a cure for everything. No platform drops in and solves all problems.
* E-commerce customers will show up because you exist. Understand an effective e-commerce plan requires as much work as the core business; it is an extension of your business. A website simply enables customers to self-serve.
* ASKUandapricearenotabusiness.
Areas of Opportunity
E-commerce is an important business tool. It can add value to the business when you consider these areas for growth:
1. Lowering Buyer Friction
Invest in:
* Integrationofinventory, delivery times, and order status to increase conversion.
* Live chat functionality.
* Rich product data for items important to your customers.
* Salespeople who actively manage and modify a cart to adjust pricing and pass that back to the customer.
2. Increasing Customer Engagement
Invest in:
* Integration with your ERP to expose inventory, order status, invoices, and other data about on- and off-line orders.
* Development and testing of mobile experiences, not just desktop.
* Conversion of your staff’s product and other knowledge into website content.
* Make reordering easy through purchase lists, reorder through order history or offer recommendations for maintenance schedules.
3. Expanding Market Opportunities
Invest in:
* Specialization of high-margin products.
* Data for specialized products that may not be available from other sources.
* Marketing to customers in geographies underserviced for your specialization.
* Promotion of product knowledge and availability can help you be more successful.
Six Steps to E-Commerce Success in Industrial Distribution
Brendan Cameron at Americaneagle.com discussed setting up workflows from new credit applications to completing quote-to-order conversions online. Gaining a better understanding of planning guideposts enables companies to think strategically and prepare.
Strategic Approach
A strategic approach to developing an effective e-commerce platform starts with learning users’ goals and motivation and merging those with business and technology. This helps build a foundation framed for the design and technical work ahead.
Subsequently, solutions are designed through iteration and define the overall brand approach. This is optimized through continuous testing and updating.
Six Steps Toward Continuous Development
Whether you currently have an e-commerce platform or are in the beginning stages of development, the following steps are designed to build on one another, constantly evolving the final product. The result is a deliverable that meets your customers’ needs and expectations.
1. Discover, create, and ideate. First, clearly understand why you are doing this project, the business goals, and project objectives. Next, assess what information you can access like customer feedback and Google Analytics data of your current website. Use this to determine user requirements and design. Lean on data, not your team’s opinions.
2. Define a goal-oriented strategy with clear deliverables. This will inform your decision-making, future planning, and budgeting. Use this phase to set up your future roadmap (user experience, content, and technology), which is as critical a step as developing your immediate project plan. Your roadmap may consist of multiple phases or incremental rollouts of value-added features and functionality.
3. Design and create a platform to engage your target audience. Apply the knowledge you have gathered to design a user-centric, intuitive, and mobile-friendly front-end.
4. Development — where the work starts. Support the team by using Kanban methodology, sprint schedules, backlog prioritization, and milestones. These practices allow for a streamlined process to increase better practices.
5. Deploy by conducting a soft launch with key customers and internal team members. Gather direct user feedback and assess to reduce the risk of functional failure. Fine-tune features and content and ask targeted questions of your test groups.
6. Monitor for continuous development. Hold a project postmortem and send out a survey to your team and core customers in advance to get feedback about what platform changes you want to make in the future. Evaluations will also provide feedback to help assess what worked and what did not regarding the process and budget.