B2B Self-Service E-Commerce

Hi, folks. For this podcast today at Accorin, we have Graham Luby, our vice president in charge of service delivery strategy. Ultimately, Graham's responsible for all the work we do for clients, planning for designing, building, marketing, and maintaining e-commerce websites and connected systems, everything we do for our clients. The purpose of this podcast today is to talk about what we are calling self-service B2B e-commerce, which is not an app, an extension, or a plug-in, or a specific piece of functionality, but really it's an approach and a set of tools we use at Acorn to make the experience on B2B e-commerce websites better, more automated, and more self-serving for the primary users of them, including both the merchants and the customers.

So, Graham, we wanted to start out today by talking about, generally speaking, the differences between B2C and B2B e-commerce that we see with our client assignments. So maybe just talk a little bit about that and some of the general differences in requirements and e-commerce experiences that we're seeing today here in 2020 between B2B and B2C. So in a nutshell, B2B is a lot more complex than B2C. And it builds on B2C from an experience standpoint.

Most customers today shop in their personal lives. Well, frankly, everybody shops in their personal lives online in fashion. And there's a certain expectation of what that means. And there's a certain expectation of the ease of use and the design and the ability to find products and see what's going on.

that people have become attuned to from their shopping with Amazon and Walmart and Nike and Allbirds and a host of other brands. So as a starting point, B2B has those expectations that they need to meet. On top of that, between organizations, there are a lot of additional rules that typically come into play when selling to B2B. They're negotiated price lists, There are approved selections.

There are purchasing on credit terms. So there's a lot more that comes into play on a B2B site than on a typical B2C site. I see. So the way you're talking about the context here, it seems like, and we talk about this a lot with B2B merchants and their e-commerce problems that we're trying to solve.

The B2B buyers are looking more for experiences that are like B2C websites. But then in addition to that, the B2B merchants and their customer relationships have a level of complexity that can be very different for every business in B2B. Is that right? Yeah, absolutely.

And no two B2B companies are going to be the same either. You know, most B2Bs have a very relatively similar set of features and functionality that they want. With B2B, you get into a lot of different nuances based on industries, based on back-end systems, based on business processes and workflows. So that adds complexity to any project.

So let's dig into that a little bit. What industries and what types of companies are we seeing and others even outside of our client base that can benefit from this concept of self-service B2B e-commerce? So taking a couple of clients as examples, one is a device and software developer focused on the restaurant industry. And for them, they've historically had a sales force that goes after larger accounts.

They're using self-service B2B to focus on smaller restaurants, maybe one, two, three location restaurants that can self-serve themselves. They don't need a salesperson to sell them on the products and the services. They're able to go in by themselves, select the products with sufficient tools and complete a transaction. So that's one example.

Right, that sounds very much like, almost like a B2C use case. It is potentially like a B2C, but the products that they have to purchase typically have multiple different configurations. So the B2B experience needs to support that. It's not just adding a pair of shoes to the car.

You have to have different compatibilities and subscriptions that all come in together. This example is a large distributor of medical supplies. They're a national organization. They have customers that are national in nature, and their customers typically have distributed purchasing.

So each individual location is able to purchase the products or the supplies and the refills that they need. So they have to build that into their e-commerce experience. but have it all under a single umbrella of e-commerce for them. So like a spa that has multiple locations a healthcare facility that has 20 offices in a region it that type of thing That's exactly it, where you might have a centralized purchasing organization, but then each of the locations are responsible for buying the supplies that they're running out of because you've got purchasing clerks in those locations or an office manager that know what's needed better than any centralized purchasing group will ever have.

But the centralized purchasing group can put in place the rules and the processes and get the negotiated rates that everybody can then buy against and benefit from. So that means that a B2B merchant might have a number of or many company customers that have a lot of people within them that are making purchases from the e-commerce website, right? Yeah, and that's a big difference between B2B and B2C. So in B2C, you've typically got an individual that has an account that they log in and then purchases against.

For a lot of the B2B companies that we work with, they sell to companies. Those custom companies may then have one or more individuals within their company that's responsible for doing purchasing. And they need their own accounts for accountability and approvals and a variety of other rules and reasons. So we do a lot of work with Magento 2, and I believe both the examples that you referred to are on Magento 2.

The concept, can you talk a little bit about the concept of the company as a customer, but then beyond that, how does Magento help to solve for some of that complexity with the roles and permissions aspect of Magento 2, which is out of the box B2B functionality, isn't it, with Magento 2? So Magento 2 Commerce has the B2B module that supports a lot of the functionality we're talking about right now. So not in addition. We're talking about the paid license version of Magento 2.

That is correct. Yeah. So within Magento 2, there is a lot of great B2B functionality. Adobe has clearly done a major investment in building up the product and the product footprint with an eye towards B2B.

So when they launched over the last year plus, there's been a constant rollout of new B2B-related features and features for more complex e-commerce situations. So there in Magento 241, which is the most recent release right now, You've got a big new feature around purchase order approvals. Those purchase order approvals layer on top of an existing B2B capability called company hierarchies. So you can create company accounts and users within those accounts.

And now you're able to create purchasing rules for those users in their accounts. So, for example, if the order is under $1,000, it can be placed by a clerk. If it's over $1,000, it has to go to a director. If it's over $10,000, it has to go to a vice president.

And all of those rules can now be built into Magento or in Magento. I see. So it's almost like the B2B merchant can create a pretty robust purchasing system within the e-commerce website, whereby that company customer can give all kinds of people within the organizations different levels of purchasing authorization based on this functionality? Yes, absolutely.

So not only do you have a hierarchy structure within companies that you can configure, from a technical side, Magenta has built a framework that you can actually add security tasks as well that don't exist. So you can extend Magento to add additional rules and purchasing structures if you need to for your processes. It comes with a lot out the box already. So really quickly, just touching on the health care distributor that you talked about earlier on.

I believe you mentioned in our pre-podcast discussions that they have a number of brands. And I believe you said that they're running on an instance of Magento 2 Commerce Edition. And so I would imagine that if this is the type of complexity that's multiplied times five, they're really able to simplify and make a lot more efficient the process of managing these customers so long as they can get this into place and get the managers of each of these businesses, each whom have a different storefront, trained and up and running on this type of system.

Is that right? Is efficiency the big benefit? Yeah, there is a lot of benefit in the efficiency. So there are really two sides of it.

Number one is efficiency. How can they move customers from faxes and emails and calls to place orders and move that out to the actual customers which reduces work internal on the call center It also helps ensure that the products that are getting ordered are definitely the right ones. The second side of it is really around stickiness. So being able to make it easier for customers to buy and build their internal processes around that purchasing cycle, which makes it more difficult for those customers to leave.

There's also on top of it, they do negotiated contracts for products. And with the Magento functionality, all of those price books and company-specific contracts are configured and set up and at scale because this customer has over 750,000 accounts in Magento. So it's really up to you. So thinking about how this customer may have done business before e-commerce or before this version of Magento 2, it's the faxes, it's the phone calls, it's that efficiency plus the ability to lock in their customers with a really efficient buying process.

That's really the benefit here. But also, you mentioned a large number of accounts. They can, with this type of system, they can handle and set up every type of business account from the one person doctor's office to the major chain of hospitals and all do it within one system. Correct?

That is correct. Yeah. so beyond the the core benefits of the b2b functionality within magento 2 i know that we have developed some extensions including shared requisition lists the company address book previously purchased products and then also the the the integrator and one view these are extensions to Magento that we've used to help our clients really achieve this level of self-service that they're seeing a real huge benefit from. Can you talk a little bit about which ones of these you think are really the best drivers of this self-service concept?

Anytime you're doing e-commerce at scale and have back-end systems that you have to integrate into, the flow of data between the e-commerce system and the back-end system, ERP or 3PL, whatever it may be, is going to be critical. So the more you can streamline those flows, the better. And when you get into the B2B world and you want to be able to present invoices to customers or you want to be able to show real-time updates to their credit online or be able to have them do self-service RMAs or self-service acknowledgement of shipments, then you need to have powerful integrations between Magento and those systems.

And we've built the integration module to support that. So at scale, our customers are able to run hundreds and thousands of orders a month through the systems with error trapping and logging. Right. That one's called The Integrator.

If listeners want to look at your website at acorin.com and learn a little bit more about it, see some screenshots, correct? The Integrator. That is correct.

There are also other features that are more visible to end customers, such as the company address book or shared requisition lists or previously purchased items that help improve the customer experience. So if you're a B2B company and you're buying products, orders are definitely important as a construct of the products that you buy in an order. But very often when somebody's in a B2B setting, they want to see what the last product they've bought was and simply add that to the cart in whatever quantity that they're looking for.

And that's where the previously purchased functionality comes in. It essentially takes all of your orders and presents them as a list of products rather than a list of orders. I see. Can you talk a little bit about company address book?

That one's I'm particularly fond of, given some experience I have with the retail industry. So in Magento, every user can have their own address book. That's great for B2C and used extensively. But if you get into a B2B setting, the company's ship to addresses or billing addresses are well known beforehand.

So if you've got 100 plus locations, you want to have those location addresses in a centralized address book rather than having a clerk in each location having to reenter it and potentially make mistakes and so forth. So the company address book layers on top of Magento Commerce and adds an additional set of functionality around address book management and centralized address books. So it really it that that little extension which I love is just is not only a nice little piece of functionality but it also leveraging the out of the box components of Magento B2B and just extending it further to really make it practical for an organization like a like a in a retail setting that really needs to control where shipments are being sent That is correct.

Can you talk about the purchase order approval module that is now, as of just a month or so ago, new with Magento 2.4? That's also, I would think, a really big part of this self-service concept, isn't it? It is, and it was announced in Amsterdam last November, really big addition to Magento's commerce footprint.

And what it allows is companies to set up rules and automations where different levels of approval processes can be created before an order is placed. So a clerk can place an order and if it triggers any of the approval rules, it then gets sent to a manager for them to approve before the final order gets placed, either as a credit card or as a open account order. That's great. That's fantastic.

I would bet that for a lot of companies that are just used to sending purchase order numbers around or faxing them or dealing with paper and phone calls, that that's going to be a really big part of making the purchasing process more efficient for those types of organizations. One thing we haven't touched on yet is the user interface or the experience, the design of the user experience. I know that we've done a little bit with some of the Magento themes to make that B2B buying experience more self-service.

And that's a big part of it, too, isn't it? Aren't there a lot of opportunities to really customize the interface so that a merchant can give a B2B buyer the type of experience that allows them to do more on their own without making phone calls and faxes and emails? yeah because it's in a business setting we tend to see more desktop b2b users than we see mobile but that's shifting a little bit but definitely not at the level of mobile adoption that b2c customers are but there's still an expectation even in the b2b world that there's a lot of functionality which you need to give customers they expect good searching they expect filtering of products.

They expect easy access to their information and check out processes and save cards. And a lot of the other details that you've come to expect from B2C experience translates into B2B. And today what we're starting to see is some of the more innovative companies starting to look at ways that they can go beyond and provide more functionality. So for example, be able to take a picture of a specific part for a piece of equipment, and that identifies what the part is and allows the user to add that to the cart.

That's typically going to be through a mobile form factor, which implies that it's either PWA or it is an application that is part of the e-commerce footprint. That's great. So in closing here, we're starting to run out of time. Just wanted to get your opinion about the growth of B2B self-service and the fact that there are still a number of manufacturers and distributors that are maybe still on first generation e-commerce websites, or maybe they haven't even moved into e-commerce yet.

But there's really a lot of opportunity for them to create a self-service e-commerce experience relatively quickly. We're talking months, not years here. And really help propel them to either a period where they're much more solvent because they have a real good functioning e-commerce website or get on a growth path that can have a really nice trajectory. So your thoughts on the types of companies that you think still have an opportunity here?

It's not too late in the game to get going, is it? Absolutely not. And in fact, if for companies that want to stay in the game, they need to be evaluating their e-commerce strategy and how they're going to take advantage of it. because in all likelihood their competitors are, and if not their competitors, other companies in tangential spaces are potentially doing this.

There's just so much going on in the e-commerce space, both B2B as well as B2C, that any company that doesn't have a solid strategy and isn't executing on it needs to get moving quickly. And the robustness of platforms like Magento make it feasible to get a proof of concept up and running pretty quickly. So there's no time like the present to get going. That's great.

Well, we've run out of time here on this podcast, but plenty of discussions also to be had. You can visit our website at acorin.com or give us a call with the contact information available there. Thanks for tuning in today or anytime, and we look forward to seeing you on another podcast soon.

Thank you so much.