Manufacturing & Distribution eCommerce: Choosing the Right Platform

Generating Alternative Income Streams

A robust, eCommerce integrated product chain manufacturing platform provides the self-service tools and streamlined management necessary to open alternative income streams such as marketplace sales platforms, short production runs, and customized products. Customized platforms designed specifically for manufacturing and distributing usually have stronger customer self-service features that enable faster decisions from multiple, customer-specific pricing, detailed information on inventory, raw materials, supply chain, compliance guidelines from multiple countries and taxing jurisdictions involved in global marketing, and faster shipping with integrated connections to various carriers.

Sharing Information Bi-directionally

In today's business environment, it's imperative to share information internally and externally to streamline processes, update inventory management software, collaborate, and market with customized content.

Manufacturers and distributors can automate intelligence gathering, enable real-time information sharing, generate custom reports based on a stakeholder's level of authorization, monitor employees, and gain valuable insights about their customers from platform analytics and user behavior. It's also important to engage customers by communicating with them, knowing their needs, soliciting their opinions, and responding to their complaints and concerns.

Automate Product Catalog Feeds, Update the Supply Chain

Companies can promote new product launches, update product particulars, change prices and create custom pricing tiers. Companies can create catalogs-within-catalogs for special buyers, preferred customers, and authorized buyers within a given client's company. Managing big product catalogs and thousands to millions of SKUs becomes simplified. That's why platforms designed for Enterprise B2B custom implementations, such as Clarity ecommerce works so well.

Delivering a User-Friendly Experience

A well-designed platform automatically generates the right display for customers, prospects, and multiple decision-makers based on the type of device each person uses. Customers can have custom dashboards for ordering products and special features such as product configurators to speed up order completions. Scheduling shipments, recurring orders, and returns should be easy and hassle-free, and the right eCommerce platform can make those processes easy and automatic.

Managing an Evolving Workforce

Distributor eCommerce often deals with associates from multiple countries, cultures, and even time zones. Some staff members might work from home while others work at multiple branches, factories, and sales offices. Unlike past generations, few companies can survive long if they run “sweatshop” operations.

Companies find it increasingly difficult to attract and retain top talent, and an integrated platform can make it easier by providing employee self-service options, online onboarding, and other HR tools. Efficiency and collaboration drive productivity more than salary savings and negative reinforcement. Most companies now allow workers to BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), which allows the staff to work anywhere. Mobile technologies on the floor allow workers to connect with customers, stakeholders, and managers.

Earning Better SEO Rankings

B2B manufacturing resourcing operations often don't realize how strongly B2C convenience has permeated the modern culture. Today's business buyers no longer rely on loyalty, word-of-mouth referrals, relationships with sales staff, and price as the main drivers of where they buy. Business buyers are also retail consumers, and they want the same conveniences that they get from retail sites. Unhappy customers can easily search the Internet for alternative suppliers, so it's critical to rank highly in organic searches.

A world-class manufacturing eCommerce distribution platform—like Clarity eCommerce—is always correctly coded for on-page SEO for each product, allows category landing pages, provides product and category XML sitemaps, and the platform can build brand awareness with the right content and off-page backlinks from other respected websites. Regular monitoring can detect broken links.

Developing an Inbound Marketing Strategy

Today's B2B eCommerce platforms can make the most of what customers do online. The data includes how long visitors spend on each area of a website, which products cause visitors to pause and what areas seem to be pain points. Content can be monitored the same way regardless of whether it's on the website or posted elsewhere. Keyword usage, requests for assistance, and other browsing habits can help to create a full visitor profile that eCommerce distributors can use to craft custom promotions and website displays and to refine content to make it more appealing. Marketers can use inbound marketing insights to give customers the content they need directly through email campaigns.

Adding New Technology

Manufacturers and distributors face a market where more and more products have Internet-enabled sensors that report key data. Sensors can track consumer devices, calibrate driverless cars in automotive manufacturing, automate deliveries of parts and subassemblies, and track production progress in real-time.

Collecting data from these sensors and disseminating it to the right departments require a robust platform where everything is well integrated. A platform geared to manufacturing can enable predictive maintenance and monitoring of equipment conditions throughout the operation.

Tracking & Measuring Results

The manufacturing process often moves slowly from inception to finished product. That's why it can be difficult to measure the benefits of enterprise B2B eCommerce from indirect promotions such as content marketing and social engagement. An enterprise-class platform doesn't forget, and it doesn't lose information.

The system can monitor long-term sales relationships, customer communications, commerce distribution channels, sales leads, customer behavior on-site and off-site, track inventory management issues in a distribution center and along the entire product chain, identify online shopping trends, and monitor market trends to spot opportunities and threats. Automated triggers can send the right information to authorized staff when key conditions are met. The system can also send customized marketing messages based on this intelligence. A robust system can even monitor a company's reputation online, find product reviews and discover any negative or positive mentions of a given company.

Integrating with Multiple Systems

Integrating new technologies often causes major problems for companies that use legacy systems, manual processes and older technologies. Each update and software addition can create challenges, downtime, and inefficiencies unless the platform has a strong API layer where ERPs, CRMs, and EMRs like Salesforce, Oracle, Dynamics, Sage, NetSuite, and hundreds of other line-of-business applications can be connected securely to specialized endpoints that disseminate the information to multiple operating areas. Updates will then create fewer problems because the endpoints will still deliver the information where it's designed to go despite software changes.

The staff will only have to enter information once to distribute it everywhere it needs to go. These are just a few of the benefits of integration. Clarity Connect is a companion platform to Clarity eCommerce, which provides that integration platform to interconnect your front office (website, distributor portal, eCommerce storefront, etc.) to your back office (Financial app, Fulfillment, Shipping, Logistics, Inventory, ERP, CRM, etc.)