Web Store <=> ERP Integration (Sage 300)

The Next Wave of Automation

Let’s preface this by saying that we will be focusing our discussion on the benefits of having a web store integrated to Sage 300 since that is our area of expertise. Our eCommerce platform, Webtelligence, is deeply integrated to Sage 300 so we’ll explore why that’s important to the typical small to medium sized wholesale distributor, who represents a big part of the Sage 300 community that we service.

Web stores are ubiquitous in the B2C (business to consumer) space. Marketplaces like Amazon are setting the standard by which all others are measured. We, as consumers, want a similar experience from every business we deal with.

As we demand more from the businesses we deal with in our personal lives, those demands are spilling over into our work lives. We want the same experience when dealing with our suppliers at work (B2B). And that’s a completely reasonable expectation. The technology exists. And yet there’s a 93% disconnect between customers wanting this functionality and merchants providing it. Wholesale distributors need to embrace it.

Providing a B2C Experience for B2B

Let’s face it. It’s getting a lot easier for you to part with your money online, buying the things you want and need from the comfort of your home or office, on your time, not the sellers. And you get on-demand access to your entire history with those retailers at the touch of a button. As a B2B business, you need to provide that same experience to your customers or they’ll find someone who will.

Why Should You Care?

According to Tradegecko, 93% of B2B buyers prefer to buy online while 17% of B2B merchants provide that capability. Now that’s a disconnect that smells a lot like opportunity. If you’re one of the few that offers online purchasing to your customers, you stand a good chance of capturing more market share.

Customer Service & Loyalty

When customers find a supplier that allows them to do business when and where it’s convenient for them. That buys loyalty. Sure you’ve got to have competitive pricing and provide good service, but those are table stakes to even be in the game. It’s the extra stuff that sets you apart. Like offering online purchasing that allows customers to buy when and where it suits them. And as a bonus, you’re order desk is open 24/7.

So whether you’re order process is manual, meaning you take orders by phone, fax, or email and someone keys them into Sage, or you have a disconnected web store, the benefits are the same.

Benefits of Integration

Let’s look more specifically at the benefits of a system where your Sage 300 and web store are integrated. What does that really mean?

There are 2 sides to the integration equation: getting your products from Inventory Control onto the web and getting orders and payment from the web into Order Entry.

Getting the orders and payments into Sage is the easy part. Especially if you have a card processor that’s integrated to Sage 300, like Paya (formerly Sage Payment Solutions), North American Payment Solutions, or Paytelligence.

Getting your products onto your web store is another story.

When you’re in a B2B environment you’ve got several factors to deal with when presenting your products to your customers on a web store.

1. Do you offer volume discounts?
2. Do some customers get different prices than others? Identified as Base, A, B, C, D, and E Customer Type in Sage.
3. What about contract pricing?
4. What about sale pricing?
5. Can customers buy on terms?
6. What if they’re past due or over their credit limit?
7. Are some customers limited to specific products that they can buy? Identified on the price list assigned to them in Sage.
8. And a myriad of other potential questions.

If you’re familiar with Sage 300 you know that it deals with all of these pricing, product, and purchase terms questions as standard functionality. In order for you to provide a personalized and accurate shopping experience on your web store, you need to respect all of that so your customers get their price for their products with their purchase terms.

If your web store is not integrated to Sage 300 you’ll be faced with the daunting task of keeping both systems updated with the correct information. That’s a lot of work and inevitably, something gets missed or keyed incorrectly. That’s where the expensive problems start, not to mention the time and expense of maintaining disparate systems.

When something goes wrong you will either lose money on the orders or potentially lose a customer.

The big win with a properly integrated web store is avoiding those problems and alleviating all the work to keep 2 disparate systems in sync.

A properly integrated web store will automatically inherit all of your product details from Sage Inventory Control while providing the capability to supplement that detail with images, extended descriptions, videos, supporting documentation like user guides, assembly instruction, or any other supplementary documents, to name a few.

An integrated system will know your customer based on their login and provided their pricing and terms for the products they are eligible to buy.

The system will deliver orders directly to Sage Order Entry with payment details if required, ready for fulfillment. Nobody needs to intercept or review the orders unless you want them to.

An integrated system eliminates all of the manual effort required to maintain a disconnected web store and avoids the inevitable mistakes that arise when human intervention (rekeying) is required.

What will you do with all that extra time and money you’ll save?

Better Use of Resources

How much time does it take to process a typical order in your current process? If you could redirect that time to other activities, what would that look like for your business? Here’s few things that our customer have done with their freed up time when they implemented Webtelligence.

• Staff takes time to introduce customers to the new web store and shows them how to use it, emphasizing the focus on an improved customer experience and service, driving increased adoption of the new site and reducing order processing costs.
• More time is available to introduce new products or services to your customers, driving incremental revenue.
• Less time spent dealing with problems. Since customers place their own orders, there are less returns. More time to proactively grow the business.
• Offer and analyze different promotions to drive incremental revenue.
• Cross sell and up sell increasing the average order size and number of items per order.

Those are just a few of the immediate benefits an integrated system will provide. Interestingly, having a web store can actually increase in store sales as well, as many of our customers have experienced. Customers may prefer to do their research online but buy or pick up in store. It’s an increasing trend with online retailers.

Let’s Recap

With a non-integrated system, someone will have to manage the products on the web site to make sure the pricing is correct for every customer, descriptions are accurate, that specific products are still available to sell, and so on. Someone will also have to get the web orders into Sage for fulfillment. Probably by manually keying it in. And what happens when we manually key things from one system to another? Mistakes!

You can avoid all that with a properly integrated system. All product information becomes available to your web store if you want it there (simple check box) along with all customer specific pricing and terms. Orders and payments flow automatically into Sage for fulfillment. No re-keying of any data, ever.

What’s the Bottom Line?

With a properly integrated web store you will dramatically reduce the administrative overhead associated with a disconnected web store or manual process.

You’ll eliminate problems and effort caused by keying or pricing errors.

You’ll have happier customer because their orders are done correctly and on their terms, and they can manage their accounts online.

You’ll have happier employees because they no longer have to deal with the mind-numbing, soul-destroying task of keeping disparate data sources up to date.

You’ll have resources to deploy on more productive, revenue generating tasks.

So we can do this the hard way or we can do it the easy way. The smart money’s on the easy way; an integrated web store for Sage 300. And since we’re on the topic, if you’re looking, please consider Webtelligence.

Sage 300 Item Number Segmentation – Why Bother?

An integrated Web Store Perspective

Sage 300 is a powerful and flexible solution for many businesses of varying sizes. Its configuration options allow for this diversity in customers. A skilled Sage 300 consultant can determine the best setup for a specific customer and implement it.

One of those configuration options (perhaps seldom utilized) is the Inventory Control Item Structure. Below is a brief description of this feature and its benefits. Your Sage Authorized Partner can help you design item codes that will work best for you.

Sage Item Number Options

An item number in Sage can contain up to 24 alpha numeric characters (including segment separators) and up to 10 segments. There are also 8 options for item prefixes or segment separators. You can even define an unlimited number of different item structures for different types of items. For example, some items may use a structure of XXX-XXX and others could be XX-XXX-XX-XXXX, depending on the nature of the item in questions.

You would typically use the segmentation to define item attributes like color or size, or perhaps with a manufacturer prefix, or some other attribute or categorization. It is a good idea to take some time to study your product line to determine the item number structure or structures that will best serve your business. You can learn more about item number formats here.

What’s the Point?

Granted there may be some work involved setting up your item structures and defining the different segments with their associated values. Why would you go through the trouble of doing that?

As the title eludes to, it will make life easier if you have or plan to have a web store that is integrated to Sage 300 which we will touch on in a moment. But beyond that there are other benefits to the business.

Ease of use

In simple terms, it just makes Sage much easier to use. You can find and maintain your products more easily, get better reporting, and more.

Let’s look more closely at 2 distinct benefits.

Business Intelligence/Reporting

Better data means more opportunity to report and analyze that data to better manage your business. On the one hand you will be able to better report on sales data – which products or variations of products sell best and yield greater return on investment. You may also be able to control purchasing habits better and be able to compare your purchasing history against sales history to spot any disconnects that unnecessarily tie up working capital. It will help you keep tighter control of your inventory so you don’t overstock certain products (or product variations) while running out of top sellers.

Integrated Web Store

Let’s get back to the primary point of this discussion. What is the impact of a properly segmented item number on an integrate web store?

The purpose of an integrated web store is to eliminate the need to keep it updated independent of your Sage 300 system. A properly integrated web store will automatically inherit all of our items and associated data, including customer specific pricing, and make them available on your web store. That’s just one aspect of the integration, of course, but since it’s the point of this article, we’ll expand on it.

Here’s one example of item segments at work on a web store.

In this example we have 3 segments in play. Check out the cookie crumble trail “You are Here: Home / PizzaTools / Pizza Pans & Trays / Perforated Baking Trays”. That represents the category placement of the item group. Once you get to the product page you have 3 more segments that now represents the product and its two variations, coated or uncoated and size. Also associated with each product are the number of holes which is stored in an optional field on the item record – more about this later.

Having the item segments set up in Sage allows for easier categorization and grouping of like products resulting in easy navigation for the customer. It also makes it much easier technically to provide the filtering capabilities needed to make the navigation easy and fast.

Take that same concept and apply it to shoes or clothes where you may have segments representing men or women, style, color and size. Think about your product line and apply that logic. You’ll probably be able to come up with a reasonable item number structure or structures that make sense for you.

Filtering & Grouping

Filtering can be a huge help in making the web store more functional. Think, for example, of a store selling plumbing equipment and a shopper wants to limit the products they are presented to only a certain diameter, adding a filter on size to the category page will significantly increase usability and if the size is represented by a segment in the item number, this can also be used for reporting and inventory control as discussed above.

Other options

In addition to item segmentation as a tool for improved data manipulation there are a couple of additional functions in Sage 300 which will increase reporting capabilities and web store functions.

Optional Fields

There are other ways to manage web store navigation ad filtering using Optional Fields. This can be a viable option if redesigning your item numbers is not practical. It’s not the ideal solution due to potential performance concerns (searches and filtering may be slower), but can be very effective. In some cases you may want to or need to deploy both item structures and optional fields. One size usually doesn’t fit all. That’s one reason why Webtelligence sites (shameless plug) are usually designed to be customer specific, respecting image, branding, and idiosyncrasies like we’ve been discussing.

Manufacturers’ Item Number

It’s fairly common for Sage 300 users to simply use the item numbers of their suppliers for simplicity. It makes it easier to replenish inventory when you don’t have to remember different numbers from different suppliers.

Well the clever folks at Sage thought of that too. There is a feature in Sage 300 called Manufacturers’ Item Number that allows you to store the suppliers’ item number that is related to your internal item number.  You can use their item number for your purchasing while using your own item number for all other purposes.

Item Number Changer

Let’s say we’ve convinced you that you need to adopt this item segmentation approach, for better system performance or because you’re thinking about getting an integrated web store, or both. What now?

Don’t fret. There are tools and people that will work cheap. Think summer student. And for Sage 300 there are a few of number changer tools available. One is for item numbers so it keeps everything nice and tidy with your history.

But, like the disclaimer says, “don’t try this at home.” Before you embark on any project like this, get the advice of your Sage Authorized Partner. They know your business and they know Sage and these tools. They will be invaluable and help you avoid any missteps.

Conclusion

Think about your own shopping experiences on web stores. Which sites provide a good experience? Are you more likely to shop there more? What made the experience better?

Often it’s the sites where navigation is intuitive and quick, getting you your desired result with no anguish. If the site is not integrated to any back office ERP then this is all managed on the site itself. No problem. In an integrated system, which is the focus of our discussion, this is best inherited from Sage 300. If you have a well thought out item structure, this is easy. If not, it has to be maintained on the site, negating one of the primary reasons for having an integrated web store.

Admittedly this is a bit self-serving. We want to provide awesome web stores for our customers at the lowest possible cost. When customers take advantage of the functionality that Sage 300 provides, it makes our job much easier and as a result, a lower cost for our customers. The added benefit is they get better data to better manage their business. It’s a win win.

Webtelligence is the most deeply integrated and most versatile ecommerce solution for Sage 300. Our platform and methodology allow for functionality that other solutions just can’t accommodate.

Sage 300 has very sophisticated pricing capabilities that can manage a multitude of customer pricing options. Webtelligence automatically inherits these pricing models to use on the web store.

Promotions Module

Whenever possible, customer pricing should be managed in Sage because it reduces maintenance of pricing models for both Sage and your web store in one place simultaneously.

What about pricing options that Sage can’t manage?

That’s where the Webtelligence Promotions Module comes in.

Promotions are a common occurrence on web stores and for merchants in general. Webtelligence has a powerful Promotions Module that can manage a wide array of promotional offers that Sage does not. Here are a few examples:

BOGO – You see this a lot online and in store. Buy one get one free.

Spend $100 and get free shipping – This is another common offer. Webtelligence can take it even further and provide the shopper with feedback on just how close their shopping cart is to getting free shipping.

Buy these 2 products and get this 3^rd one for free – Another common promotional offer that our Promotions Module can manage for you.

Spend $100 and get a free baseball cap – Similar to free shipping but offering a promotional item instead.

Enter a coupon code and get 15% off – This one speaks for itself. It can apply to one product or the entire shopping cart, to a maximum discount amount, if desired.

These are just a few of the types of offers you can make that are not handled in the Sage pricing structure. They are easy to administer in Webtelligence and the necessary data flows back to Sage so you can analyze the effectiveness of your offers.

Webtelligence is the most deeply integrated and most versatile ecommerce solution for Sage 300. Our platform and methodology allow for functionality that other solutions just can’t accommodate.

Here’s an example.

Live Data from Sage 300

Every integrated ecommerce solution for Sage 300 has some form of data replication process that provides Sage 300 data to the web store or portal. That’s absolutely necessary so your web store can operate and take orders even if Sage is not available 100% of the time. What no other solution has that Webtelligence does is access to live data from Sage 300.

What does that mean and why is it important?

Live means the data is read on demand and is current as of that moment. It does not mean the data is replicated very frequently to be “close” to real time. Data replication needs resources to perform. Doing so very frequently can cause performance issues for Sage users doing their day to day work.

It means that in order to provide a Customer Portal that allows customers to review their history with the merchant, the data does not need to be replicated to the web. It is read live from Sage. Regardless of how that data got into Sage or when, it is available for customers to view.

So rather than replicating your entire Sage data structure to the web, only those data elements that are required to facilitate shopping need to be replicated. The rest can be accessed on demand, and only the data requested needs to be served up, all in a secure, encrypted communication.

If it’s important that your customers know that particular items are available, for example if they are needed for a job that is getting done tomorrow, being able to read inventory availability live from Sage will provide that capability.

With these 2 communication methods, Webtelligence customers can use the method best suited for the task.

Webtelligence is the most deeply integrated and most versatile ecommerce solution for Sage 300. Our platform and methodology allow for functionality that other solutions just can’t accommodate.

When you’ve been doing something for so long you start to take certain things for granted. For example, Webtelligence is integrated to Sage 300. Of course everyone knows what that means. Hold on there Sherlock. That’s a big assumption. Integration can mean a lot of different things to different people. Let’s elaborate on what that means from a Webtelligence perspective.

Integration to Sage 300

The point of an integrated web store is to avoid having to maintain 2 disparate data sources. Let’ start with the basic premise that any data element need only be entered once. Nothing should ever need to be rekeyed into either side, the web or Sage. Let’s expand on that a bit by stating that Sage 300 is the primary data repository, meaning that all data flows from Sage to the web and from the web back to Sage, automatically. Again, no rekeying and no manual or semi-automated process.

Let’s elaborate on those ideas. Sage 300 maintains a lot of details about customers, items, pricing, etc., much of which would be very useful to have on a web store, especially a B2B web store, without having to recreate it and maintain it separately.

Webtelligence automatically inherits all of that information and provides the means to further supplement it (product details specifically) to provide a very personal shopping experience for your customers. You’ve taken the time to develop customer specific pricing, contract pricing, and specific customer price lists. They are automatically available on your Webtelligence web store. No need to maintain it separately on the web.

Once your customer logs in, your web store knows what terms you have granted, what pricing to display as they shop, what products to show on the web store that they are eligible to purchase. All maintained in Sage and automatically available on the web store. No duplication of effort.

If you change pricing in Sage, the new prices are automatically reflected on the web store. If you add a product in Sage, It is automatically available on the web store if you want it there. You can even communicate with your customers through a pop up message that appears the next time they log in. That message is entered in Sage AR and read live.

Some of what we describe above is done by data replication on a scheduled basis and some is read live, on demand. Depending on the business and the task at hand, we’ll choose the most appropriate method.

That’s what integration means from a Webtelligence perspective. We hope that clears up any confusion.

Webtelligence is the most deeply integrated and most versatile ecommerce solution for Sage 300. Our platform and methodology allow for functionality that other solutions just can’t accommodate. For example, Webtelligence is not a template-based solution. Here’s what that means for you.

Web Site Design

Most of our customers have spent years, if not a lifetime, creating and growing their brand identity and company image. None of them are the same. Each has their own personality that has been nurtured to become the living, breathing entity that it is today. That’s too important to be left to a template.

Our designers will work with you to create the shopping experience you want for your customers that best showcases your products and image. It’s pretty rare that you’ll find a template that expresses your vision without making significant modifications to it. And if that’s the case, why bother. You’ll be better served to let our experienced designers work with you to create that perfect experience for your customers that matches your vision exactly.

Surprisingly, you’ll find that taking this approach is no more expensive than starting with a template. And the results will be superior, by design.

Webtelligence is the most deeply integrated and most versatile ecommerce solution for Sage 300. Our platform and methodology allow for functionality that other solutions just can’t accommodate.

Business to business (B2B) presents different challenges than business to consumer (B2C) sites. Yes, there are similarities. You want to expose all of you products to your customers, make it easy for customers to find what they’re looking for, and provide opportunities for them to buy more. But often in the B2B space it’s important to your customers that they can get their order in quickly and easily so they can get back to work. Webtelligence can help you do that.

Multiple Order Methods

Making it easy for your customers to place orders can be the difference between them buying from you or someone else. Providing the right option that works for your customers can be the difference.

Quick Order Pad

This is a great option for those customers who are familiar with your product names or SKUs. It’s much like a web-based order entry form that uses our Smart Finder to locate the right products.

The Smart Finder can be set up to search multiple fields based on what is entered into a field in the Quick Order Pad. For example, if a customer types in 3 or more characters of a product description or item code and stops typing for a second or more, the Smart Finder will return a list of all possible matches. The more characters entered, the more the list of possible matches is narrowed. And this is a “contains” type of search, not a “starts with” search. Much more forgiving for the user.

The fields searched can include Optional Fields or any other field in Sage that may help return the desired result. This can be a very effective order method for B2B customers.

Re-order From Prior Invoice

It’s common for customers of distributors to regularly replenish their inventory. That means that they are frequently buying the same products on a regular cycle. Allowing them to place a new order based on a prior invoice can save them a lot of time. Either replicate the entire order or just specific line items from previous invoices. And rest assured that current pricing will be reflected on the new order and they can adjust quantities before they buy.

Private Catalogue

Most people are familiar with the concept of a wish list. You place items on the list that you want to buy later. When you ultimately buy the item you move it from the wish list to the shopping cart.

A private catalog is similar in that customers place items in their private catalog to purchase at a later date. In the case of B2B buyers this can be a list of products that they frequently purchase from you. So rather than having to navigate the usual category and product pages to find what they need, they simply access their private catalog and order from there. And unlike a wish list, when a product is ordered from the private catalog, it stays in the catalog for the next purchase.

Your customers can keep as many catalogs as they need for different purposes. For example, they may have seasonal catalogs, or equipment specific catalogs, or task specific catalogs. Having that option makes it easier to do business with you than your competitor, building customer loyalty.

Most Frequently Purchased

Some of our customers challenge us to provide new and interesting ways for them to service their customers. And that’s a good thing because it allows us to provide that functionality to all of our customers. Since we are a multi-tenant SaaS solution, once we deploy a new feature it’s available to all customers. This is an example of one of those features.

As discussed earlier, wholesale customers often buy the same things repeatedly. Some items they buy more frequently than others. This feature shows the most recently purchased items (you determine the date range) and orders them from most frequently purchased to the least. From that list customers can add items to their shopping cart with a click of their mouse. And those purchase details come directly from Sage, not just the web store, so it doesn’t matter how the order got placed. If it’s in Sage, it’s included.

Those are just a few of the methods we’ve deployed for customers that are standard in Webtelligence. If you’ve got other wild and wonderful ideas to make it easy for your customers to order, let us know.

Webtelligence is the most deeply integrated and most versatile ecommerce solution for Sage 300. Our platform and methodology allow for functionality that other solutions just can’t accommodate. Here’s an example of what’s possible with our methodology.

Stand-Alone Customer Portal

Let’s say you’re not interested in selling your products online or that you’ve got some other non-integrated web store. No worries, we won’t hold that against you. But your customers have started asking for the ability to make routine queries on their account status, pay their invoices online, retrieve and reprint prior orders, invoices or other documents, and generally self-serve. As a Sage 300 users you didn’t really have a lot of options, or any for that matter, without getting into a whole integrated ecommerce solution with the associated costs and complexity (read into that expensive). Until now.

Because the North49 Customer Portal reads data live from Sage 300 there is no need for a complex ecommerce infrastructure to support it. We simply need a place (our data centers) to host the portal pages. The data is served up on demand when a customer selects an option on the portal.

No infrastructure changes on your side. No big development cost ($995 USD) to setup. And no big monthly fees ($200 USD/month). It’s quick to deploy and easy to use.

Our ability to read your Sage 300 data live in a secure communication makes this possible. It doesn’t get any easier than that.

Bill Gates once said that he would always hire a lazy person to do a difficult job at Microsoft because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.

What’s your point?

I’ve spent the last almost 30 years working in the Sage community with Sage Development Partners, Sage Solution Providers, Sage customers and even a fairly long stretch at Sage. I’ve seen my share of systems, integrations, work-arounds and plain brute force methods for managing a business. Some were developed out of necessity because of a lack of financial resources, some from the lack of finding a better way. The former is understandable, to a degree. The latter is not.

Let’s apply this line of thinking to the ever growing demand for online business. And let’s further narrow our focus to a business using Sage 300. Typically these will be small to medium sized businesses (SMBs). Most don’t have huge budgets but they do have discretionary funds for marketing and necessary IT investments.

Most of these businesses will have a web presence, either a typical marketing web site or even a web store. If they have a web store it is likely not integrated to Sage 300. In their defense, you don’t know what you don’t know, so when they went looking several years ago for a solution to sell online, integration was not the big driver that it is today. So for years they’ve had their employees do the tedious, mind-numbing, soul-destroying re-keying that gets their products and prices on their web stores and their web orders into Sage. Granted we’re not digging ditches here but this is mentally draining, frustrating work.

And what do you get with such pleasurable work?

• Mistakes in the form of incorrect pricing on the web.
• Mistakes in the form of incorrectly keyed orders into Sage.
• Lost revenue from orders that just didn’t make it in for fulfilment.

What does that mean for the business?

• Unhappy customers
• Lost revenue
• Lost customer loyalty
• Staff spending time on low value tasks
• Overall, lower profits

People are now, or are at least getting to be, a lot more educated before they embark on an ecommerce strategy. If we, as Sage 300 integrated ecommerce providers, do our jobs well, and we’re trying, businesses should be more keenly aware of the benefits of an ecommerce platform that’s integrated to their back office. You may have to wade through the noise that the big guys make, but if you take the time to do your research you’ll find the benefits are worth your effort. And you’ll be surprised that the cost is very competitive.

Pay now or pay later.

Yes, there is a cost to implement a Sage 300 integrated web store. Surprisingly, you will find it less expensive than some of the big names. Making an investment now can alleviate much of the pain and problems we discussed earlier.

But what about sticking with the status quo of keeping both systems updated manually? It doesn’t cost me anything.

If you’ve been paying attention, you know that’s not true. There is a cost of doing nothing.

How much does it cost to return and reship the correct product because of a rekeying error?

How much revenue is lost due to orders just not showing up?

How much time does it take for your staff to maintain your web store and manually rekey orders?

How could you make better use of your staff’s time rather than manually maintaining your web store and rekeying orders?

What is the cost of an unhappy or lost customer?

Can you scale your business with your current staff?

Put some numbers to those questions and you’ll see just how quickly you can recover an investment in a new, integrated solution and lay the groundwork for expansion without adding front end staff.

One customer’s experience.

So what does properly integration get you?

• No data is ever re-keyed, anywhere. No more errors.
• Data is either replicated or read live, on-demand, depending on the task at hand. No need to replicate your entire Sage data structure unnecessarily.
• Your Sage system is the primary source of data. “One version of the truth”. Easy reporting.
• Your Sage inventory items are automatically available on your web store, if you want them there. Connected, not disparate systems.
• All pricing models set up in Sage for specific customers are automatically reflected on the web store. Customers get their price.
• Orders, quotes, and payments are automatically posted to Sage. No errors.
• Integrated payment processing with full PCI compliance. No risk.
• Responsive design that works just as well on a phone as it does on a desktop computer. Your customers can shop from anywhere and on any device.
• A customer portal that allows your customers to self-manage their account. More time for your CS staff for meaningful customer engagement.
• A mobile sales portal that allows your staff to be productive wherever and whenever. Full access to customer data and your product catalogue to sell at your customers’ convenience, not yours.
• A tailored shopping experience that speaks to your customers about your products. Your brand identity and image. No templates.
• Lower operating costs, higher staff productivity, better customer service and loyalty, capacity to grow, more profit

So get lazy.

That brings us back to where we started. In my mind, the easy way to do a web store is to have it integrated.

• Sage is the primary source of data and any changes made there are automatically reflected on your web store.
• Your customers get what they ordered the first time and at the price you set for them.
• Your staff spend their time engaging in more meaningful interactions with customers to increase adoption of your web store and grow sales.
• Customer satisfaction and loyalty improve.
• Revenue and profits grow.

Is that lazy or just plain smart? You decide.

51% of all Americans prefer to shop online according to research done by Rose Leadem, freelance writer for Entrepreneur.com. And what we experience in our personal, consumer lives is spilling over into our business lives. Other research bears this out as well.

• Self-service usage increased from 67% in 2012 to 76% in 2014. (Forrester)
• 45% of companies offering web or mobile self-service have reported an increase in site traffic and a decrease in phone calls. (Destination CRM)
• 40% of customers prefer self-service to human contact. (Steven Van Belleghem)
• 90% of consumers now expect a brand or organization to offer a self-service customer support portal. (Fonolo)
• 60% of consumers view a brand with a mobile-responsive self-service option more favorably than one that doesn’t. (Fonolo)

So, as a wholesale distributor, if you accept the rising statics for the adoption of online purchasing by your customers, how do you give them what they are demanding?

When it comes to a business to a business (B2B) shopping experience, one size does not fit all. The typical business to consumer (B2C) model doesn’t fit. At least in most cases. The B2B market has interesting nuances that the B2C market doesn’t. And to be successful in your online endeavor, you need to address them to give your customers and prospective customers an experience that will keep them coming back to you as their preferred supplier.

Let’s take a close look at what makes a B2B site different.

1.    Integrated to Your Back Office

This is arguably the biggest consideration in developing a B2B web store. A properly integrated solution addresses a multitude of challenges that a non-integrated, or poorly integrated solution can’t. In a properly integrated solution there should be one point of maintenance for any data in the system.

Your back office should be the primary data source with any product, pricing, and customer data being made available to the web store in an automated process. Orders and payment should also flow automatically from the web to the accounting system for fulfilment. There will be no need to maintain 2 sets of data, one for your accounting system and one for the web. There will be no need to export, import, or manually key web orders into the accounting system. There will be one version of the truth that all systems operate from.

A properly integrated web store will minimize maintenance and reduce your overall cost of ownership.

2.    Customer Specific Experience

Typically a B2B web store will be gated so customers are required to enter their login credentials to gain access and buy. Those login credentials should provide the shopper with information that is specific to them.

Once a customer logs in, a properly integrated web store will provide an experience that is specific to them. That can include their pricing, the products that they are eligible to purchase, their credit terms, and, optionally, even a unique look, feel, and navigation.

Let’s say you are a supplier for both Coke & Pepsi, for example, and you have a web store where they can order supplies from you. Imagine the power of delivering a Pepsi experience to those customers with their product names and descriptions, Pepsi branding and messaging while delivering a different, Coke experience to Coca Cola customers; all from the same web site.

Those are just a few of the things that you can provide with a properly integrated B2B web store.

3.    In and Out Quick

One factor that you need to pay very close attention to is making it easy for your customers to buy from you. Make your site easy to navigate so they can place their orders quickly without having to navigate through multiple pages and endless menu structures to find what they’re looking for. As few mouse clicks as possible should be your focus.

Multiple Order Methods

Making it easy to do business with you may means providing multiple ways to place an order. A well designed web store should allow your customers to choose from different ordering methods. Here are a few examples:

• Private catalogs – Similar to a wish list, a private catalog allows your customers to create their own catalogs of frequently purchased products. So rather than navigating your entire product catalog they can go directly to the products that they want allowing them to get that order in quickly. You can provide a quick link from your home page so it’s easy to get to their catalog.
• Order from prior – In the B2B world many customers place orders to replenish their inventory. From week to week or month to month these orders can be very similar. Providing customers with the ability to recall a prior order and simply add it to their cart as a new order will speed up the replenishment process for them. A well designed and properly integrated system will provide current pricing and allow quantities to be adjusted in the shopping cart.
• Quick order pad – You can think of this as a web-based order entry form. Often your customers are familiar enough with your products that they can use a dynamic order form to place their orders. Having some sort of smart finder on the form will make this even easier. A smart finder will allow customers to enter any part of an item SKU or description (or other criteria like competitor part number) and bring up a list of available matches for the characters entered. Again, this is a quick and easy way to place an order and get back to work.
• Most frequently purchased items – This will allow your customer to view and purchase items from a list of what they purchased over a specific period sorted by the most commonly purchased items.

Of course you’ll want to expose them to other products and there are elegant ways to do this without a laborious navigation process. You can use features like Suggested Products or Customers Also Bought to highlight specific, related products. You can use a featured products section on your home page to highlight new products or products on special. There are a myriad of options to expose other products to customers that won’t hinder their task of getting that order in quickly and getting back to work.

4.    Customer Portal

In the B2B world there are more customer interactions than orders. You’ve got a potentially long history of dealings with your customers that could date back years. All that information is normally stored in your accounting system or other systems like a CRM system.

Increasingly, B2B customers are demanding the same experience they get in their personal lives, like those they experience on shopping platforms such as Amazon. They want to see their purchase history, access to past invoices, account standing, and even to pay outstanding invoices online, among other capabilities.

Once again, a properly integrated solution will provide this, and have the ability to serve up that data regardless of whether that transaction originated from the web store or not. If it’s in the back office systems, it should be available, if required, on a customer portal.

Having this capability will raise your profile as a technology savvy supplier who is easy to do business with.

5.    Sales Rep Portal

If you’ve got sales reps in the field, make showroom sales, do business at trade events or conferences, or any other activities where your sales staff need the ability to place orders on behalf of customers, then you may benefit from a sales rep portal.

Again, with a well-integrated solution your sales people can have access to all relevant customer information and process orders on their behalf. In a similar way that a customer portal provides account details to your customer, the same can be provided for your sales staff. Either complete details or some subset of that information will allow your staff to deal more effectively with your customers while they’re away from their desk.

5.5 Loyalty

This last one gets a .5 because it isn’t really a feature of an integrated ecommerce platform. Rather it’s a byproduct of that system.

What you’ll experience by providing the capabilities discussed here is that your customers become more “sticky” because it’s so easy to do business with you. You’ve put the power and control in their hands. That gives them the ability to do business with you on their schedule, not yours. And with the click of a mouse they can self-manage their business with you, when it’s convenient for them, 24/7.

So if you’ve started to explore your options for taking your business online or updating your tired old web site, be sure to consider the points discussed here. It will pay huge dividends.