E-COMMERCE SOLUTIONS
Increasing Adoption of E-commerce Solutions
In the consumer space, there have been dramatic shifts in buyer behavior with a strong move towards omni-channel experiences spanning physical stores, online, mobile, and social networks. A similar shift is happening in the B2B space as well, with more and more enterprises and mid-market B2B buyers moving towards online channels. Mid-market buyers are rising to meet this opportunity with the help of e-commerce solutions. Adopting an e-commerce solution drives significant benefits by helping businesses acquire new customers, improve their profitability, and increase customer satisfaction. Businesses can build e-commerce solutions directly using cloud services or by customizing cloud-based e-commerce platforms.
Success Factors
Some keys to a successful E-commerce solution are:
- A personalized, contextually relevant shopping experience that attracts, engages, and converts buyers.
- A flexible procurement and management experience that allows customers to track, analyze, and optimize their purchase behaviors.
- Diligent post-purchase follow-up using reviews, polls, and other mechanisms to build loyalty.
- Proactive, responsive, and attentive customer service to make users feel truly cared for.
- Flexible, low-friction billing, payment, and multi-channel fulfillment options.
- Rich insights and predictive intelligence about customer needs and behaviors.
Key Aspects
The main elements of an end-to-end E-commerce solution are indicated in the accompanying figure and described below.
Experiences
Responsive experiences provided across the web and device platforms comprising shopping including post-purchase, account management, and customer support.
Commerce Foundation Platform
The foundation platform provides core commerce capabilities such as account and subscription management, order management, fulfillment, billing, payment, and license management.
Store Catalog and Merchandising Systems
Systems which provide product sales and marketing capabilities such as structured product catalog display and management; flexible merchandising options using promotions, discounts, and campaigns; ad inventory management, targeted display, and conversion tracking.
Store Operational Systems
Systems which provide basic store management capabilities such as inventory management, back-office functions, business processes integration, accounts receivable, payments reconciliation, and so on.
Analytics & Machine Learning system
A cloud-based analytics system which processes the user telemetry to generate insights and intelligence that help enhance outcomes across the various experiences and systems.
Customer Support Systems
Systems that provide a variety of ways for customers to receive support including self-service options such as site functionality for common tasks and service requests as well as forums, to intelligent bots that provide a more interactive experience, and human-mediated options such as live chat and call centers.