Business to business E-commerce

Business to business E-commerce

Table of Contents

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In some ways, making products is easy, and selling items is hard. Not only do you need to convince people to buy them, but you also must ensure your pricing is accurate, that you keep track of inventory, and that order fulfillment is timely. All these functions require software that can allow you to multitask and drive customer experience.

Part of the challenge that most businesses face in selling their products is the huge amount of data that it consumes. Often, ordering is kept in one location while stock data is kept elsewhere, and the tools you need to ship items out to customers could be in a third. This is especially true if you have older software products or your business has outgrown its current solutions.

In this article, we will look at the software side of product sales. And although your business may sell some items to consumers, we will focus our attention on B2B product sales. By the end of our discussion, you will see that the better integrated her software is, the less error-prone your process will be, and the last back office work your staff will have to do. At the end of the day, the right software solution, properly applied, can save you a lot of money. As an added bonus, the customer experience will be much better, which can also increase your sales.

B2B eCommerce Integration: How It Works and Why You Need It

As we mentioned above, our focus right now is on B2B sales. Businesses behave a lot differently from consumers because they buy a lot of goods and services. In addition, there’s a lot more due diligence to ensure that what they buy is the right item. However, what’s more important here is their expectations in terms of contract management, fulfillment of their order, and payment terms.

In order to meet B2B customer expectations, it’s important to have your data in one place. That’s not to say that everything has to be in one computer program because that might make your process too cumbersome. However, communication is important in software, just as it is between members of your human team. With that in mind, let’s talk about B2B e-commerce integration.

What is a B2B eCommerce Integration?

A B2B e-commerce integration is a process whereby your e-commerce software is interfaced with other parts of your sales infrastructure. In particular, your B2B e-commerce solution should be able to communicate with your inventory, sales, marketing, and accounting software. This way, your staff does not need to manually keep track of every item in your warehouse. Likewise, they don’t need to worry about which payment methods are used or about sending out a bill manually. And in addition, sales and marketing get the information they need to plan.

Of course, this data integration should also include warehouse fulfillment. In other words, ideally, you want the B2B customer to place an online order and then have that order set directly to the warehouse. This reduces the level of delays and enhances customer experience. Remember, for a business customer, having predictability for fulfillment is an important part of their overall supply chain management.

Why should you do B2B eCommerce Integration?

The biggest reason that you should do B2B e-commerce integration is that you can process more orders more quickly and have your employees spend a lot less time doing paperwork. The biggest challenges that companies face include keeping track of every aspect of a customer’s order.

Think about this for a minute — when somebody places an order, whether it’s as a business or consumer, they must select the item including all options, the number of items, continue to do this for each item they want, and then go to shipping and payments. When they reach their carts, they must select or enter a shipping address, a billing address and designate a payment method.

If the company decides to pay with a purchasing card or a corporate credit card, then the transaction information goes to your processor and their bank for payment approval. Your accounting department will need a copy of the transaction so they can reconcile accounts later. For a purchase order, it gets a bit more complicated. The transaction will need to be reported to accounts receivable so they can bill your customer and log the payments.

Likewise, transaction information will have to go to your warehouse for fulfillment, including the purchase of shipping services to your customers’ delivery location. The items must also be taken out of your warehouse inventory, so it doesn’t get sold twice. And finally, sales and marketing need information about what customers are buying, who is buying them, and what quantities. This information helps you enhance your sales and marketing efforts to increase revenue further. You can even adjust pricing based on what customers are willing to pay or upon the demand of your item.

Keep in mind that without data integration, your staff will have to do much of this work manually. Manual work can range from transferring data from one system to another using flash drives, all the way to manually keying information from one place to another. Not only does this slow you down, but it costs a lot of money.

Benefits of B2B eCommerce Integration

For companies that do B2B sales, there can be a lot more benefits to integration than simply saving money and time. Not that these aren’t important, but they only scratch the surface of how you can maximize your B2B e-commerce platform through integration.

Here are some other benefits of having all your software programs talk to each other:

In other words, your business will be run much more efficiently with data integration in place. In addition, you’ll have fewer worries about reporting and other covenants violations because it will be much harder for your financial team to make mistakes.

Learn from real-world integrated eCommerce ERP examples to understand how to streamline your operations.

Challenges of B2B eCommerce Integration

Of course, like anything else in business, there are challenges to B2B e-commerce integrations. One of the biggest problems that B2B companies face is that computer systems tend to be more complex. In addition, these companies are more likely to use custom software and other proprietary items that are far different from the off-the-shelf B2C e-commerce solutions.

For example, B2C ordering is much simpler because there’s usually no option for purchase orders. Additionally, depending on the B2C business, other features like tax exemptions may be more limited. In other words, B2C ordering systems typically have less information stored in them that must be tracked.

Another concern is software compatibility. Software vendors can’t always make their solutions compatible with every system. This can sometimes be true even if every piece of software your company uses is an off-the-shelf SaaS or installed product.

Similarly, you and your team must decide which programs to integrate. For instance, it might make sense for your sales software to prepare shipping labels automatically. On the other hand, you might find that the shipping issue is too complicated for an automatic process. This can be especially cumbersome when there are significant supply-chain issues that impact the availability and price of shipping services.

Key Takeaways

Integrating your B2B e-commerce platform with other software at your company typically saves your firm a lot of time and money. In addition, you can enjoy more accurate reporting and better planning because there is less opportunity for data loss and reporting delays. You can even use this valuable data to integrate more dynamic and profitable pricing.

Unfortunately, integrating your company systems isn’t always trouble-free. Sometimes, you’ll find that the IT department needs to patch together an integration system or that you’ll need to change some of your software to make everything work better. However, the benefits of a high-quality integration are well worth the trouble for most companies.

Methods of B2B eCommerce Integration

It’s one thing to talk about the importance of integration and another to implement it. The first step toward implementing data integration is understanding your various options. Some of these options are simpler than others. In some cases, you can upload files from one piece of software to another, while others might require some coding to implement. With that in mind, let’s look at the different options and how they work.

Real-time (API)

Your first option is to integrate information in real-time. Typically, you would use an Application Programming Interface, or API for short. Many modern e-commerce solutions have some form of API already built in. For that matter, API integrations are a common feature of business software. ControlHub, for example, has API support for QuickBooks. This lets users know immediately when something was purchased, when the bill is due, and what the payment was for.

Using an API allows for effortless synchronization of data. For instance, when your customer buys something on your website, an API would tell your fulfillment provider, your accounting software, and your inventory management system. This would ensure that the warehouse knows an item has been sold and where to ship it, your accounting software to expect a payment from the bank, and your inventory on how many unsold units it has left.

Likewise, an API is one of the best safeguards against human error. While there’s still opportunity for trouble, such as when a customer cancels an order through your customer service line, the potential for error is minimized. Therefore, while an API isn’t always the best choice and is occasionally incompatible with certain software, it’s an increasingly popular method of integration.

Scheduled (SFTP or API)

Not all data needs to be synced simultaneously. And in some cases, batch processing is better than real-time processing. For example, merchants often need to do a process called “batching,” which sends credit card transactions to the processor so that the merchant can get paid. While it’s possible to batch transactions once a day or even once a week if your e-commerce site is busy, there’s a chance you’ll do it more often. Either way, the idea is that you’re not sending that information to your processor simultaneously.

Of course, batching credit cards is just one example. There might be other data sets that should be forwarded to the next application, or to a data processor, in groups. Programs can perform this bulk data transfer using an API. However, you can also do it through a different process called “Secure File Transfer Protocol,” also referred to as SFTP. Essentially, this is a form of file encryption that makes it safe to transfer information over the Internet. Therefore, if you have information that needs to be kept more secure, it might be smart to choose SFTP instead of an API.

Manual (CSV file upload)

Finally, you can use a CSV file to transfer information from one application to another. This is arguably the oldest form of integration because all you really needed to do was use a portable data storage device. And while the original data storage devices didn’t hold a lot of data, they were still effective for small tasks like moving a small number of files from one computer to the next in the pre-Internet era.

Now, of course, the manual transfer process is different. Certainly, there are situations where you will use a USB thumb drive or maybe an external hard drive to transfer data from one computer to another. You have a computer that doesn’t use the Internet and that runs a particular application.

More commonly, however, the CSV file will get moved from one place to another using the cloud. In this case, the file transfer would be manual and on demand. The trouble, of course, is that if your employee forgets to make the transfer and the destination application will be missing an important data set.

Key Takeaways

As with many other things in technology, there’s more than one way to accomplish integrations between one computer application and another. All methods have their advantages and disadvantages, and some are more difficult to use than others. You can almost always use a CSV to transfer data, but in many situations, this is a very clumsy method. On the other hand, using an API or SFTP is often more efficient. No matter what integration method you choose, however, it’s still far more efficient than the old-fashioned manual method of keying or copying information from one aspect of your business into another.

Tori Katz

- Content specialist

Tori has a deep expertise in procurement and digital transformation technologies within the hardware industry. Author of extensive guides on strategic procurement practices and technology implementations. Focuses on improving operational efficiency and strategic growth through content.