Blog

The Internet of Things is a concept that has been established for several years in the consciousness of B2C stores. Even the use of beacons allows you to generate a unique shopping experience, such as illuminated shelves to locate the item you are looking for in a stationary store. Offline is increasingly connected to online, and the Internet of Things (IoT) supports this phenomenon. The B2B sector is also increasingly looking at the Internet of Things.

More and more companies are selling products simultaneously in the B2B and B2C channels to increase sales and their market shares. Companies that produce goods or sell it in larger quantities can benefit from economies of scale and generate huge margins sold directly to consumers, not just to companies with a wholesale discount.

It’s not a secret that eCommerce is the basis of B2B strategy. From growing income to increased satisfaction and client’s loyalty, companies see a chance for growth thanks to digital channels.

Customer expectations are constantly growing, regardless of the industry in which the company operates. B2B companies must undergo digital transformation to stay on the market. If you do not offer a better web interface, mobile or conversational, your customers will look for a provider who does.

The time needed to find a product is a key variable of a well-designed B2B system. An effective search engine can and usually is a key factor for its proper operation. Through proper preparation should ensure easy and quick access to products for contractors. What factors influence the fact that the search engine fulfills its role?

There are some notable differences between B2B and B2C sales. The fundamental one is the number of transactions that platforms supporting individual solutions need to process. In the case of B2C, it is necessary to handle many small transactions and the purchasing process is usually much simpler. In the case of B2B transactions, their volume is usually much smaller, while the value of a single shopping cart exceeds the one that occurs in the B2C store significantly. Therefore, the purchase process and requirements are also different.

The B2B sector is growing dynamically like no other branch of e-commerce. More and more companies are considering transferring their B2B sales to the online world. Numerous benefits, such as lowering transaction costs, simple monitoring of buyers' activities or higher transparency of the sales process, influence the decision making. At this point, we are facing the choice of a SaaS platform, an Open Source or a dedicated platform. While SaaS platforms are quickly rejected, due to the low possibility of adapting to specific B2B processes, the decision weighs up to the end between open source platforms such as Magento and dedicated software. This article will try to explain why choosing a dedicated solution is a mistake.

The usability audit also called the UX audit or expert analysis is a comprehensive evaluation of the website for convenience of use and meeting the users’ requirements. The purpose of the audit is to check whether the website meets the actual needs of the target group in the best possible way, and which elements of the website can be improved.

In the case of B2B systems, sales are very often based on commercial relations between enterprises. B2B systems usually serve from several dozens to several hundred customers, performing cyclical orders. This is a significant difference compared to B2C systems that support thousands of clients with a relatively low value of a single transaction. The specificity of B2B sales requires a significant change in approach when implementing a sales platform in a company.

In the context of recent changes related to the introduction of the GDPR, there is a lot of talk about the need to ensure data security. This security should be important not only for people who leave their data but also, and perhaps above all, for those who collect and process this data. Those who do not genuinely care about security now have one more argument against each themselves. Beginning July 2018, Internet browsers such as Google Chrome, Safari, and Firefox mark sites that do not have an SSL certificate as not safe. In a nutshell, this means that every visitor will receive a message saying that the page being viewed is not secure. This is a change to the previous approach, which until now has distinguished between secure pages, in view of the fact that it was considered that the page's security is no longer a distinguishing feature, but should be a standard.

Pimcore, along with Akeneo, is one of the more frequently considered systems collecting product information in the case of e-commerce activities. The system's task is to collect all the data in one place and manage it in the most flexible way. Additionally, Pimcore also allows you to manage customer and supplier information broken down into the organizations and industries with which they are associated. What, however, decided that the popularity of the system is constantly growing?

PWA (Progressive Web App) is a solution that has emerged quite recently and immediately became a very hot e-commerce topic. It is commonly associated with the use of the largest and well-known global websites such as Alibaba, Forbes, Twitter or The Washington Post. Due to the fact that PWA allows for a significant increase in performance and scalability, its use is increasingly taken into account by medium and large online stores.

If you want to start a startup, but you do not have the required technological knowledge, you can find yourself in a situation where you will need to look for a partner working in the field of new technologies that will support the development of your startup. This is feasible, even the founders of Airbnb have created a company worth billions of dollars without coding skills.

Before starting the implementation, define the most important issues and bottlenecks as well as analyze the current situation, make sure you check what kind of problems occur in the flow of information with the infrastructure currently in use. The basis of implementation is always a specific goal, which most often is to improve the flow of information allowing for better data presentation and analysis. The ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) is not only a mechanism for data transfer - the range of its use is much wider. On one hand, the data exchange bus introduces some flexibility in data transferring between systems, on the other hand, it allows for organization and a proper segmentation. However, the most important factor is its correct and well thought out implementation, otherwise, it can cause high maintenance and modification costs. Therefore, the planning stage is the most important and shouldn’t be overlooked. The correct description of goals, range and the method of data exchange will later affect the functioning of all the enterprise’s systems.

Functional model of the project contains the beginning and the basic step of any further activities.  Many e-commerce companies has faced with the fact, that Clients do not require such a project, tough. Most of the Clients claim that creating the model provides additional and unnecessary costs which may be discarded from the pricelist.  Below You can see an example of functional model which Global4Net company has prepared for one of Our Customers.

According to recent eMarketer's forecasts, an online retail sales in the U.S. will grow by an average of 14% per year over the next four years, reaching a value of over 424.2 billion dollars in 2017. The largest increase will record clothing industry and electronics - respectively 17% and 15.3%.

Higher temperatures and Christmas break helped the UK's e-retailers to expand sales by as much as 16% more than last year- so, according to a report made by Capgemini and association Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG) and despite initial predictions IMRG of comes to the growth of 12%, the average annual growth rate in the UK can be as high as 15%. 

The global market for e-commerce continues to grow which isn’t  rather big surprise. If you wondered who leads the market in terms of volume per person, You may be interested with this article.

Increasing eCommerce competition

Services market for e-commerce has become in recent years very competitive. Continuously increasing barrier to entry, and at the same time a lot of undeveloped space functions, business niches. Similarly, the situation is on the market for e-commerce, resulting in increasing pressure for the results to support interactive agency. At the same time the process of achieving results is becoming increasingly complex, as a result of the multiplication of points of contact and integration success is determined more than ever. In this competition landscape of many service providers for e-commerce begins to compete on how far this market incidental: extended payment terms, lowers the price of services, adds freebies. In my opinion they do not succeed.

“Multichannel” isn’t new concept. In USA Multichannel existed since many yearshaving two forms: distribution by shops (offline) and distribution of shipping. Many companies in USA uses this type of selling and some are specialized only in the area of shipping.