Your business need a wholesale eCommerce
Part One in a helpful series of blog posts to make your wholesale eCommerce a success.
eCommerce has evolved to become the first place consumers looks for new ideas, new products and price checks. In the same way, today the internet is often the place your stockists and retailers turn to find about more about your product range.
Your website is a great place for information about your company. However your stockists, wholesalers and distributors need specialist product information and the prices, SKUs, offers, labelling and promotions specific to them. This information must remain private, only be accessible for the partner to which it is intended, and should certainly not be accessible to the public.
With wholesale eCommerce, you can give your stockists, stores, wholesalers and distributors the information they need, when they need it, in a private and secure way. Furthermore, they can place orders with you online when it’s convenient for them.
Defined simply:
‘A wholesale eCommerce site empowers producers and brands to share and collaborate on product information with their partners. It allows their partners to easily search, browse and collaborate on product information, place and track orders via a web browser.’
Objectives for wholesale eCommerce
Identifying the objectives of your wholesale eCommerce site is your first key task. This will allow you to create the business case.
- It’s important when planning your wholesale eCommerce site that you aim to develop a self-service platform. It needs to be easy for your employees to manage, update and control the product information your partners can access. The user experience for your partners should be simple with no training required, be fast and intuitive.
- Frequently wholesale eCommerce sites have slow user interfaces, unwieldy search results and are difficult to maintain. This results in information that is out of date, confuses and frustrates people who soon lose confidence in the wholesale eCommerce site. Usage falls away as people find a quicker and more accurate way to do things.
- A useful wholesale eCommerce site requires an appealing, easy to use user interface. It needs to be easy to integrate with external applications such as ERP and CRM systems. It must have appropriate security features. Documentation that provides help for people should be readily available. The features have to be easily maintained and upgraded.
Transform your business
A well planned wholesale eCommerce site can transform the way your company does business. It can certainly change the way you interact with your partners and positively impact your sales and marketing processes. The ‘long-tail’ economics of eCommerce can be applied which makes it easier to sell a broader product range to partners worldwide. This will result in measurable business savings, streamlined flows around sales and marketing efforts.
Wholesale eCommerce sites give producers and brands the power to collaborate with their partners. This enables both to collaborate to market and sell the products in new ways. However, to take advantage of these opportunities, it’s important to see the need to facilitate knowledge and information flows between producer and partners.
This is part One in a series by iStockist wholesale eCommerce.
2. Wholesale eCommerce – Preparing the business case
3. How to integrate wholesale eCommerce with your ERP
Any questions? Feel free to contact us.
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