Online shopping’s big moment came in 2020. According to Digital Commerce 360, online sales increased on B2B ecommerce sites by 10 percent, jumping more than $13 billion in the United States alone. To compete against behemoths, smaller sites required a profoundly good shopping experience – a fact that’s becoming only more relevant.
Brandon Garcia, founder of DSS Partners, was expecting this moment. His team and Coveo aligned to create a reliable solution for companies to either build or reshape their ecommerce experiences at the drop of a hat. DSS Partners built the Coveo for Intershop Quick Launch Integration, a complete ecommerce implementation, in just 8 weeks for newcomers and a lightning-fast 35 days for existing Intershop customers.
Managing all of a business’s essential ecommerce functionality, Intershop covers everything from sales channels to product information management. The ecommerce system gives users an end-to-end solution by connecting with customers, creating unique experiences, updating product information, and tracking orders.
With Intershop, those new to the ecommerce world can take on the more digitally-entrenched competition waiting for them. Garcia has seen it himself. His clients have increased customer satisfaction, process efficiencies, and overall profits just by bettering their digital presence.
In his mind, B2B companies are in a great position to exceed expectations online, and thanks to his work with Coveo, anyone can do it quickly.
B2B Advantages
“There’s features that you can add in B2B that B2C retailers often only dream of,” Garcia says. “You know your customer so well that you can make checking out much faster, plus you can offer features like reorder lists to decrease friction.”
Decreasing friction is pivotal in any sales experience but even more so online. It’s something Amazon has mastered. In fact, they accounted for a third of online purchases made in the United States last year – and this was due, in part, to their ability to remember shipping addresses, provide single clicks to checkout, and give recommended content to help increase basket size. The good news is that this is all information that B2B clients are more than happy to provide for a more efficient service.
“Just add items to a reorder list for the month, quarter, or year,” Garcia states. “Now they’re able to just quickly change quantities and boom, they’re done.”
In B2B, it’s much easier to predict your customers’ purchasing patterns and remove nearly all the transactional barriers as a result. “Product recommendations,” Garcia notes, “are the easiest thing for companies to implement right away. It’s why I recommend Coveo so proactively. It’s one of the biggest areas where the software helps out.”
And this help has its advantages. Delivering more seamless experiences with a relevance platform like Coveo provides quantifiable returns. “It really sells itself when customers see the metrics,” Garcia says.
The ROI of Relevance
Increases to average order values (AOV) and overall sales volume are just two of the easiest metrics to measure the success of any ecommerce upgrade, but as Garcia highlights with his customers at DSS, there are many additional ways it pays off.
AI-powered recommendations allow merchandisers to focus on more strategic activities versus time-intensive data maintenance, which has proven to have a significant effect on revenue generation. On average, their Intershop customers are seeing an increase in cross-sells and upsells of 29 percent.
That improvement alone is impressive, but it’s also met with a 24 percent increase in customer loyalty, meaning customers aren’t just buying more on a single occasion, they’re doing it again and again.
“We did a study,” Garcia begins, “and found the decrease in our customers’ returns averages 35 percent.”
“That’s real money,” he explains. “Think about the customer dissatisfaction and the shipping cost to get things back and forth. It’s likely to lose a sale. Perhaps they’re returning it because you screwed up, so now they’ve gone and bought it somewhere else.”
By making the customer experience more relevant, you’re also making your employees’ experiences more relevant too. Things become more seamless and the likelihood of error decreases.
“We see an average decrease in order errors of 22 percent,” Garcia notes. “Customer service is no longer retyping faxes or phone calls, hoping that your employees are reading and hearing people correctly. Customers can pay their invoices online via self-service, whether it be a card or a wire transfer or credit card or whatever. The benefits just go on and on and on.”
Adapting Quickly
The members of the DSS Partners team are experts at guiding clients through digital transformation processes. No matter the complexity of a company’s catalog or the total number of its SKUs, customers can get results quickly with the Coveo for Intershop Quick Launch Integration. They’re able to implement features like intelligent merchandising, AI-powered content recommendations, and automatic relevance tuning for an all-in-one solution.
“If you don’t provide accessibility for your customers,” Garcia outlines, “they will go find someone else that will. I think COVID helped to cement the fact that companies must make this investment. Many have put other high priority projects on the backburner to make this jump to being online.”
This jump online is essential to meeting customer expectations, and DSS Partners and Coveo set about helping to ensure that this can be done at a rapid pace. The only question that remains now is: what are you waiting for?
Dig Deeper
70 percent of B2B buyers prefer buying from a website rather than from a sales rep. Are you meeting your buyers’ expectations?
Read more about the importance (and difficulties) of achieving relevance and how the Coveo and DSS partnership can help you on your way.