The Infor Storefront marketplace has been left in chaos with many customers very unsure of the future of Storefront, others even searching for a new platform.

As EasyAsk has always been the core engine powering Storefront, we’ve been working directly with increasing numbers of Storefront customers.  We have found there is a lot of room for improvement.

Additionally, almost all Storefront customers’ UX is obsolete and visually stuck in an outdated ‘aol.com’ time warp.

The September TUG webinar, focussed on the future of Storefront and how EasyAsk and mStorefront could significantly and immediately enhance a Storefront user’s experience.  Read the summary or watch the full recording.

At the November 12^th TUG webinar, we took a deeper dive into the capabilities and enhancements that you can expect from the partnership between EasyAsk and mStorefront.  With advanced Search, Analytics and Merchandising, as well as a thoroughly enhanced, responsive, modern and user-friendly front-end, plus a Mobile Smartphone UX, you can take your significant Storefront investment forward into the next decade.

We have created a Roadmap showing what you can expect from EasyAsk and mStorefront in 2020:

• A fresh, responsive design for your Storefront site, which will work equally well on all devices

• Enhanced scanner functionality

An internal sales team would be able to scan products to retrieve product information for customer orders, etc..  mStorefront now allows scanning via Bluetooth-enabled devices and smartphones.

• Single Sign-On Extension

The ability for mStorefront to integrate with any Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) based service will allow for logging users into the application based on their sessions in another context.

This is beneficial for account managers that need to utilize different applications including mStorefront to service their customer base.

• Continuous UI/UX enhancements

mStorefront creates a consistent brand across your content website and your customers’ shopping experience.  Your customers will feel like they’re underneath one roof, and no matter what platform they’re viewing from, they’ll see the same

branding and design.

• Integration with Content Management System (CMS)

This is a fully-fledged solution where mStorefront can integrate with Drupal CMS and give users the ability to control pre-determined content, create new content pages, enable blogs, as well as control headers, images, and other sections of a company’s main marketing site.  If your customers are shopping/browsing or navigating from page-to-page, they will always feel like they are on one integrated, responsive site.

• Enhanced Google Analytics

The following Google Analytics extensions will be added:

• Enhanced Google Analytics: giving you visibility of how customers interact with mStorefront, including understanding customers’ shopping behavior, product performance, among others.
• User session tracking: giving you visibility of how particular users shop the site and allowing you to analyze the signed-in user experience.
• Tag manager: giving you the ability to add and update your own tags for conversion tracking, site analytics, remarketing, and more.
• Ecommerce Analytics: tracking orders including order values, ordered products and more.

New EasyAsk features:

• Landing pages

An EasyAsk landing page is a set of products that the merchandising team wants to show customers, which are typically referenced by a specific URL. This URL could be referenced in email marketing or on another part of the site.

A landing page will contain products as well as banners and other content.  In EasyAsk Studio, it is possible to define which products and other content should be displayed on a new landing page very easily using natural language.

• Banners

A banner is visual content that can be triggered to be shown on predefined areas of any screen.  A banner might be an image, a video, a slider – or enter html into the definition to display anything required.  Banners can be triggered by a number of situations, such as:

• By the presence of a set of products. For example, if 50% or more of the products that a customer is looking at are tools, then you could show a banner for a tool brand that you’re currently promoting
• If a user views a certain set of products, or uses a certain category, you want to put a visual element at the top of that subcategory page
• By certain terminology used in a search. For example, if a customer uses the term ‘tool’, a banner could be displayed for a tool brand that you’re promoting

Combinations of these triggers allow any situation to be catered for.  The business user has comprehensive control. Banners can have a variety of associated actions, such as:

• Go to a URL
• Go to a product category or subcategory
• Do an attribute selection, e.g. brand = xyz, optionally qualified with a category
• Do a product search, optionally qualified with a category selection. For example, run a search for oil, but only within pump products
• No action – the banner is simply for information or aesthetics

• Messaging on EasyAsk driven Product Results Pages

Messaging on product results pages is used when users search and EasyAsk changes that search in some way in order to get better results.  It is an opportunity to show alternative products or searches when the original search may not find anything and to inform customers why this has happened.

Messaging can be used in the following instances:

• Spell correction, for example:

“sofaa” returned no results, so we’re showing you results for “sofa” instead.

• Out of stock products, for example:

“Gracey Recliner” returned no results, so we’re showing you results for “leather recliner” instead. The Gracey recliner is currently unavailable.

• Products not in the catalogue, for example:

Sorry, we don’t stock Canon, but Nikon are an excellent alternative.

• Part of the customer’s search has been relaxed, for example:

Sorry, we don’t have purple leather couches, but here are the leather couches we do have.

Messaging on product result pages is straightforward to set up and configure within EasyAsk Studio.  It allows merchandisers to drive a better shopping experience for their customers without relying on programmers to ‘code’ in order to explain to the searcher what they are seeing.  This can significantly reduce bounce rates.

• ‘No Results’ page content

EasyAsk allows you to control which suggested product sets and what messaging is displayed.  The ‘No Results page might contain one or more of the following:

• Show alternative products. This is an opportunity to promote specific products or groups of products.  You might display top sellers or campaign-related products, for example, summer specials.  Here is an example of promoted products from pmall.com:

• Make some search suggestions. The possibilities here for using the No Results page are numerous.  You could make some search suggestions that will return results using some of the words from the original search or suggest that the customer removes one or more filters from their search.  You could display the top trending searches made on the site (clickable).

• Invite the shopper to further action. Suggest that the shopper browses the site by category and direct them to where on the page they can do this.  You might display some clickable popular categories. Here is an example from timberland.com:

If you stock numerous brands, you might suggest popular brands or featured designers, or even just list all available brands.  It is also possible to display a ‘Still can’t find what you’re looking for?’ section, giving the opportunity for a chatbot to step in or providing a telephone number or email address.  The following pop-up was triggered from the No Results page, once again on timberland.com:

All of the above options for your ‘No Results’ page can be easily defined and controlled within EasyAsk Studio.

• Merchandising slots

A merchandising slot is a part of a screen, often on the home page, where merchandisers want to highlight certain products or sets of products, for example, own brand specials or this week’s offers. These product groupings can be defined using EasyAsk natural language rules and are completely dynamic.  For example, if a company had own-brand specials and had a rule that defines a merchandising slot to show these products, then any new own-brand products would automatically be included. This functionality is rule-based rather than product-based.

Alternatively, it is possible to specify a set of product IDs stipulated by the marketing team to be shown in a merchandising slot.  There are no limits to the number of supported merchandising slots; the front-end design dictates how much can be shown.

• Enhanced Search As You Type (SAYT)

SAYT is a very advanced autocomplete/type-ahead system that is designed to put the right products in front of the user at the earliest opportunity.  The latest EasyAsk SAYT system uses templates, making it very easy to change.  It includes features such as the ability to change how many products and suggested searches are displayed and whether to show relevant attributes.  EasyAsk provides multiple templates to choose from, or your business can define their own.

The above drop-down panel is displayed on pmall.com as a user begins to type their search.

We’d love to show you how we can easily transform your dated Storefront site into a cutting edge B2B eCommerce site without tying up valuable resources and potentially a $300,000+ investment by you to get there – get in touch with us to find out more.

The post 2020 Storefront Roadmap: How EasyAsk and mStorefront are working together to take your B2B business into the next decade appeared first on EasyAsk.

According to Forrester, B2B eCommerce in the U.S. will hit $1.2 trillion by 2021, seeing a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 7.4% over the next four years.  It is therefore essential that B2B businesses optimize the experience for their customers online.  B2B sites have typically been known as less usable, but it is time for them to catch up with B2C and make it really easy for customers to do business.  B2B eCommerce has unique complexities, which present unique challenges and therefore require a unique set of best practices.  We will explore these challenges in our B2B blog series and offer advice and solutions to ensure that your B2B site delivers a superior experience.

Bad Data is a Common Problem

Companies who are selling online are often using multiple vendors and a number of systems that tie together.  Information such as pricing and stock could be arriving from hundreds or even thousands of suppliers.  A large volume of data comes in to the ERP and it isn’t normalized.

No one ever said they had good data. The problem is common.

A successful eCommerce experience is reliant upon good data and an intelligent structure with a hierarchy of categories and attributes.  Often, when setting up an eCommerce search system, it crosses many different categories.  A copier might be in both office supplies and electronics categories.  Yet the attributes of a copier would be a lot different to those of a TV, for example.

If you find your data creates a barrier to the success of your business online, you’re not alone. We find this is a very common challenge among B2B companies.  We will discuss 2 problems that B2B companies frequently struggle with:

Inconsistency of Data

The same information can be listed differently by different suppliers.  Certain companies receive stock from various factories, who list the exact same products with different product numbers, color names or measurement units.

A large Paper and Janitorial Supplies company experienced this problem with the fragrance related to the cleaning products that they stocked.  Each manufacturer gave their fragrance a different name, so that each time they released a new fragrance, it was classified into a new system.

Lack of Data

Products may arrive in your system with little or no attribution.  Perhaps the color of guitars that a company sell can only be found in the product name.  Most search systems won’t be able to extract data based on the product name or a brief description.

So this is the problem, but what are the possible solutions?

B2B companies will usually have a Content Management System (CMS), but the data feeding the website can be messy.  One choice is to solve the data programmatically, which would get the data close, but relies on the data having the same attributes.

Another option is to fix the data manually by converting everything to the same structure. This option is labor intensive and time consuming and consequently costly and slow.

The Quickest Route to Good Data

EasyAsk’s search and merchandising solution can very easily give the tools to a merchandiser to catch all possibilities by normalizing data:

• Analytics give you insight and allow you to continually improve your data.  Taking a B2C example, the term ‘Petite’ would normally be related to women’s garments, but if a brand name called ‘Petite’ became part of your stock, the word would need to bring back a different set of products.  Words can be treated differently at different times, depending on the category.

• The AI-based Natural Language Processing allows the engine to take care of linguistic complexities, such as pluralities: women’s, lady, ladies, girls.

• Creating dynamic attributes allows you to mirror sections in a brick and mortar store.  In our B2C example, customers may be searching for a petite dress, but as the data comes from different sources, most products don’t have a ‘petite’ attribute.  It is possible to enhance the data and create a ‘Petite’ virtual category.

Normalizing Bad Data

The abilities described above are necessary in order to normalize inconsistent data.

Nasco, a B2B Education, Healthcare and Farm & Ranch supplier, found inconsistent data was hindering their online sales.  One of their liquid products was sold in 1 liter packs, but depending on where the data came from, the volume was described differently: 1L / 1Ltr / 1 litre / 1 liter.  EasyAsk were able to normalize the data (all to 1L) without the need to change every product.

Are you eCommerce ready?

As well as dealing with bad data as discussed above, if you implement the features we have covered in this B2B Series, we are confident that your customers will be happier.  They will be able to always find the right products, showing accurate pricing, ordering and delivery information.  They will have their B2C expectations of your online experience met and will have a growing confidence in your company.

So many B2B eCommerce sites aren’t providing what their buyers want, but overcoming the common challenges to B2B Ecommerce is possible with the right tools. 

EasyAsk Tools

EasyAsk offers the only site search and merchandising tool designed exclusively for the rigors and challenges of B2B eCommerce.  EasyAsk can be configured for any platform, either commercial or built in-house.  

EasyAsk has long served the B2B customer segment and over 200 B2B distributors have chosen us to power their B2B eCommerce sites, including: Aramark, Demco, Kaman Industries, Tacoma Screw, and Crown Packaging.

The post B2B Series Challenge 7: Dealing with Bad Data appeared first on EasyAsk.

The Price is Right

Pricing is a critical component of a B2B eCommerce site. There’s nothing more disastrous than a customer seeing the wrong price for a product. The emphasis should be on accuracy and processing speed.

It is common for B2B prices to be individualized based on factors such as contract, purchasing frequency, and volume. Sometimes bulk prices are displayed, grouped according to the number bought.

There are 2 main pricing situations that your search system will need to cater for. We will explore them and discover how best they can be handled:

1.    Price Groups

Rather than allocating individual prices for every customer, some businesses have levels or groups of prices, e.g. Level ‘A’ to ‘E’. Depending on the group level allocated to the customer, they’ll see one of a number of prices. In these situations, if the customer is identified, the search system can index all prices and decide whether to pass back, for example, the Level ‘A’, Level ‘B’ price. This situation works well when there are up to about 10 price levels.

2.    Dynamic Pricing

In this situation, every customer has negotiated prices, based on volume or contract etc. and the search system can’t know the price in advance. There are several ways in which a search system can handle dynamic pricing:

The search system indexes a standard price, and a message is displayed alongside the product on the search results page along the lines of:

“This is the standard price. For your pricing, view the product details.”

When the customer accesses the product details screen, the price for that particular customer is calculated and displayed. The advantage of this method is that price attribute filters, such as price sliders or selectors, can be displayed on the search results page, giving users the option to filter results based on the standard prices.

For each page of results, the ecommerce system calculates and retrieves the prices for the products that are going to be displayed on that page. Most sites only show one page at a time, approximately 10-12 products. Once the search system has passed back the product IDs, it can calculate the prices based on pricing rules, which can then be shown on the product results page. The search system uses a pricing engine to pass back appropriate prices. The disadvantage of this method is that any price attributes on the search results page become invalid.

An advanced, flexible search system can call a pricing engine as part of its process. This means that it can retrieve exact pricing before the attributes are calculated, passing back the correct pricing for each customer. This method allows for totally dynamic pricing. For every product in the results, a price is needed, which does mean that page load time can be affected. For on-premise B2B customers, this overhead would be reduced because the pricing engine will be running on the same internal network, or even the same server that the search system is running on.

Multiple Options

When displaying search results, there is sometimes the need for the price to be more than a single number. Sometimes a set of prices according to volume is required. The search system will need to be able to pass all prices back, perhaps displaying them in a table showing quantity vs price. Does your search system have the ability to pass back multiple prices?

Flexibility is the Answer

Every B2B business has differing needs, and it is essential that search systems are flexible to reflect this. EasyAsk can index multiple prices, calling out to a pricing engine if required, and pass back pricing structures in the results, as opposed to just a simple price. It may be that a business has a set of thresholds for discounts, or individualized pricing based on customer ID. EasyAsk adapts to all circumstances. This isn’t the case for all search systems.

Why Choose EasyAsk?

EasyAsk offers the only site search and merchandising tool designed exclusively for the rigors and challenges of B2B eCommerce. EasyAsk can be configured for any platform, either commercial or built in-house.

EasyAsk has long served the B2B customer segment and over 200 B2B distributors have chosen us to power their B2B eCommerce sites, including: Aramark, Demco, Kaman Industries, Tacoma Screw, and Crown Packaging.

The post B2B Series Challenge 4: Dynamic Pricing appeared first on EasyAsk.

According to Forrester, B2B eCommerce in the U.S. will hit $1.2 trillion by 2021, seeing a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 7.4% over the next four years. It is therefore essential that B2B businesses optimize the experience for their customers online. B2B sites have typically been known as less usable, but it is time for them to catch up with B2C and make it really easy for customers to do business. B2B eCommerce has unique complexities, which present unique challenges and therefore require a unique set of best practices. We will explore these challenges in our B2B blog series and offer advice and solutions to ensure that your B2B site delivers a superior experience.

Customer-Specific Catalogs

Providing customer-specific catalogs is a unique search requirement for B2B companies and can present unique challenges when it comes to eCommerce. But if it is done well, the personalized experience for your B2B customers will certainly pay dividends.

There are 4 possible situations that a B2B company may need to cater for:

1. The company has products that all customers can see and buy.
2. Certain customers are only authorized to buy from a particular range or category of products. When the customer searches, it is important that they can only view the products that are available for them to buy.
3. Similarly, the availability of products may be based on location. Customers in the North-East might only see products that are stocked in the North-East warehouse. Location of the stock also limits which products a customer should see.
4. There may be custom products produced by a company that are only available to one particular customer. For example, coffee companies need branded cups, so it is important that those custom products are in the supplier’s catalog, but cannot be purchased by anyone else.

Differing needs

Within a typical B2C system, the search system would search the entire catalog and show results, but in the above situations, the catalog indexing process needs to define who can buy which products so that the search system is able to present products in the results correctly. This can become very complex, which is why out-of-the-box search systems can’t handle it. EasyAsk provides a custom implementation for each customer so that any of the challenges described above can be handled.

A paper products manufacturer became an EasyAsk customer and now has certain products in their catalog that are marked with customer IDs, while other products are marked as being global. Their coffee store customer buys branded cups, so when they log in the customer ID is passed to EasyAsk, who pass back only the right products.

The implementation of customer-specific catalogs varies completely between B2B customers, so it isn’t possible to just use defined rules; the flexibility to support all different circumstances is necessary.

B2B Personalization

Being able to search and see personalized results based on pre-negotiated terms is imperative for your B2B customers. They should never see a product that isn’t available for them to buy. Your search system should be aware of product availability for any given customer. Is your search system up to this?

EasyAsk is up to the challenge

EasyAsk offers the only site search and merchandising tool designed exclusively for the rigors and challenges of B2B eCommerce. EasyAsk can be configured for any platform, either commercial or built in-house.

EasyAsk has long served the B2B customer segment and over 200 B2B distributors have chosen us to power their B2B eCommerce sites, including: Aramark, Demco, Kaman Industries, Tacoma Screw, and Crown Packaging.

The post B2B Series Challenge 3: Customer-Specific Catalogs appeared first on EasyAsk.

According to Forrester, B2B eCommerce in the U.S. will hit $1.2 trillion by 2021, seeing a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 7.4% over the next four years. It is therefore essential that B2B businesses optimize the experience for their customers online. B2B sites have typically been known as less usable, but it is time for them to catch up with B2C and make it really easy for customers to do business. B2B eCommerce has unique complexities, which present unique challenges and therefore require a unique set of best practices. We will explore these challenges in our B2B blog series and offer advice and solutions to ensure that your B2B site delivers a superior experience.

The complex world of part numbers

B2B shoppers are much more likely to search using specific product numbers. B2B product numbers can inherently be more complex and therefore be easily mistyped or forgotten. B2B product numbers often take the following forms:

• Groups of numbers, letters and other characters, such as hyphens and slashes
• Long numbers with some kind of structure, e.g. 123 4567 89

If your customers can’t find parts or part numbers on your eCommerce site, they will be calling your customer services, which is expensive to you and inconvenient for them. Worse still, they may take their business to your competitors.

Complex product numbers affect many businesses, but some more than others. Take print cartridges for example. It is important for customers to find the exact cartridges that are compatible with their printer. We used a print cartridge site to search for cartridges for a Kyocera Ecosys printer:

As you can see, the printer model numbers are made up of very similar combinations of letters and numbers. Scrolling through the list revealed 3 times this number of results.

A mechanic who needs a car part for a job the next day is probably not going to be the person typing the part number into a search box. Someone in the office will be asked to order the part, and when they can’t find the part due a slight error in the part number, they have to get on the phone to the supplier. This means it costs the car parts vendor more to service the customer.

The challenge for B2B eCommerce sites is clear, but what can be implemented to avoid the need for calls to a customer service line or using a competitor’s site?

EasyAsk’s ‘Begins Expander’

A ‘Begins Expander’ is EasyAsk functionality that attempts to predict the most common inaccuracies a ‘searcher’ will make when attempting a product number search using EasyAsk’s advanced autocomplete functionality. A Begins Expander can be set up for any field, but is most relevant for a part or product number field. It can be configured to start or finish on any number of characters and it will index the part number as the start parameter, then plus 1 character, then plus 2 characters, and so on until the end parameter. For example, if the product code is 1234567 with the parameters 3 and 7, the Begins Expander would index:

123

1234

12345

123456

1234567

This is an extremely effective technique as it is incredibly helpful to a searcher that doesn’t remember the entire product code, they can just start to type the beginning of the code and EasyAsk’s Search As You Type (SAYT)/autocomplete will show all possible product codes.

                         enasco.com begins to suggest product numbers after 2 characters are typed

EasyAsk’s ‘Part Number Expander’

A ‘Part Number Expander’ is especially useful for complex part numbers that include a combination of letters, numbers and other characters. A user might forget whether characters were separated by a hyphen or a slash, or might omit letters on the end. The Part Number Expander takes each part number and creates all the different versions of terms and inserts them into the searchable index so that if any of them are searched for, they will match to the product. The code is broken up into parts and the separators are substituted in all combinations. For example, if the part number is

123-HC/1345AB

the Part Number Expander would index:

123-HC-1345AB                                                                        123

123/HC/1345AB                                                                       123-HC

123/HC-1345AB                                                                        HC

123 HC 1345AB                                                                          1345

AB

amongst many other combinations.

If a customer types a part number that is slightly different (for example, using spaces instead of hyphens) the correct part will still be found.

Ecklerscorvette.com demonstrates how the Part Number Expander can avoid no results for customers:

The part number for this disc brake set is 25-261256-1. If a customer replaces the hyphens with spaces, the exact product is still returned.

We’ve got you covered

The 2 capabilities above are just a part of the EasyAsk experience. There is no effort to use them; no extra coding is needed because EasyAsk does it automatically. When your data is read the part numbers are broken up based on rules that are built internally. EasyAsk will scan the part or product numbers, and wherever they change from or to alphabetic or numeric, they will be treated as a separate part.

EasyAsk making all the difference

An EasyAsk customer recently encountered problems with product number variations and saw outstanding results when they implemented EasyAsk’s software:

EasyAsk was approached by a library and schools supplier who was a printed catalog business before launching online. Their web system only used the internal product codes, which were just numbers, whereas in the catalogs, each number had a 2-character prefix with a hyphen. So, if the internal product code was 1234, in the catalog it could be rx-1234, kb-1234, depending on the different catalogs that were issued throughout the year.

The company found that a teacher or librarian would look in the catalog, find the product they required, and then when they tried to find the product online, the search failed every time. Because the printed catalog didn’t match what was in the database, the user wouldn’t be able to find what they wanted, and so would call the helpdesk who would take the order over the phone.

When the company implemented EasyAsk software, they provided EasyAsk with their data, plus a list of catalog prefix and suffix codes for those printed catalogs that were in circulation. As part of the build process, EasyAsk indexed product numbers with and without prefixes and suffixes, and with and without hyphens. From the moment that the EasyAsk system went live, customers were able to find the products using the catalog codes and calls to the call center were reduced by half.

EasyAsk made a huge difference in this case, can your website do this?

B2B Experts

EasyAsk offers the only merchandising tool designed exclusively for the rigors and challenges of B2B eCommerce. EasyAsk can be configured for any platform, either commercial or built in-house.

EasyAsk has long served the B2B customer segment and over 200 B2B distributors have chosen us to power their B2B eCommerce sites, including: HD Supply, Aramark, Alphabroder, Demco, Kaman Industries, Tacoma Screw, and Crown Packaging.

The post B2B Series Challenge 2: Complex Part or Product Numbers appeared first on EasyAsk.

According to Forrester, B2B eCommerce in the U.S. will hit $1.2 trillion by 2021, seeing a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 7.4% over the next four years. It is therefore essential that businesses optimize the eCommerce experience for their customers. B2B sites have typically been known as less usable, but it is time for them to catch up with B2C and make it really easy for customers to do business. B2B eCommerce has unique complexities, which present unique challenges and therefore require a unique set of best practices. We will explore these challenges in our B2B blog series and offer advice and solutions to ensure that your B2B site delivers a superior experience.

Fast-track your Customers

B2B buyers typically know exactly what they want. Being able to find it quickly and without unnecessary clicks or searches is key. Your B2B buyers need to search and navigate your site easily so that they can find what they are looking for and get on with their day. Don’t forget that your B2B buyers are also B2C customers of other companies, and it’s likely that they are used to experiencing good product findability.

We can break product findability down into two main areas: Navigation and Search.

Navigation

B2B products can be complex, with a huge number of attributes, products and ways to buy. The manageability of navigation filters is important so that your business can quickly create new filters as products are changed or added. Make these filters visually attractive and easy to use, for example by creating sliders for numeric options.

Remember to adjust the number of attributes that are displayed according to how far down the navigation tree the buyer is. At a broad level of products, it would slow down the buyer to show the attributes for every single product. Limit this to broader attributes, such as brand and color. Depending on the user interface, we suggest showing 5 to 6 attributes. As the buyer progresses in their navigation, it becomes more important to show the detailed attributes.

EasyAsk’s search solution allows complete business user control over navigation, including:

• Category Management – The ability to restructure categories to better suit the needs of the buyer.
• Dynamic Attributes – The ability to create attribute groupings based on numeric data. For example, dynamic price groupings.
• Multi-Select Attributes – EasyAsk allows attributes to be multi-selectable or single select.

All of this functionality is under the control of the business user, not the IT department, which could take days or even weeks to implement. EasyAsk keeps your B2B site agile and current.

Search

Your B2B site search needs to be accurate and to understand the terms that your business uses. It should also allow any non-standard terms to be defined. The higher the number of products in your catalog, the greater the importance of Natural Language Processing (NLP). NLP is the ability to understand the different ways that people might describe the same product. Understanding the terminology of your users and the ability of your search engine to intuitively and instantly map that to the correct products is extremely important in B2B. Analytics are invaluable in showing how your users are interacting with your site, but are you able to implement any resulting changes rapidly and easily?

Does your site search implicitly understand prices, sizes, lengths and other weights and measures, allowing customers to search using alternative forms of input? Your site should enable your customers to buy how they want to, not how your search system dictates they should.

Of course, users may well be searching using complex part or product numbers rather than words on B2B sites. This can be an issue for regular site search engines and we will cover this challenge in our next blog post.

Search As You Type (SAYT), aka autocomplete/instant search, is a really useful tool for B2B buyers on your site. As a user is typing, the pop up can show the products that are most likely to be sought, for example recently searched or purchased products. It’s also a good idea to display the last searches that the user made even before SAYT kicks in. B2B buyers are often buying the same products repeatedly.

With all search results pages, it is important that your search engine only displays products that your customer is entitled to buy. We will explore customer-specific catalogs later on in this blog series.

The Power to Perform

Although B2B buyers interact in differing ways to B2C shoppers with your search and navigation, it’s equally, if not more important that your search system performs well when faced with the unique demands of B2B eCommerce. You need a powerful system to cope with that.

EasyAsk offers the only merchandising tool designed exclusively for the rigors and challenges of B2B eCommerce. EasyAsk can be configured for any platform, either commercial or built in-house.

EasyAsk has long served the B2B customer segment and over 200 B2B distributors have chosen us to power their B2B eCommerce sites, including: HD Supply, Aramark, Alphabroder, Demco, Kaman Industries, Tacoma Screw, and Crown Packaging.

The post B2B Series Challenge 1: Product Findability appeared first on EasyAsk.

B2B eCommerce: Benefits

B2B eCommerce has many benefits for any company looking to streamline their procedures, reduce costs and increase sales.

The rise in popularity of purchasing online means that the doors are open for your business to the national or international marketplace. Your business needs to be online, where the customers are. Your B2B customers are also B2C customers of someone else, and they are used to the B2C experience. They expect functionality and UX that mimics Amazon and the like. Use this to your advantage and take tips from B2C, such as increasing order value by offering cross-sells or up-sells.

B2B commerce traditionally happens through sales reps, catalogs and call centers. These routes to purchase are expensive compared with eCommerce. Providing a great experience to B2B customers online helps your business move away from spending time and money on processes that can be fully automated on an eCommerce site. The product information can still be extensive and accurate, with specification sheets, manuals, and diagrams being easy to view and download.

When a B2C customer searches for something on an eCommerce site, they will usually see a combination of what they’ve searched for and what the business wants them to see. B2B customers, on the other hand, will need to see what they’ve searched for, but also what they usually buy. In B2B, customers are buyers, not shoppers; they’re much less likely to be browsing. They’re likely to be repeat buyers and want the quickest route to the products they’re looking for. They may even just want to click a button to reorder last week’s purchase. For this reason, personalization is key in the B2B domain. Using historical buying and browsing data, it is possible to create a personalized buying experience. B2B eCommerce can create a streamlined ordering process for customers who know exactly what they want.

B2B eCommerce: Challenges

B2B products have a different set of characteristics to B2C products. These differences can present the following challenges that we will explore in more detail over the coming weeks:

Product ‘Findability’

A B2B company may have hundreds of thousands or even millions of products that are typically complex with lots of attributes and variants. It is therefore vital that your B2B site search solution is able to cope with these complexities and shorten the path to purchase.

We will explore how to use dynamic filters and advanced search capabilities to make sure that your customers can find what they’re looking for among the many products. We will also share how to make sure that your customers are only viewing products and prices that are relevant to them.

Complex part or catalog numbers

Many organizations struggle with multiple versions and formats of catalog numbers resulting in failed searches and lost revenue. We will discuss how to ensure that however a user searches – they find the correct product.

Customer-specific catalogs

B2B buyers expect catalogs to be customized based on negotiated product assortments, warehouse locations, and pricing. The last thing that a customer wants to see on your site is products that are not available to them. Personalization can significantly affect B2B online revenue.

Dynamic Pricing

Customized pricing is a challenge unique to B2B businesses. Prices are individualized based on factors such as contract, purchasing frequency, and volume. We will explore the ways in which complex B2B pricing can be handled in the context of search.

Omni-channel B2B

B2B customers will experience your company through different channels – call centers, eCommerce site, sales representatives. All of these channels should have the same information and your business should be able to have a single view of all customer activity.

With over 60% of B2B customer research happening on mobile devices, the ability to understand more verbose, natural language queries is paramount.

Managing the Relationship

There will always be B2B customers who simply want to reorder. A good eCommerce system allows you to maintain a list of regular order items and to use analytics to spot trends. Online B2B means that you have a closer view of customer activity, so that if there are any issues, or the customer simply hasn’t logged in for a while, you can make contact.

The Global Market

If your company intends to do business outside of the U.S. there are implications in terms of language, currency, and regulations. The EU regulations may be different for your products, for example, product or product labeling may need to be modified. Using a search solution that intuitively understands multiple languages and currencies is imperative in the global market.

Customer Acquisition

Although some techniques are transferable from B2C commerce, often B2B companies have a specific buyer group, meaning that their initial customer contact will be made through channels such as trade shows or sales representatives. Once customers are aware of your business, however, they are likely to try to find your company online to continue their research. Good content and S.E.O. is therefore just as important as for B2C sellers.

Are You Ready?

There are huge benefits in putting in place a strategy to drive B2B customers to your eCommerce site. But is your site capable of maintaining the relationship and even driving more revenue through excellent functionality? When asked to cite the top features or functions they would most like from suppliers in the selling process, most business buyers chose enhanced search functionality on their website (60%).

EasyAsk offers the only merchandising tool designed exclusively for the rigors and challenges of B2B eCommerce. EasyAsk can be configured for any platform, either commercial or built in-house.

EasyAsk has long served the B2B customer segment and over 200 B2B distributors have chosen us to power their B2B eCommerce sites, including: Aramark, Alphabroder, Demco, Kaman Industries, Tacoma Screw, and Crown Packaging.

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