Cloudcraze Alternatives

If you’re looking for a Cloudcraze alternative, this stat will might bug you. Cloudcraze reports a 94% Order Error Rate among B2B Leaders. That’s a lot of errors in your B2B orders!  Cloudcraze’s March 2016 survey of 340 marketing and IT professionals further suggests that “…nearly half (48 percent) admitting ordering mistakes happen regularly, if not always”.

Wow.

Actually, that’s not a big surprise to me at all.

When 20% of orders (as Cloudcraze suggests) are coming in by fax, and who knows how many more by email and EDI, you know you’re going to have beaucoup mistakes.

The scientist in me really cringes when I read the Cloudcraze study because they provide no insight into the sources of those errors.  Yet that doesn’t prevent them from blaming the “legacy systems such as Oracle, IBM, or SAP hybri$ who often result in rigid platforms that lack the customer-first approach that brands require today.”  Then they go on to suggest that a CRM integrated off-premise solution will solve all of your B2B eCommerce ills.

I wonder what kind of B2B eCommerce solution Cloudcraze offers?  Hmmm.  Can it be a CRM integrated off-premise solution?  I wonder?

As an aside, it cracks me up that Cloudcraze is positioning SAP hybri$ as a legacy system. Based on the increasing traffic to our website from hybri$ clients, that may be the one bit of truth in their study :-).

Let me shed a little light on those errors, and to make a long story short, integrating a standalone eCommerce system with your CRM (aka Salesforce.com) solution isn’t going to make them go away.  I wrote about this topic in my May 2014 post entitled “Secrets to Successful SAP B2B Order Processing? 3 F’s.“.  Here are the major types of order errors that we see:

• missing or invalid PO numbers
• unrecognized ShipTo location
• credit limits exceeded
• obsolete part numbers
• unrecognized part numbers
• minimum order quantities not adhered to
• invalid price

You want to make those errors disappear?  You can’t get there by making a prettier website.  Nor will making it mobile friendly solve the problem.  Knowing more about the customer’s history or purchasing preferences won’t move the error-fixing needle either.

In the B2B world it’s all about managing complex ordering processes that have complex business rules.

Looks like you need a Cloudcraze alternative.

So how do you get there from here?

The answer is simple.  Integrate with your SAP system in real time.  If your eCommerce system doesn’t integrate with SAP in real time you have two choices about how to deal with those errors:

1. duplicate and synchronize all of the business rules and data that are in SAP onto your eCommerce platform
2. live with those errors and staff up with enough CSRs to manage them manually

Option #1 even if it’s technically feasible, is what inflates the cost of implementing, and the ongoing support of, all eCommerce projects.

Option #2 is the most common “cause of death” on the death certificates of all of the eCommerce websites that we replace.

Cloudcraze’s misleading, and self-serving, recommendations of what’s required to produce an affordable and effective B2B eCommerce website in the SAP world is marketing drivel.

This was confirmed for me last week when I was in Germany facilitating a Corevist Project Initiation Workshop at the HQ of our newest client.  They happen to be one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies and our Executive Sponsor told me why they chose Corevist over the competition.  Cloudcraze was the leading contender (SAP hybri$ and Intershop were the other two on the short list) because of their “pretty user experience” and their “ability to integrate with Salesforce.com”.  However, Cloudcraze’s blatant disregard for the importance of SAP integration simply disqualified them from the running and forced our client to find a Cloudcraze alternative.

My message to Cloudcraze?  Thank you and keep up the good work.  You and hybri$ are turning out to be my best friends. We’ll go on offering the top alternative to Cloudcraze and hybri$—Corevist Commerce.

Corevist and Magento are happy to reap the seeds that you guys sow.

Onward!

Sam