Content is king.

That’s the conclusion we’ve come to as we enter our fourth year of business at b2b2dot0.  Real time integration into SAP are the table stakes when deploying a B2B Webshop.

If you can’t provide contract pricing, real time inventory or shipping status without duplicating data and business rules that reside in SAP, you might as well not show up to the party.

With that said, the real differentiator seems to have become the ability to present relevant content during the ordering process.  Marketing departments have invested an immense amount of time producing product content (descriptions, photographs, brochures, manuals etc.) that they want to bring to bear during their customer’s order creation process.  Unfortunately, because of the disconnect between many Marketing departments and their IT organizations, content is usually relegated to “brochure status” on the corporate website.

Making it easy to learn about products, but difficult to purchase, doesn’t seem like a winning business strategy in…2011 (wow! how time flies!).

Integrating rich content into the ordering process was the overarching theme of many of our 2010 client specific customizations.  In addition, it seemed like every conversation we had with prospective customers also quickly turned to developing a content strategy.  It wasn’t rocket science to come to the conclusion that we not only had to extend our solution to embrace existing content solutions, but to provide our own for those companies that needed one.  That’s why we’ve architected Magento, “the World’s Fastest Growing ecommerce Platform”, into our b2b2dot0 solution.

Our design goal for the Magento integration was straightforward:

“Evolve Magento from a standalone ecommerce platform into a multichannel (B2B and B2C) SAP integrated ecommerce platform”

Amongst the more important use cases that are now supported in our version of Magento are:

1. Anonymous browsing – even your B2B users can (should) start their purchasing experience learning the latest about your company and products.
2. Credentialling – based on login id, authentication is either linked to SAP (B2B) or Magento (B2C)
3. Personalized catalogs – the same Magento catalog will display and behave differently depending on whether you are a B2B or B2C user.
4. Real time pricing and ATP – after B2B login, the ability to interrogate SAP from the catalog
5. SAP “One-time SoldTo” support – for B2C users who you don’t want to establish SAP Customer Master Records for.
6. Real time order confirmation – If you get a confirmation from SAP, you’re going to get your order!  (see Fry’s, Target and Buy.com Black Friday nightmare stories)

We’ve taken the industry’s leading open source ecommerce platform and integrated it with the industry’s only (and therefore best :-)) On Demand SAP Integrated B2B ecommerce solution.

The result?

If you are an SAP based manufacturer…the quickest/cheapest/safest to implement and most flexible Webshop solution in the market today…supporting all of your distribution models (B2B or B2C)… and leveraging all of your content investments (your platforms…catalogs, product selectors etc., or ours, Magento…or both).

Content is king.  Our SAP Integrated ecommerce platform is but a slave :-).

Sam

[want_more title=”Learn more” subtitle=”FREE Case study: 150% Sales Growth with Rich Content” description=”Learn how a leading flooring manufacturer more than doubled sales with a B2C-style catalog.” button_text=”Download Now” button_link=”/” button_class=”btn btn-primary mannington-ae” title2=”See it for yourself” subtitle2=”Talk to us” description2=”Curious what Corevist Commerce can do for you? Let us show you a personalized demo. You’ll see ecommerce with real-time SAP data.” button_text2=”Schedule Demo” button_link2=”https://www.corevist.com/demo/” button_class2=”demo-popup”]