Should you outsource your B2B ecommerce website?

Outsourcing your eCommerce website is not for everyone.

Some organizations have such unique requirements that it’s impossible for them to outsource their B2B eCommerce websites.  Some control oriented organizations have the illusion that if you do it yourself, you’re more in control.  Never entering into their decision making process is the reality that with added control comes additional responsibilities and costs.   Like anything else in life there are trade-offs and every situation is unique.

For those of you considering outsourcing your eCommerce website, here are the top seven reasons we think you should do so. The converse is also true, if these don’t apply to you, than we encourage you to charge forward on your own.

1. Time to value – Every day that passes where your Customer Service Representatives are handling phone calls, faxes and emails for routine orders you’re wasting money and human capital. What’s worse, it’s also preventing your CSRs from performing more important customer oriented activities like upselling, training and troubleshooting. If you are lucky enough to have a B2B website, but for whatever reason it isn’t connected to your SAP system, it’s costing you time and money to keep the two synchronized so that your customers at least have the impression of a real time integrated system.  Either way, if you’re tired of these inefficiencies and concomitant inferior customer service, then there is no faster way to solve this problem than to outsource to us. Guaranteed!

2. Personnel – Are you prepared to hire, train and sustain the web developers and designers, network and system administrators, security analysts, ABAP programmers, SD Functional Analysts, Business Analysts & Project Managers required to develop, integrate and maintain your B2B website?  Are you excited about the prospect of backfilling any one of them when they decide to take a better job elsewhere? If not than outsourcing to us should be quite appealing.

3. Cost – If time is money, than every day past 2 months that you are not in production, you are wasting your money. You are not only missing out on the value you could be providing your customers on a daily basis, but you’re tying up your cash to buy hardware, software and salaries that you could be investing elsewhere in your business.  Lastly, you’ll probably have to hire and retain at least one full time web developer to maintain your site over time.  If you’re looking for the lowest total cost of ownership, than outsourcing to us is definitely the answer.

4. Best of breed functionality – When you are responsible for dozens of B2B  implementations you get to see a lot of mistakes, a lot of interesting requirements and come up with a lot of great ideas. B2b2dot0 is dedicated to translating those decade long learnings into the best functionality possible. That’s not to say that we’ve learned all there is to learn about the B2B business. But, if you don’t want to reinvent the wheel, and would prefer to stand on the shoulders of all those that have come before you, than outsourcing to us is definitely the answer.

5. Lowest risk – Any time you engage an IT project, you are flirting with risk. Risks such as: technologies and designs that should have worked that don’t, key people that you’re counting on that leave the project, funding sources that were committed that dry up in a changing economy. The longer the project lasts, the more opportunities that risks have to
   make their presence known. If you’re more interested in reaping the rewards of your B2B project than exposing yourself as a target for IT projects risks, then outsourcing with us is definitely a great idea.

6. Project management – B2B website projects can be quite challenging to manage. They span multiple parts of your organization…Marketing, Customer Services, Sales, IT infrastructure, SAP Management, Operations (Fulfillment), Product Management etc.. They span multiple technologies each of which have their own language…SAP, networks and firewalls, application servers and web servers, web pages with html, css and javascript, databases and programming languages. They also leave the boundaries of your organization and directly impact your customers. If your past experiences of managing these sort of complicated projects leaves you less than excited about pushing this initiative forward, than outsourcing with us and leveraging our Agile Implementation Methodology is a great idea.

7. Focus – This isn’t the only project on your plate. No one in your organization has the luxury of dropping what they’re doing just to work on this project. Distractions are pervasive and all of them are seemingly legitimate. In fact, we’ve often observed that when the inevitable challenges surface on your B2B project, people seem to disappear to work on other priorities. We don’t have that luxury. We’re extremely focused. We do only one thing…help you succeed with your B2B eCommerce project…and we don’t succeed until you do. So, if you think your organization is easily distracted, and you really want to get this project into production as quickly as possible, than outsourcing with us is in your best interest.

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