Can your ecommerce platform adapt to the growing demands of digital commerce?

B2B segments are one of the fastest-growing areas for new and established companies. As B2B buyers created a higher demand for digital sales channels last year, many sellers were quick to respond and helped generate nearly $10 trillion in transactions—an almost 10% increase from 2019. Capturing your share of this market is crucial.

B2B buyers have recently come to expect more B2C-like customer experiences from vendors. According to McKinsey, more than three-quarters of B2B buyers and sellers say they now prefer digital self-serve and remote human engagement over face-to-face interactions, and the shift to digital and remote engagement is consistently being embraced by decision-makers.

It’s more important than ever to have powerful ecommerce solutions to keep up with these changing times and new digital shopping expectations. Beyond simply improving customer experience and increasing revenue, however, such transformations can also help companies avoid disruption to supply chains and sales processes.

While it’s critical to transform your business and respond to the shift in customer expectations, it can be challenging for many B2B organizations to adapt their legacy ecommerce systems to the growing demands of digital commerce. Some legacy platforms can actually slow business growth. They lack agility and scalability, can be expensive to operate and maintain, are becoming increasingly incompatible with evolving IT landscapes, and can prove difficult to customize and integrate. But tackling this challenge can actually be much easier than you think.

It’s all about customer experience

Zebra Technologies, a market leader in industry-tailored solutions that intelligently connect people, assets and data, saw the enormous potential in taking on a digital transformation to better personalize their customer journey. They had previously set forth a company-wide initiative to continuously improve customer experiences with their business, a need that was only heightened by the events of the past year. To support this effort, Zebra worked with Oracle and Tata Consultancy Services to help modernize its online product selection and configuration experience for its partners.

Leveraging our Business 4.0 thought leadership framework and deep domain knowledge of ecommerce, we designed and implemented a solution using the Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience (CX) applications, enabling a connected ecommerce platform and offering Zebra partners self-service capabilities, product recommendations, and region-specific catalogs.This solution gave Zebra the ability to customize offerings while providing a streamlined commerce stack, optimizing the total cost of ownership.

“TCS supported this strategic, collaborative project driven by our IT, Sales and Marketing teams to provide a differentiated experience for our partners as they grow their businesses with Zebra,” said Deepak Kaul, Chief Information Officer, Zebra Technologies. “We are excited that our new product selection and configuration tool, a key milestone in our digital transformation roadmap, is available to our partners.”

The TCS and Oracle advantage

A unified partner platform can deliver compelling value to a partner ecosystem while helping them accelerate their pace of innovation, promote distancing during B2B sales, and respond to changing market dynamics with the highest level of agility and flexibility.

Oracle Commerce can help you deploy a full spectrum of flexible, configurable, and unified B2B commerce solutions to achieve business agility and a faster time to market. It allows customers to become more efficient and globally-oriented, offers a rich set of RESTful APIs, and delivers on some of the primary capabilities for meeting the growing demands of digital commerce:

• A consistent and connected experience across all devices and touchpoints throughout the entire B2B shopping journey.
• Guidance and assistance for buyers when searching for products they need.
• A seamless, self-service online shopping experience with B2B functionality, including product configuration, dynamic pricing, and RFQ.
• An end-to-end integrated purchase flow across Commerce, CPQ, and Order Management on the cloud.

When paired with TCS’s B2B Omnichannel Transformation Solution, B2B merchants gain the agility to innovate on par with their B2C counterparts and transform their ecommerce user experience. Our collaboration can help you harness data-driven processes and enterprise-grade configuration capabilities and cover all  of the B2B commerce bases, including contract-based pricing, delegated administration, integration with new and existing components, omnichannel experience management, price optimization, quote management, and centralized operations management.

Are you ready for a transformation?

Our recent study, “Digital Readiness and COVID-19: Assessing the Impact,” found that companies with strong digital capabilities in place have faired better revenue-wise during the pandemic and are showing greater resilience. And those businesses that have lagged behind when it comes to digital initiatives are racing to catch up.

Is your business prepared to pivot to meet the growing demands of digital commerce? If not, it may be time to reassess and optimize your commerce solutions. The time for transformation is now. Are you ready?

Zebra Technolgies and Tata Consultancy Services are members of Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN).

To learn more about Tata Consultancy Services, visit our website.

To hear more about how Zebra Technologies optimized their customer and partner digital portal experience, watch the replay of the recent Oracle Advertsing and CX Virtual Summit, Manufacturing Insights: Enterprise Digital Transformation.