Everyone loves a marketplace. That feeling of wandering around stalls and discovering new products is hard to beat. This is the same philosophy behind digital marketplaces, which are rapidly becoming key battlegrounds in the war for B2B success. First rising to prominence as B2C environments, digital marketplaces have now found their way into the B2B buying and selling space. Companies seeking to procure products or services for their business needs are finding incredible value in the choice, competitive pricing, and product discovery potential of digital marketplaces.
We’ve only got the one planet and it can be truly heart breaking to see it treated with such disdain by many governments and corners of industry. The relentless pursuit of profit above all other considerations has inarguably brought our ecosystem to the brink of collapse, with the evidence for this being writ large in the headlines on an almost daily basis. The science is conclusive – if humans fail to address the worst excesses of our climate impact, the planet future generations have to grow up on will be a far more inhospitable one than we enjoy right now. This means the onus must fall on governments and industry to clean up their act and take decisive action now.
Nobody wants to feel like they’ve "lost their head” in a situation, but the notion of headless commerce is one which is gaining increasing levels of traction within the B2B space. In this context, headless commerce refers to a method of doing business online where multiple stores can be created and managed without an all-in-one legacy application sitting at the center – maybe "heartless” commerce would be a more apt descriptor, but we fear that might send the wrong message.
Back in the distant past of 2018, the Harvard Business Review published a piece on how advanced data analytics were transforming B2B selling. Four years later, it would seem a suitable time to take a look at the state of play when it comes to advanced data analytics in the B2B ecommerce space and see if the industry has picked up the torch and ran with it, or let it fizzle out.
We’re all familiar with the B2C marketplace. However, as we are increasingly seeing B2B brands adopting the strategies of the B2C market, we are also witnessing a large number of buyers for businesses flock to a new generation of B2B marketplaces to purchase products for their organizations.
We hear customer journey mapping being bandied around B2C circles all the time. However, as the lines between B2B and B2C become ever more blurred, we are now seeing the concept being deployed on this side of the ecommerce fence as well.
Information is everywhere in the digital economy, and organizations want a good return on their investment in it. Data is so far-reaching that companies are starting to consider its actual monetary value..
Once primarily a vehicle for streamlining internal processes, digital transformation is assuming a different role in the B2B sector. Several trends are in turn facilitating this shift and creating new dynamics in an evolving market.
Digital transformation isn't the only thing driving the need for a change in culture and mindset at the enterprise level. Demographic factors have come into play as the job market sees an influx of Millennials into the industry and the imminent departure of baby boomers from the B2B sector.
The customer experience in B2B is very different from that of B2C - despite a convergence of expectations in recent years. In the B2B realm, pricing and contracts can change drastically from client to client - even from product to product - depending on the industry and whether products or services are made or delivered to order.