Three Ways B2B Commerce Will Fundamentally Change by 2025:

Commerce platforms drive digital transformation, and they must be adapted to the modern B2B customer. Delivering a highly customized commerce experience that meets the complex needs of B2B is a competitive differentiator today.

Customer expectations have drastically shifted and customers have come to expect high-value commerce business capabilities:

• Vast product catalogs with graphic content and product comparisons
• Frictionless ordering
• Ability to handle B2B complexity, such as integration with corporate procurement and ERP
• Support for business model changes, such as marketplaces with thirdparty products and direct to consumer engagement

IDC estimates that COVID-19 accelerated adoption of commerce technologies by three years. In 2021, we saw further acceleration, as B2B commerce shifted from a “nice to have” to a “must have” for B2B buyers.

Existing B2B commerce solutions have often been built around a customer journey that predates the iPhone.

Many existing platforms suffer from the following:

• Slow to implement and complex to maintain
• Not built for mobile
• Hard to comply with local requirements (VAT, taxation, privacy, e.g.,) and with external commerce hubs
• Limited support for today’s complex, disjointed, and non-linear purchasing path of business buyers
• Inability to augment core commerce capabilities with third-party leading-edge technologies, such as self-service bots, advanced personalization, and new payment methods
• Unfulfilled promises from technical microservices approaches, as opposed to pragmatic approaches with more attention to time-to-value of business capabilities

Over half of online B2C transactions occur over digital marketplaces. This number has been trending upward over the past five years.

Meanwhile, less than a quarter of B2B transactions occur over digital marketplaces.

B2Bs want to be a part of the marketplace movement but struggle to build the technology, people, and processes to power them.

Q. What are the top priorities for you from a digital commerce platform?

Supports both B2C and B2B commerce on a single platform

Supports ability to build a proprietary, multi-sided digital marketplace

Order management capabilities

Customer experience management capabilities

A strong personalization engine

Selling across third-party marketplaces (eg. Amazon, Alibaba, eBay)

IDC research shows that packaged business capabilities combined into meaningful business capabilities have strong advantages, such as:

• Facilitating rapid changes to individual modules within an application, enabling the delivery of quick application changes and updates
• Enabling finely grained scaling of application components as opposed to the monolith application’s requirement to scale the entire application
• Saving costs resulting from optimized resource consumption

“We have made many innovations to our business over the past year. We consider ourselves the market leader in innovations for full spectrum medical equipment.”

– SVP of IT, Siemens Healthineers

Case study

What did it build?

• Created a system that augments the B2B services carried out by its service engineers for medical equipment (over 10,000 employees)
• Injected digital commerce along the customer journey, including cross-sell and up-sell directly within doctors’ and nurses’ workflows on the machines used on a daily basis
• Plans to add commerce to B2C workflows in the future

What did it achieve?

• Replaced a legacy all-in-one commerce platform with a microservices-based system to more easily augment existing technology
• Constructed and implemented the system in under seven months

What did it use?

• Spryker Cloud Commerce OS
• Integrations with CPQ and configuration tools

Case study

What did it build?

• A mobile-friendly purchasing interface for mom-and-pop grocery micro-businesses in Mexico; these B2B companies often act like consumers
• Can support cash-based payment methods favored by their micro-business customers
• Constructed and launched a B2B commerce experience from scratch (no pre-existing digital commerce infrastructure) in seven months

What did it achieve?

• Achieved 2,000 transactions within a single month among 700 users, with plans to expand that to over 10,000 orders in a few months
• Plan not to cannibalize its traditional channels and instead leverage digital in places it does not already have a physical presence

What did it use?

• Spryker Cloud Commerce OS
• Glue API

Benefits of marketplaces for B2B buyers and sellers:

• Compelling, alternative digital revenue stream
• Enables direct customer relationships
• Wider product assortment
• Easier to browse
• Streamlined payments, fulfillment, customer service (fewer accounts)
• Greater geographic reach
• More competitive prices
• More information / transparency
• Lower capital expenditure for suppliers

“Last year we had revenue of a few million dollars on SourceEngine. Now we sell tens of millions of dollars annually. Our aspiration is to take all orders online on the website.”

– SVP of eCommerce, Sourceability