That pressure stems from ARG’s role as a light custom-manufacturer as well as a distributor of more than 25,000 SKUs for  industrial hoses, fittings and related products for such industrial uses as oil rigs and fuel-delivery trucks. Most of its business involves replacing broken industrial hoses, and ARG’s sales and product teams often work with customers to assemble customized hose products and systems.

Mike Powers, director, ecommerce and digital, ARG Industrial

“You have to make sure that you’re getting the right data from your suppliers, and also that you’re presenting the right data on these assemblies to your customers,” says Mike Powers, ARG’s director of ecommerce and digital. Ship a hose assembly with the wrong specifications, and the customer could experience severe problems, he adds.

ARG B2B digital commerce sales

ARG is working with the the Industrial Distributor Cooperative (IDCO) buying group and product information management (PIM) and other software from digital commerce technology vendor Unilog to expedite how it receives product data from Midland and other critical suppliers.

Ross Baker, director of product strategy, Midland Industries

“It’s the way of the future,” says Ross Baker, Midland’s director of product strategy. “The more distributors that are pulling this data we’re putting into the PIM, the more chances there are for sales to increase on both sides.”

Powers asserts that companies involved in ecommerce face challenges in pulling data from legacy enterprise resource planning systems and integrating that data with a customer-facing ecommerce site.

“They’re realizing that the complexity of integrating legacy ERP and B2B ecommerce is very, very tough,” Powers says. He adds that companies then often find it difficult to find the people with the necessary expertise to work with legacy ERP systems.”

Working with Unilog and IDCO, ARG receives more consistent and helpful product information from Midland and other suppliers.

Midland is now pushing new product updates quickly to ARG, “instead of us waiting 12 months to get a new catalog,” Powers says. “All we need to do is log in.”

Data collaboration results

He says the much-improved product data flow is producing several results, including:

• Increased web traffic through improved keywords and search engine optimization.
• A more useful site search tool and increased sales of newly released products.
• ARG’s enhanced ability to develop a new configurator that lets customers who want to build their own hose assemblies to order an accurate product set.
• ARG’s enhanced ability to provide punchout catalogs that let buyers punch out from their procurement software to an ARG product catalog.

Baker adds that Midland expects to extend the level of product data-sharing it does with ARG to more companies to foster increased revenue for both Midland and its channel partners.

The Cashing in with Digital Channel Partners report is available for a free download.

Paul Demery is a Digital Commerce 360 contributing editor covering B2B digital commerce technology and strategy. paul@digitalcommerce360.com.

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Bachir Kassir, founder, MyTradeZone.com

“We know that 40% of B2B marketing budgets are spent on trade shows and that over 95% of marketers use social media content in their campaigns,” he says in his promotional material, adding: “So why is there no social network specifically dedicated to B2B trade?”

That’s where MyTradeZone fills the gap in B2B commerce, he adds.

“On MyTradeZone, each business can both market its products/services and source what it needs, all within the same platform,” he says.

Kassir notes that he founded and launched the site quietly several years ago, building a base of about 50,000 users through word-of-mouth.

A toolset with CRM and email marketing

But he recently publicized MyTradeZone’s official launch in a press release and is considering taking on investment partners to spur growth. He adds that he expects the site to begin generating revenue in the first quarter of next year.

MyTradeZone.com provides built-in features ranging from site search, product listings, and online video chats to email marketing and CRM software applications to help buyers and sellers find and build business relationships with particular types of trading partners.

It offers limited access to these features at no charge under its basic membership plan. Premium plans will provide the same features and higher site search rankings for monthly fees from $20 to $50 based on the volume of activity.

In addition, the top premium plan will let participants earn fees from online ads placed on the social network site. MyTradeZone will take a cut of those ad fees.

MyTradeZone.com does not operate as a conventional ecommerce marketplace hosting product and services sales transactions among participating buyers and sellers, who complete those transactions outside the networking site. But it will let users monetize business communities, such as by setting up industry organizations and charging membership fees through the Stripe online payments system. In that case, MyTradeZone will charge a fee based on a percentage of the membership fees.

Kassir says MyTradeZone has been gaining about 100 members daily — a figure he wants to grow to about 1,000.

To get there, he says he’ll continue to invest in “lots of business tools” available to members and offer premium membership deals to trade shows, business networking groups and trade associations. He adds that while he has mostly self-funded MyTradeZone, he may consider outside investors.

Paul Demery is a Digital Commerce 360 contributing editor covering B2B digital commerce technology and strategy. paul@digitalcommerce360.com.

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“While there are many short-term opportunities for experimentation with generative AI, businesses need to think about the long-game when experimenting with the technology,” says Chuck Gahun, a principal analyst for Forrester and lead author of the report. “Generative AI is about making value delivery systems more efficient for businesses to impact business outcomes such as efficiency, worker productivity, profitability, and top-line revenue growth.”

Forrester Research study on generative AI

Forrester, which interviewed more than 25 business executives, data scientists, and content management team members, defines generative AI as a set of technologies and techniques that leverage large amounts of data, including large language models, to generate new content such as text, images, video, audio, and code.

Businesses are already adapting generative AI at a rapid pace. 50% of participants polled during a webinar use the technology on a daily basis in an experimental or incidental usage capacity, according to the report. Of those respondents, some 71% were likely to leverage generative AI for content and product information creation use cases. Meanwhile, just 14% use the technology for creative expression or code-based use cases.

Content generation and finding the right tone and voice of copy is a common use case for B2B marketers implementing generative AI. It can help businesses meet the complex content challenges across writers, languages and cultures. Lloyds Banking Group in the United Kingdom, for example, uses Acrolinx to find the right tone and voice for 13 brands. Acrolinx is an AI-powered software platform that improves the effectiveness and consistency of enterprise content.

“We discuss tone and voice standards to teach the tool, such as using the word ‘select’ instead of ‘click’ and following overall design standards [in conjunction with tone and voice],” Chris Whitwam, senior product owner for Lloyds, says in the report. “This is a new learning process for our teams, but they are getting used to managing the tool as it suggests alternatives [and helps reduce the risk of inconsistent content].”

The human element of AI

While the use of generative AI helps expedite copywriting, more time is needed for human copy editing of the AI enhanced copy because of the risk of errors, according to Gahun. Such errors can include using words in the wrong context or poor language translations.

“As generative AI gets put into place, one of the challenges facing businesses is what to do with copywriters as they can become displaced by the technology as it learns,” Gahun says. “One option is to turn copywriters into copy editors.”

Generative AI use cases

Opportunities also exist for B2B marketers using generative AI to personalize content using behavioral data. For example, the technology can create product descriptions that fit the interests of a specific customer segment. As a result, businesses can generate more intelligent product descriptions across multiple layers of the customer base.

Translating copy into new different language to support geographic expansion is another use case for generative AI, although it is in the intermediate stage of experimentation.

“Generative AI capabilities are quickly accelerating beyond traditional translation plug-ins, such as Google Translate, to keep pace with professional translation services that have been providing these services for decades. This reduces the risk of inaccurate translations and simplifies expanding a business geographically,” the report says.

Uploading data into a product information solution is an emerging use case for generative AI as today’s solutions require businesses to map the data provided by the supplier into a predetermined format. This can be a time-consuming task that is prone to error when done manually.

fonQ, a Netherlands-based home décor retail, is using ChatGPT to onboard products. ChatGPT, from consortium OpenAI, is an AI-based chatbot that uses natural language processing to create humanlike conversational. The technology is enabling each of the company’s content specialist to onboard 100 products a week, compared to 30 to 35 per week manually.

“Manually uploading products to a PIM requires a lot of human brain power and time,” Gahun says. “Generative AI speeds the onboarding of suppliers and products, can show where there is broken product content, and can enable sellers to expand their product catalog. If sellers have more products, they can increase sales.”

B2B marketers using generative AI

Business applications for generative AI still in the early stages of experimentation include using the technology for creative tasks, such as producing product videos. While generative AI can embed previously approved brand assets within newly generated image backdrops to help enterprises reconcile creative quality with scale and speed to market, one shortcoming of using the technology for creative tasks is that it cannot yet create images. That is especially important for businesses to keep in mind when it comes to using generative AI for the development of brand assets.

“Brands tend to be careful about their brand assets,” Gahun says. “And while generative AI can help content creators stitch together images, it can’t create images from scratch, which raises concerns about its impact on brand assets.”

A word of caution concerning AI

As the potential use cases for generative AI expand, Gahun stresses that businesses need to thoroughly evaluate the speed at which their organization should move from experimentation to implementation of the technology.

“Business context influences which generative AI use cases are most valuable, which is why businesses need to be thinking about what implementation of the technology means to their business,” Gahun says.

Factors such as industry, geography, strategy, client base, and values, can influence the business context, Gahun adds. Forrester interviewed one company that applied generative AI for use on managing one product sold through one sales channel in one in geographic area for six months to see understand the impact of the technology on its operations.

“This was a way for the company to put the risk around the technology into the context of its business,” Gahun. “Companies that research and identify the risks around adding a new technology such as generative AI into their operations can think through their appetite for piloting the technology, then scaling the technology on a trajectory that is healthy for their business. The goal is to be methodical and put more structure around the potential impact the technology can have on the business.”

Peter Lucas is a Digital Commerce 360 contributing editor covering B2B digital commerce technology and strategy.

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The new Digital Commerce 360 report, “B2B Ecommerce Handbook: Formulas for Digital Growth,” lays out many of the steps businesses are taking, from identifying customer needs to managing useful product and customer data and providing a user-friendly, personalized buying experience — and growth in sales to boot.

Case studies in the B2B Ecommerce Handbook

Enzo Rabante, head of digital solutions, Dayco

At Dayco, an international engine parts manufacturer for various industries, “Our customers expect a personalized journey that generates value at each touchpoint, enhancing the brand in every line of business,” Enzo Rabante, head of digital solutions, says in the report.

To reach that point, Dayco gathered specifics on what its distributor customers wanted in an online buying experience, including quick access to product pages and related technical documents. It also determined the kind of customer experience it needed to provide and laid out the key performance indicators it wanted to reach, such as increased conversion rates for marketing campaigns and levels of customer loyalty.

Fine-tuning the B2B marketplace model

Also featured in the report are fast-growing chemicals marketplace ChemDirect and GearSource, a live-events gear supplier.

Dave Haase, president, ChemDirect

As B2B marketplaces expand in number and volume to serve every industry, the companies building and operating them are perfecting their strategies.

ChemDirect, a marketplace for the chemicals industry, last year expanded its catalog to more than 500,000 specialty chemical products. It’s on course this year to triple gross merchandise value to between $40 million and $50 million.

President Dave Haase notes that ChemDirect is backing that growth by addressing two critical needs of chemicals industry buyers: pricing transparency and, through a shipping network developed with trucking company Schneider National, more control over their shipping.

Marcel Fairbairn, founder and CEO, GearSource

If you’ve viewed a Super Bowl half-time show recently, you’ve seen the kind of results provided by GearSource.com, a supplier of lighting, audio and related equipment for live events and clients like Google and Apple.

Recent plans to tap expanded growth opportunities led GearSource to replace its long-running legacy ecommerce platform with a new one capable of handling transactions of complex orders, many of which involved multiple currencies.

Founder and CEO Marcel Fairbairn says the new platform gives GearSource the necessary speed and flexibility to grow and keep its customers’ events on stage and under the lights.

The B2B Ecommerce Handbook: Formulas for Digital Growth report is available for a free download.

Dave Haase, president of ChemDirect, will speak B2B marketplace strategy at Digital Commerce 360’s EnvisionB2B 2023 Conference & Exhibition in June in Chicago.

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Kathleen Lewarchick

“Visual commerce,” or online buying that uses 360-degree image views, interactive 3D models, and in some cases, augmented reality, has made the jump to B2B ecommerce. Introduced by the gaming world, visual commerce became more mainstream when B2C brands began offering enhanced visual experiences. Think eyewear retailing, where consumers “try on” frames, or furniture buying, where buyers preview products in their virtual home. It was only a matter of time before those experiences appeared in B2B.

How visual commerce helps B2B buyers

Buyers look for clarity as they step through an online customer journey. Ordering and reordering can be straightforward, but increasingly distributors and manufacturers have turned to “solution selling” of interconnected products using a visual approach. Buyers appreciate seeing a more fully integrated list of materials. It removes the guesswork and saves time. Sometimes it even saves them money.

In some categories, visual commerce provides wholesalers (and even their consumers) with engaging experiences. It might be a virtual showroom with curated collections that support full online buying. Other times it is a mixed-use tool, a digital assist: buyers peruse fixtures and materials in a real showroom and place items in an online cart, on a device, as they shop. This can save buyers time and it can be a wonderful way to cross-sell them throughout the customer journey.

New technology tools

One tool — exploded-view diagrams, or schematics showing parts together — was a mainstay for engineers. But they are more common now throughout B2B ecommerce.  Buyers can now see the entire solution, both holistically and individually, and order with them. Per the parts diagram below, the exploded view integrates with the order management system. See a part that you need? Check. See the whole solution? Check, check. In either case, just click and place it in the cart.

An exploded-view diagram, which is becoming more common in B2B ecommerce, lets buyers view and click to buy individual parts of complex equipment.

One B2B company incorporated this technology into their user experience flow. The goal was twofold:

1. to make it easier for B2B sellers in their organization to explain larger, integrated solutions; and
2. to make it easier for their customers, B2B procurement teams, to visualize the outcome.

By creating an integrated visual tied to the company’s order management system, they reduced steps in the customer journey. As the ecommerce manager says, “There’s a wonderful moment when buyers say: ‘Aha! I see how it all works.’ We want to delight and relieve buyers during the process.”

While not all B2B categories are a match for transactional visual commerce, other augmented reality tools are on the cusp of changing the way that overall B2B business performs. Again, driven by experiences in gaming, buyers like MRO (maintenance, repair and operations) engineers can now don A/R headgear or use tablets to “see” solutions in their natural environment.  As a result, they may uncover potential barriers earlier in the buying process, maybe even prior to ordering. This accelerates the knowledge build and helps save time and money with returns.

MRO engineers use visual commerce to view products in their natural environment before placing an order.

Preparing for the future

Visual commerce may never fully replace traditional ecommerce, just as “voice commerce” hasn’t become the dominant way to place B2B orders yet. However, visual commerce will continue to be incorporated into many facets of B2B digital commerce given the appetite that online users have for strong visuals. A great place for your organization to start is with a strategic discussion about use cases. These provide the foundation alongside good product data, and with technologies like Digital Asset Management systems, you evolve toward the Visual Commerce experiences that your customers increasingly expect.

About the author

Kathleen Leigh Lewarchick is the VP of Marketing for Xngage LLC, a B2B digital commerce services company with more than 60 clients across the industrial trades. She is the former PURELL® Hand Sanitizer Brand Director, has co-created automated replenishment products with Amazon Business, and created telehealth solutions for a company that she later helped sell to CVS Health. 

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But how they use these channels are in contrast between the ages groups, says a new report from Forrester Research.

“Forrester’s research shows that younger buyers bring those behaviors and attitudes to B2B buying, and are more likely to use digital and self-serve transaction channels than their older counterparts,” the report says.

Younger buyers use digital channels more

Millennial and Generation Z buyers are much more digital in their channel usage than their older counterparts. For example, 35% of younger buyers say they will use an enterprise app to make corporate purchases. 24% of older B2B buyers prefer placing orders with an inside sales representative. That compares with just 19% of Millennial and Generation Z buyers.

“Across all phases of the buyer’s journey, older buyers most frequently identified in-person vendor sales interactions, peer conversations, and visiting vendor websites as the most meaningful or impactful sources of information,” the Forrester report says. “Two of these three information sources represent vendor-owned interaction types. But no vendor-owned interactions were selected at the same frequency by younger buyers.”

“Generational shifts in the workplace are turning the business buying process on its head,” says Amy Hayes, vice president and research director at Forrester. “Lack of understanding about millennial and Gen Z buying behaviors can adversely affect providers’ ability to reach, engage, and ultimately win these buyers over.”

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Millennial refers to people born between 1981 and 1996. Gen Z refers to those born between 1996 and 2012.

Amy Hayes, vice president and research director, Forrester Research

“Generational shifts in the workplace are turning the business buying process on its head,” says Amy Hayes, vice president and research director at Forrester. “Lack of understanding about millennial and Gen Z buying behaviors can adversely affect providers’ ability to reach, engage, and ultimately win these buyers over.”

Millennials and Gen Z zoomers constitute 64% of business buyers. Furthermore, millennials make up more than half of all business buyers, Forrester says.

“These younger buyers are more demanding, engaging in more buying activities, and more willing to express their dissatisfaction with the buying process,” Forrester says. “These changing buying behaviors, combined with continued economic uncertainty and tighter budgets, necessitate that sales and marketing leaders adapt their go-to-market strategies.”

Millennial and Gen Z B2B buyers also have high standards for engaging and purchasing online from sellers

• Younger buyers carry new demands and expectations for B2B buying. Forrester predicts that in two years, more than a third of millennial and Gen Z business buyers will purchase through self-guided digital channels. Those include vendor websites, marketplaces, app stores, or directly from an existing product.
• Millennials and Gen Z B2B buyers are active information seekers. Younger buyers go to more sources and find third-party resources more impactful than vendor resources.
• This group is quicker to express dissatisfaction with the buying experience. 90% of younger buyers cite dissatisfaction with their vendor in at least one area compared to 71% of older buyers.

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Arjun Narayan

According to Business of Apps, “Amazon is by far the largest store in the world, with nearly 200 million customers accessing its website each month” — so  it’s only natural to want your product to be displayed in front of all of these potential customers. To give your business a fighting chance, Amazon offers Advertising and Promotions that you can offer to future customers. So how do you decide which is the right fit for your business?

Because they are time-sensitive and foster a sense of urgency, discounts may be an effective tactic. Offering discounts or promotions is not a way to cheapen your goods; instead, consider them a great advertisement! We recommend discounting the best-selling items in your subcategory to see how crucial pricing is to your customers’ purchasing decisions in that market. The next step is determining which days you want to provide them. To get rid of your surplus inventory, discounting  may be seasonal, on sale days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Prime Days, or it may be based on consumer patterns you find on your Brand Analytics dashboard.

Your Amazon business may develop significantly if you utilize discounts wisely in conjunction with Amazon Advertising. Here are some examples to help illustrate this:

The First Scenario

Determine your marketing budget if, for example, your primary objective is to increase brand awareness for your products, and return on investment is unimportant because there is a good fit between the two. Then create Sponsored Product Campaigns with a maximum bid on the top of the search results and Sponsored Brand campaigns with a landing page of either the new products you have launched or the Brand Page. Let’s say the budget is 50% to 60% of your product’s MSRP, with a goal of X units sold in three months. In addition, you can run a Sponsored Display Campaign focusing on the ASINs of your rivals.

The result: This kind of advertising strategy increases your items’ visibility so that they appear on the top page of the search results for the relevant keywords. If there is a product-market fit, it may have a modest ROI initially. Still, over time, as you convert a significant number of reviews into sales, your chances of having your product appear naturally on the first page increase.

The Second Scenario

If your rivals’ lower prices are causing you to lose customers — even if your items rank first or second in search results — it’s time to explore your options. The best way to get back on track is to launch Discount Promotions and use Sponsored Display Campaigns with a budget of 2% to 3% of your monthly sales to target the product detail pages of your rivals. This will allow customers to see that your pricing is more advantageous than your rivals’.

The result: If your products have received similar reviews to those of your rivals’ products in conjunction with a greater discount offer, a lower expenditure is recommended. (This approach is not recommended for products with low reviews and ratings.)

The Third Scenario

It is essential to determine the amount of money you could spend on each unit if your product sales and glance views are trending downward due to reduced prices from your competitors, which you cannot match owing to profitability. Once you know how much advertising for each unit costs, you may divide that amount between Amazon advertisements and discount promotions.

The ideal budget allocation in these cases would be to spend 70% on sponsored products and 30% on sponsored displays.

The result: With budgeting split between campaigns that increase sales and campaigns that enhance product visibility, a discount can also act as an additional sales driver. With 75% of sellers on Amazon using at least one type of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, this discount strategy improves both the visibility of your products compared to those of your competitors and provides the best ROI.

Arjun Narayan is the founder and CEO of Salesduo, an automated multichannel commerce platform that assists companies with Amazon account management, Amazon advertising, Amazon SEO and brand pages, and Amazon EDI and shortage claims.

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The chain retailer says B2B digital sales make up a big chunk of its customer sales. It is adding new perks to its loyalty program.

The Home Depot Inc. ranks No. 4 in Digital Commerce 360’s Top 1000 database. The Top 1000 ranks North American e-retailers by web sales.

Home Depot’s new loyalty program perks include:

• A new elite support line for prioritized, exclusive assistance for business needs, VIP experiences, and account management services
• Personalized purchase support from Home Depot experts
• Preferred pricing

The retailer said it will release additional benefits for members throughout the year.

“Pros make up about 10% of The Home Depot’s customer base and approximately half of our sales,” says Hector Padilla, executive vice president of outside sales and service for The Home Depot. “To serve the pro, it’s about removing friction through a variety of products and capabilities — whether they visit a Home Depot store for a last-minute need on the way to a job or plan a larger purchase in advance to be delivered to the job site.”

Pro Xtra and professional contractors

Professional contractors represent a $450 billion marketplace. So, The Home Depot is building a unique, interconnected ecosystem to help them build their businesses, the retailer says. The company has introduced new product offerings and capabilities. They include:

• Job-lot quantities of the right assortment of brands, digital tools and personalized experiences
• A variety of fulfillment options with reliable delivery and prioritization for Pros
• Other value-added offerings like credit, tool rental, and quote center.

“We’re always looking for ways to enhance Pro Xtra to best support Pros as their needs grow and evolve, along with their businesses,” says Molly Battin, senior vice president and chief marketing officer. “This tiered loyalty system unlocks a new experience of rewards and savings for our Pro customers with more benefits than ever, right at their fingertips.”

Since launching Pro Xtra in 2012, the program has continued to expand its benefits and rewards with more ways to support contractors, Home Depot says.

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Vinny Maurici

The opt-in era poses new challenges for online advertising. But by offering ecommerce sites that provide a helpful customer experience, B2B companies can rely less on online ads, writes Vinny Maurici, vice president, data strategy and services, Pivotree.

For years, companies have been able to track their users’ website and app activity across other companies’ apps and websites, using the resulting data for advertising purposes or for sharing with data brokers.

Last year, Apple launched a highly anticipated privacy feature: App Tracking Transparency (ATT). With this policy change, Apple users now have to opt-in to Apple’s Identifier for Advertising (IDFA), a unique code assigned to mobile devices, which data brokers and ad marketers use to track users across apps. Using this code, they can combine their users’ behavior into one comprehensive profile, providing companies with the information they need to send targeted ads.

Historically, this process took place behind the scenes, with most users generally unaware of what data was being collected and how it was being used. Now, users receive prompts the first time they open an app, letting them know how the app is tracking their data and giving them the option to opt-in.

Unsurprisingly, Apple’s ATT policy was met with outrage from platforms like Facebook and Snap, who rely on their users’ data to send targeted ads and generate revenue. And their fears became a reality – in the United States, data from analytics company Flurry showed that users chose not to opt-in of app tracking 96 per cent of the time, following the implementation of ATT.

Now, in 2022, nearly every direct-to-consumer (DTC) company is dealing with revenue contraction, shrinking margins and runaway losses. In combination with supply chain costs, heightened interest rates and shrinking venture capital investments, DTC companies are in trouble.

It’s important to note that B2B organizations are different in their focus compared with retail and DTC. While retail and DTC home in on price and customer acquisition,  B2B focuses on digital product experience and elements like punchout, which lets B2B buyers link from their procurement/spend management software to a preferred seller’s ecommerce site.

B2B organizations have long understood their customers, however, and have been less reliant on paid advertisements or targeted ads as a source of revenue. On top of that, they have been focusing especially on the product experience of finding, selecting and ordering products.

For that reason, B2B companies, once viewed as the dinosaurs of digital commerce, are now at the forefront of digital commerce strategy with many B2B distributors building more complete, in depth, and intuitive shopping experiences than retail giants like Amazon, Walmart, Etsy or Wayfair.

For once it seems, retail has to catch up on the digital front when compared to leaders in the B2B digital commerce space.

About the author:

Vinny Maurici is vice president, data strategy and services, at Pivotree, which  designs, builds and manages digital platforms in commerce, data management, and supply chains for branded manufacturers, distributors and retailers.

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