The Future of B2B eCommerce, Part 2: The Opportunities

The driving force of technology is propelling B2B eCommerce to the next level, and expectations for market growth are optimistic: Forrester Research forecasts that by 2020, the B2B eCommerce segment will be a $1.13 trillion market. This is encouraging news considering the various obstacles standing in the way of B2B procurement professionals as they inch their organizations toward eProcurement. Despite complex sales cycles, process-led operations environments and competing business priorities, most operations are indeed making progress.

Read The Future of B2B eCommerce, Part 1: The Challenges for details.

Growth is imminent, largely because organizations have so much to gain through the implementation of eCommerce/eProcurement strategies. Can they afford not to embrace the way of the future? Let’s look at the opportunities inherent in using technology to drive the corporate buying process—in other words, adopting some form of a B2B ecommerce model:

Uncovering Business Value in B2B Procurement Data

Retailers on the B2C side are using data to transform their approach to sales and marketing—and not only is it paying off, but it’s ensuring their relevancy and competitive position. By nature of their technological lifeblood, eCommerce platforms deliver a wealth of detail about each customer—transaction data, buying habits, product preferences, and more—that’s used to optimize the shopping experience and drive additional sales. It’s hard to imagine a B2B procurement professional who’s not hungry for these types of insights.

As businesses use digital platforms to transact with their suppliers and customers, they too will generate the data that’s required to better understand their partners, and design a better (more B2C-like) corporate buying experience. Developing and customizing solutions that work well with any given company’s procurement process—and aligns well with their supplier relations strategy—is complicated business. Six Big Data Hurdles Payments and Financial Professionals Need to Overcome gets into details on some of the challenges. Since digitation is occurring across the supply chain, it’s becoming easier to understand what companies need their eProcurement solutions to do and the types of data they need to generate.

To learn about implementing AP analytics, reference Payment Analytics Turn Invoices Into Insights and Unlock a Treasure Trove of Insights in AP Data.

Tapping Additional Value Through IoT

The influence of the Internet of Things (IoT) is, in a sense, expected to redefine the entire procurement experience, let alone the purchase transactions. As presented in Payments in the Internet of Everything, Accenture sees five considerations in IoT that will provide the most value for everyone, from end user to financial organization:

• Uncover innovative new ways to use IoT to enable and help increase transactions and revenue
• Streamline payment processing to help reduce transaction costs and increase settlement speed
• Secure sensitive consumer information in connected transactions
• Create highly personalized and contextual digital payment experiences
• Monetize the additional data generated by connected devices

Look ahead into the not-so-distant future: around the company, data-generating sensors will be embedded into the business tools and machines used every day. These IoT-connected devices will reveal how they’re performing, alerting decision-makers to the need for servicing, and offering suggestions as to what parts the company needs to procure. The procurement process can then be automated—a form of eCommerce.

For more about the IoT and the payments process, explore Making the Connection: The Internet of Things and Payments and The Internet of Things Is Turning Into the Internet of Payments.

Taking Commerce Online Via Custom B2B Platforms

Deloitte’s 2016 Global Chief Procurement Officer Survey provides insight into technology’s role in both informing strategic decisions and enhancing day-to-day administration with more efficiency and transparency. They point to technologies like cognitive analytics, crowdsourcing, and digital reporting as well as cloud-based solutions and mobile technologies as among the most significant being explored by CPOs. Seventy percent (70%) of the CPOs surveyed, in fact, say they are focused on delivering self-service solutions for the business to take the strain off their teams and allow the business to manage its own activity.

There’s no doubt about it: Companies’ adoption of digital tools for data-generation, eProcurement, and payments is on the rise, and procure-to-pay solutions and supplier portals are getting more use across the industry as more companies and their partners adopt digital processes. Many of these tools include eCommerce capabilities, or at least lay the groundwork for future purely online corporate buying and selling. To learn about the value they’re providing, refer to Exploring AP Technologies: Complete Procure-to-Pay Solutions and Exploring AP Technologies, Part 1: Supplier Portals.