Deploying an Online Store with B2B Functionality Has Never Been Easier!
In our formative years at Vurbis Interactive, we identified 1000+ e-commerce platform vendors in existence at the time, operating on millions of domains, mostly selling goods and services to consumers.
But explosive growth in the e-procurement platform market changed things.
Businesses no longer “preferred” but now “demanded” suppliers sell online. Unfortunately, most e-commerce platforms, with their consumer-orientation, couldn’t meet the needs of business buyers.
Some vendors reacted by “opening up” the consumer versions of their platforms to partners who could populate their app marketplaces with B2B add-ons in the form of extensions, plugins, or API’s. Episerver, Magento, Shopify, Big Commerce are a few examples.
Some vendors developed B2B versions of platforms. For example, Magento 2 and Shopify Plus were both designed to be more “B2B-friendly” than the consumer versions.
Also, pure-play B2B e-commerce platform vendors like Oro Commerce, Insite Software and Unilog emerged to take advantage of demand for B2B features.
Providing more proof that the e-commerce platform market was refocusing toward the massive B2B opportunity, and maturing overall, IPOs started happening, and vendor consolidation started.
Some examples:
· Shopify and Big Commerce went public with billion-dollar valuations
· Episerver acquired Insite Software
· Salesforce acquired Cloudcraze
Prior to all this, large distributors like Amazon, WW Grainger, Fastenal and others leveraged their existing B2B e-commerce capabilities to drive tremendous sales growth, which, unfortunately, came at the expense of smaller competitors who had little or no e-commerce capabilities.
But the playing field has changed. Small and medium suppliers can now have the same e-commerce capabilities as these larger competitors for a fraction of the investment made by those companies.
How is this possible? Not only are the products better, but thanks to the cloud, they’re easier and less expensive to buy, deploy and operate. And vital B2B features like Punchout or B2B transactions (PO’s, invoices, etc.) are easy, low-cost add-ons.
SMB suppliers, time to get in the game!
Have questions or thoughts? We’d love to hear from you…
