Integrate Your Online Application Tightly With Your ERP

Distributors vastly underestimate how complex ERP integration is for eCommerce. Unfortunately, there are virtually no good mainstream eCommerce platforms provided by ERP systems so chances are you are going to have to integrate. Suit ecommerce is making strides but is still behind major players like Magento in terms of functionality and the ability to customize the frontend. What you need to consider for integration: Customers Orders Shipment Updates Inventory Pricing Products Shipping All of these areas could have immense complexity when it comes to the integration so really try and dive into how these data points will go back and forth between both systems. Don’t underestimate this and realize that most integration products are not going to be customized to fit your specific needs. You may either have to live with what they offer or shell out more money for expensive custom integration. One to One Customer Pricing Customers are expecting great pricing when it comes to distribution otherwise they will just buy on Amazon or Walmart.com. This usually means most distributors have very complex pricing rules in their ERP system that may be completely unique for each customer. Integrating this pricing into your eCommerce system is critical for offering competitive pricing on your website. If the pricing isn’t accurate or competitive, your customers won’t use the website, making it useless for your customers! Tiered Pricing One of the best ways to encourage more purchases is to offer tiered pricing for larger quantity orders. This is natively built into platforms like Magento and BigCommerce and is really a no excuse item every distributor should have on their website.

Shipping is often one of the biggest hurdles in distribution because customers order large shipments that are not easy to estimate shipping costs. In 2019 tools like ShipperHQ and other shipping tools can integrate with major LTL carriers and help you implement complex shipping rules. Ensuring that shipping costs are optimized on your website are critical for customers checking out. No one wants to overpay for shipping, so ensure your pricing is accurate and represents a fair cost.
Lastly, you may have many warehouses. It’s possible you need to think about warehouse optimization in the fulfillment process and how orders are shipped out based on where they are going. This can be done via the ERP integration or other aspects of the project that ensures the products being shipped out are optimized based on the warehouse and the destination.

Many distributer sites have a basic picture, SKU, price, and a few basic details. That no longer cuts it in 2019 and beyond. Customers expect robust product data so they can sort and filter down to the products they want as well as look at all the data about the product before they make a buying decision. There are companies like Unilog and DDS can help you get all the product data you need so there is really no excuse not to go get it. Once you have the product data, I highly recommend making sure your product pages are designed to encapsulate all this rich data.
You may also have to get creative with complex product types and inventory. Making sure the product data availability is accurate and also has all the options the customer wants is key.

Search is critical to allowing your customers to easily find your product data. It’s no longer enough to use default eCommerce search. You either need to configure something like Elastic search or use another third party. Ensuring the search feature is set so that customers can easily find your products is key to success, and finding the right tool for that job is the foundation to getting it right. From there you can continue to configure and improve that search tool.

Your customers should live in the account pages because they want to reorder, track their orders, or look at any other details about their business on your website. Having robust and quality account pages that are specific to your business model will help customers get to what they need and want quickly. You want customers to feel valued when they log in to the account pages, simply using default account pages will not be enough to stand out from the competition.

You don’t need the best design in the world to be successful in eCommerce but as a distributor, it should function well. This means it should be easy to navigate, easy to use on all devices, and fast to get around. You should easily be able to find the products you are looking for or simply browse via categories and filters. I would focus on the design being functional in that it allows you to easily navigate to products and understand what you are buying in terms of shipping costs, tiered pricing, etc.