“59% of B2B buyers and sellers prefer not to interact with a sales rep and 74% find buying from a website more convenient.” —Forrester
SMB manufacturers and distributors have traditionally faced difficulty in the world of eCommerce, in large part due to a high volume of product offerings and the complex pricing structure that goes along with them. And in a B2B or wholesale environment, pricing becomes even more daunting when considering different pricing situations for different customers. While this information is housed neatly in the manufacturer or distributor’s ERP, getting this information out of the ERP and into an eCommerce site has resulted in a data entry and rekeying nightmare or an altogether non-existent online sales presence. So fax, phone or mail has remained the name of the order game for B2B eCommerce.
But in 2016, B2B buyers have grown to expect the same experience that they enjoy as B2C buyers–online, on my time, at my pace and at my rate. Today, manufacturers and distributors that don’t have an efficient B2B eCommerce presence fall behind. This is especially true for SMB organizations that don’t have the budgets of their enterprise competitors to build custom solutions and hire in-house eCommerce teams.
So how can you give your B2B customers the experience they want when you have complex wholesale pricing?
“Pricing in our industry is volatile. Entering pricing changes and new products is a time consuming process for us, and it’s not sustainable to have to enter these changes in twice–in our ERP and eCommerce site.” — Williams Shooters Supply, Inc.
If you are an SMB manufacturer or distributor, you more than likely deal with one or more of the following complex B2B pricing situations:
- Different negotiated pricing per customer
- Different discount options by customer/group/product/purchase amount, etc.
- Seasonal and frequently changing pricing and promotional pricing (like Nomad erpCommerce customer Williams Shooters Supply, Inc.)
The key is getting rich product and pricing information out of your ERP and onto your website while at the same time:
- Making your product information public to search engines to take advantage of search engine optimization (SEO), and
- Keeping your wholesale pricing information private and restricted to login only access
New technology in B2B eCommerce makes this possible and affordable for SMB manufacturers and distributors.
Nomad erpCommerce, a new technology in eCommerce, directly integrates your ERP with the Nomad eCommerce shopping cart platform. Nomad is not an after-market connector or third party between your ERP and your eCommerce website; Nomad is your eCommerce website, built to share information back and forth between the eCommerce platform and your ERP through APIs and ERP maps.
Pricing groups are not the same as individual pricing
Many larger eCommerce shopping cart providers are marketed to serve both B2C and B2B eCommerce needs, but not only do they often require a lot of additional development costs to integrate with ERP, the B2B eCommerce pricing features don’t quite work the way that an SMB manufacturer or distributor requires.
Some larger eCommerce shopping cart providers handle individual, complex B2B pricing through customer or pricing groups. While Nomad also allows pricing categorization by customer or pricing group, Nomad also allows you to display pricing on your eCommerce site by individual customer according to the pricing information set in your ERP. So, if you have 1,000 wholesale customers and each one of those customers has a different pricing situation in your ERP, Nomad handles this without the need to create 1,000 different customer groups.
Additionally, competing shopping cart providers often require an add-on service to handle group pricing, while complex pricing is automatically included within Nomad erpCommerce. And remember – your customer will only see their own custom pricing upon logging into your Nomad erpCommerce site. It’s complex pricing made easy.
For manufacturing by manufacturing
How is Nomad erpCommerce so in tune with the needs of the SMB manufacturer? The concept for Nomad erpCommerce was created by manufacturing entrepreneur and Sniperdyne president Torre Tribout. In 2000, when Torre and his mother started a decorative pillow manufacturing company, he realized that there was a great need for a web-based solution that tapped into their ERP data so that information like inventory availability, customer pricing, order status and more would be available at any time, from anywhere, to their sales staff on the road. And so, Torre set out to create an ERP integrated eCommerce solution. Read Torre’s full story here.
Today, after several years of perfecting the integration technology, Nomad erpCommerce is helping SMB organizations compete with enterprises like never before. Our team understands first-hand the importance of mastering complex pricing and utilizing modern technology to alleviate daunting wholesale and seasonal pricing administration woes that once plagued SMB manufacturers and distributors.
But don’t take our word for it — hear what our customers have to say about Nomad erpCommerce and how it handles their complex pricing situations.
- Read the Accutome story
- Read the Wastequip story
- Read the Williams Shooters Supply, Inc. story
To learn more about how our manufacturing and distribution customers utilize Nomad’s eCommerce and ERP integration, visit our website.
