See here for original article written by Aaron Pickrell, senior product manager at HCL Commerce
When choosing to partner with an eCommerce platform provider, it is critical that you choose one that provides the most flexibility from a business model and channel support perspective. Your organisation may only offer a single channel for B2C selling today, but what happens when you decide to wholesale to larger customers in a B2B setup? What about B2E? What about B2B2C? What about guided selling in a call centre live chat context?
Managing the implementation and long-term ownership of multiple solutions to support each model would be a maintenance nightmare! Instead, select a platform that supports all these models out of the box and position your business for future expansion.
For B2B, your platform will need to have the ability to manage complex catalog filtering business rules, pricing logic, contract and organisation management capability. Your organisation will likely benefit from having centralised promotional capability across each of the business models, as well as a shared product catalog.
“For even greater extensibility, you will want to choose a platform that has a robust set of APIs that will allow you to integrate in countless creative ways from additional selling interfaces and backends like marketplaces, social networks and IOT.”
Choosing a system that decouples its core platform capabilities from the presentation layer is absolutely critical but doesn’t over-complicate the platform by getting too granular!
HCL Commerce is best of breed for large enterprise customers that have complicated business requirements and a need for growth. Our cloud-native, API-first approach coupled with decades of mature product development for multi-business model support has empowered hundreds of customers all over the planet to provide the right experience with the least lead time in the industry.
To find out more about the HCL Commerce platform, or to chat about your current ecosystem, get in touch with our eCommerce experts below.