Why the business model influences the choice of e-commerce platform
This is the second part of our article series Choosing an e-commerce platform. In the first part, we talked about the importance of having a clear strategy, something that is not always as obvious as you might think. In this part, we will develop the reasoning because an important part to be clear about is what your business model looks like now and how you plan to develop it in the future. Different platforms are good at different things and even if a lot can be changed, it will eventually be a matter of development time. Finding the right one from the beginning is always better than trying to change an existing structure.
How much you want to change your platform in the future greatly affects the choice, rental solutions are generally easy to get started with and often go a long way for smaller businesses. But they are rarely particularly adaptable, so if you want to create a unique experience, it may be better to choose a licensing platform that can be more easily scaled up.
When it comes to the business model, you need to consider who you sell to, is it to a company or end customer or is it to both? Should you have a special login for resellers with separate prices? Internationalization is also an important point to consider early on, all premium platforms of course support language and currency, but how does the platform work in different markets?
Internationalization
Many companies are already in a global market, others have just started or are planning for a future internationalization journey. Regardless, it is important to be aware that the way markets are handled can vary greatly between different platforms. By thinking through how you want your company to act, you save a lot of time when choosing a platform.
Markets
The business rules and cultural differences make different markets different. Payment methods that work within the EU are suddenly not relevant in Asia. It is common for parts of the range not to be relevant in certain countries or parts of the world. There may even be restrictions that mean that a product may only be sold in the EU but not in Asia. These are parts that must be regulated in a platform.
Language
How do you want to work with different languages? This is an important issue and often becomes a strategic ditto, several languages can mean more qualified staff who know customer service and management of product data in each language. Do you translate and write product texts yourself or do you hire an agency? Here, integrations may be needed for a translation agency.
Currencies and price
Pricing is another point of discussion where there are as many answers as there are companies. Should you have individual pricing per currency or per market or per country is something to consider.
Shipping and warehousing
How do you deliver your goods today and how do you plan for the future? If you have more than one warehouse, you can think about how to work with warehouse balances and choice of delivery locations.
B2B or B2C? Who is your customer?
Historically, e-commerce has been almost entirely driven forward from a B2C perspective, ie through trade with consumers. B2B sites have often felt old-fashioned and lacked much of the features we are used to when shopping privately. This trend has been broken in recent years and B2B traders have understood that we who shop for companies demand the same simplicity in the job as we do privately.
In B2B sales, there are some things that usually differ from B2C and where you need to take the platform into account.
A more advanced pricing model
We often see a more advanced price structure where we have customer-unique prices and an advanced discount structure. This places high demands on the platform or integration from the business system. You often want to let an ERP be responsible for the price and then in some cases it may be better to reflect this by bypassing the platform's price engine.
Limited customer range
A B2B customer can to a greater extent have access to parts of a product range, or a specially adapted part of the range. For example, the store that calls off its branded bags from a supplier, these products are of course only shown for that store.
Technical aspects
Inventing the wheel once again is seldom a good idea, but thinking about how you work today and what working methods and flows you want to keep and which you want to change is a very good idea. This can give a good indication of which platform suits you best.
PIM
How do you work today with product data? Is there a PIM (Product Information Management System) system or do you have a working process for this in the business system? If you have many and advanced product structures, a PIM system can be the solution for many bottlenecks in product enrichment.
CMS
How important is it for you to change the content of your website? The higher the focus on changing the site's content, the more important the platform's CMS (Content Management System) becomes. By content we mean texts, images and functions that are not direct products. Can be guides, information texts or configurators.
Speed
Today, the speed of web pages is one of the single most important aspects of ranking well in search engines like Google and Bing. Here it is important to make sure that the technical choice does not make something worse in the future. It is important to be able to scale up performance in step with the expansion of e-commerce.
How does 3bits work?
These are of course just a few examples of issues that are important when choosing a platform from a business model perspective. If you get answers to these, you are quite well equipped for a choice.
3bits is platform independent and being able to guide our customers to the right platform is an important part of our mission. In our specification project, these are just some of the questions we ask and work with in order to provide a platform recommendation.
In part three of this article series, we will talk about what is required of your organization when choosing and purchasing and using your e-commerce platform.