B2B eCommerce thrives when customers are presented with customized buying experiences. Tailoring such journeys requires firms to leverage their data and put it to good use. Unfortunately, their choice of eCommerce platform might hinder data collection and analytics goals.
When running an eCommerce sales channel, your choice of platform is essential since it acts as a central hub for all your data-gathering efforts. Your platform’s ability to simplify data collection and provide data sets for analytics is critical to your web presence.
There are several key criteria you must pay attention to before choosing an enterprise eCommerce platform. Here is a deeper look at how a platform can help you make better use of your data.
Assemble Custom Tech Stacks
Big data is tough to decipher, and every company has a set of preferred tools. From data warehouses to BI tools, your eCommerce platform must integrate easily with the stack of your choice. Unfortunately, integration is not often a priority when eCommerce platforms design features. Much attention is paid to usability and performance, leaving integration and big data analytics behind.
Enterprises collect a lot of data and need powerful solutions to help them decipher it. For instance, most organizations use Google BigQuery as a data warehouse to store, mine and analyze data. Native integration with such solutions helps enterprises quickly make sense of their data and put it to good use.
BI tools also play an important role in simplifying data and presenting it in an easily understood format across the organization. Deriving customer insights is easier with these tools. A tool that seamlessly connects to your platform and warehouse can help you understand where your customers spend the most time, their typical buying behavior, and the points where they drop out.
While these types of analytics insights can be big game-changers to the business, everything hinges on seamless integration across your tech stack.
Easy Scaling
Growth is a challenge for more enterprises from an infrastructural standpoint. As an organization scales or expands into new markets, technology stacks change, and data volumes grow exponentially. The result is an infrastructure that cannot cope with growth and damages a business’ reputation.
When scaling a business, data has to be transferred from legacy systems to new solutions. During these transfers, your eCommerce platform plays a crucial role, since it hosts all of your data. To gain a holistic view of your business, your platform must support all migration efforts.
For instance, after reaching a certain size, enterprises tend to adopt customer data platform (CDP) solutions that help them understand user behavior and pain points. These solutions enhance and augment an eCommerce platform’s data by tracking touchpoints and presenting interactions in easily understood dashboards.
eCommerce platforms that offer multiple integrations with such solutions will help you scale your business easily. Thanks to plenty of solutions available on platform app marketplaces, you can choose one that fits your size and adopt another as your business grows.
The data that your eCommerce platform provides you will also inform your marketing strategy. For instance, you can mine your data to determine your customers‘ pain points and tailor the ad copy to appeal to them. Your website’s copy can also be tailored accordingly and increase conversions.
There is a wide range of analytics tools that help you decipher customer intent when browsing and a good eCommerce platform integrates with these solutions easily. As your business grows and your analytics needs increase, switching between solutions and migrating data should be simple.
Eliminate Data Silos
Data silos tend to be a bottleneck for an eCommerce business. This is especially true in the B2B world, where multiple customer touchpoints are needed to close a sale and drive repeat business. For instance, a customer might interact with your business on social media, download content, and send a query via a chatbot.
A good eCommerce platform will provide you with data from all sources and integrate with a solution that helps you make sense of these datasets. It will not silo customer service data from engagement metrics, for instance. Connecting all data points will help you understand where a customer currently is in their journey and tailor their buying experience accordingly.
Best of all, you can rely on your data and stop making decisions by feel or intuition. Many enterprise eCommerce projects fail because executives don’t trust their data. This situation occurs because of data silos that sit separately from the rest of the organization.Â
Thanks to seamless connectivity and integration, your eCommerce platform will prevent silo creation and give you the insights you need to take your business to the next level.
Big Solutions for Big Business
B2B enterprises need robust eCommerce solutions that scale and simplify a range of technical tasks. Data holds the key to growing a business and providing customers with experiences they’ll love. Choosing the right eCommerce platform that helps you extract the most out of your data is a key step to success.
