2016 eCommerce Goals, Electrical Initiatives

Interesting article here from Internet Retailer regarding eCommerce goals for 2016 and written by Forrester Research. With the emergence of many electrical ecommerce initiatives for distributors, much bears watching.

The following could be of interest for those invested, investing or considering investing into an eCommerce platform:

• Keeping up or besting Amazon shouldn’t be your top concern, at least for another year or so as Amazon Business is still in a “test and learn mode” and needs “more time to settle and hone its B2B marketplace model”
• Forrester advises retail customers to consider expanding their assortments and consider deploying their own online marketplaces.
  • Here’s a potential thought … if you have your site up and running, and your software enables it, perhaps create your own local marketplace and host product content from other small, complementary, distributors in your market. You’ve invested in the software. Can you host their content and deploy another site and then forward orders to them? Could you create a “separate corporation” that holds your e-commerce system (and maybe people), accept the orders and parse them out for a fee? Leave the marketing to the company that gives you the content or partner with companies where you have common customers.  Just a though … perhaps innovative, perhaps disruptive, could help minimize your ecommerce costs.
• Forrester also advises learning how customers want to research and buy products. Be able to allow customers to be self-serve while offering also partial and full service offerings provided by sales and customer service people (live or via chat). This could provide distributors a competitive advantage.

Electrical Industry Initiatives

With AD, IMARK and IDEA helping to ecommerce enable their members, look for possibly hundreds of new (or definitely enhanced) websites to be deployed.  AD’s initiative with Unilog is reportedly providing content and much more at a reasonable price (with it being expanded across multiple divisions).  IMARK has over 40 distributors participating in their initiative with Second Phase and Trade Service.  IDEA, and possibly through inference NAED given that NAED is an IDEA owner, is promoting XO Logic (reportedly already has 2 in beta after announcing the relationship a couple of months ago)  as a resource for decorative lighting content but, perhaps more importantly, as an electrical data resource and very cost-effective ebusiness solution for small distributors (enabling them to “compete” with bigger distributors).

And if distributors are on a common platform, especially in the marketing groups, what other services could be envisioned, especially if the group was willing to initialize the concepting and investment?

The challenge for many will be allocating personnel resources to keep sites current and to market them. Supplier geographic and branch authorization policies will be “stretched”, distributors will need to be concerned about pricing consistency (which could help everyone’s margins), inventory management systems will need to be improved and these systems will need to be maintained.  While it may not be profitable the first year, it could be like opening a branch … doesn’t turn profitable (typically) for 12-24 months.

Where does your company stand on eBusiness? What challenges will it create for manufacturers? Will it be positive or a negative for distributor operations?