Why Oracle's new Commerce Cloud might be the B2B platform you're looking for

Today, two of the key drivers for Manufacturers or Distributors to modernize their commerce or order-taking platforms is to transition high-touch sales processes to customer self-service, and to drive higher returns on lead generation.  This in turn will, respectively, lower OPEX and increase return on marketing spend.  How should you embark on this journey? In the following paragraphs, we will look at the ideal architectural components of a B2B system, why Oracle’s new Commerce Cloud is a surprisingly good fit, and how you can evaluate a system for your own organization.

It’s a business problem all my customers face - an adequate to excellent sales team / call center are the primary (if not only) means of collecting orders from vendors, and they are burdened by:

• High-touch sales processes to generate pricing and orders on all products, regardless of complexity
• Incorrect order placement
• Manual order taking processes
• Lack of alignment between product sold and customer need
• High cost of education to inform sales / call center of new products or services
• High loss of possible income because of poor upselling / cross-selling
• Oversized call center structure due to lack of self service capabilities on website
• Difficulties for the sales team to place orders on the field, when visiting customers

These issues are born from sales processes that worked great to build the business, but are inhibiting growth due to lack of scalability.

When looking at a solution to solve these needs, businesses should look for the following qualities and capabilities:

Qualities

• Is the solution easy to maintain, or will it require proprietary expertise?
• Is the solution flexible enough to meet my unique business needs and processes?
• Does the solution have the right type of support my business will require?
• Does the solution have an ecosystem of partners that can do more than just implement, but actually help establish and operate best practices?
• Does the TCO of the solution allow me to generate a return on the investment?

Technology Capabilities

• Does the solution have a REST framework for me to easily pull data in and out of the system?
• Does the system allow me to a have a profile hierarchy, allowing me to set up accounts and users for the accounts?
• Does the system allow me to have multiple catalogs and price lists per catalog?
• Does the system allow me to match catalogs to accounts, providing me pricing power for my best customers?
• Does the solution allow for flexible payment options, including credit card and invoicing?
• Does the platform have native integrations to my ERP and catalog management systems?
• Does the platform allow for offline order taking?
• Does the platform unify my online, call center, and sales rep order taking systems?
• Does the platform provide a great experience for mobile users?

The advent of SaaS based eCommerce platforms benefited my B2C customers, but left B2B customers without a viable cloud-based product because of the lack of flexibility inherent in single-tenant SaaS commerce platforms.  However, modern, services-first based SaaS solutions such as Oracle Commerce Cloud has forced me to reassess that perception, as I found that Oracle Commerce Cloud ticks almost all the boxes listed above to make the move to self-service a reality.  

Refreshingly, I am not bound by the UX tooling Oracle provides to meet my customer’s needs.  As we engage in a deep dive business evaluation of our customer’s sales process (to carefully identify which products should be moved to self-service, not to mention which types of self-service content), we are able to design the optimum technology architecture to meet almost any B2B need.  Oracle’s REST model natively supports the dynamic permutations of profile (accounts), catalogs (products), and price lists, along with native plug-ins to CPQ (configure, price, quote tools) via API, allowing me the freedom to design modern B2B customer experiences without having to worry about core modeling issues.  The cherry on top is that the solution is completely REST based, allowing us to deliver solutions in the client's language of choice, from Ruby, .NET, Java and much more.

At the end of the day, a flexible technology architecture is required to solve the complex and individually unique needs of B2B businesses.  Is Oracle Commerce Cloud (OCC) right for your B2B business? There is a surprisingly refreshing chance that it is.

Rohit Garewal is the President of Object Edge (Digital) and an eCommerce evangelist for helping customers grow profitably.  This focus has allowed him to develop an expertise in lowering OPEX and increasing customer retention.  Specifically, for B2B, his models have allowed Object Edge to effectively transition many B2B customers from high-touch sales processes to a self-service ones.