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According to Forrester, the anticipated worth of Ecommerce Business will reach $1.8 trillion by 2023.

This popularity and the convenience and ease of online shopping have enabled B2B VARs to shift their preference from the traditional business model to the online model. The report provided by Digital Commerce 360 states that B2B websites, log-in portals, and marketplaces witnessed an increase in online sales from $1.39 trillion in 2020 to $1.63 trillion in 2021.

Manual processes are no longer a thing in this digital space. B2B businesses must automate, optimize, and integrate their process to help them collaborate and communicate effectively with customers, partners, and suppliers. And to achieve these goals, they need an effective IT VAR E-Commerce software.

A seamless Integration plays a tremendously crucial role in streamlining the business processes and exceeding their customer experience with an improved shopping experience. Moving further in this blog, you will learn more about how fundamental eCommerce integrations are to a reseller eCommerce platform.

Why is B2B Integration Essential For VARs?

A B2B business model seems to have highly complex business processes as they have to fulfill several operational needs. eCommerce integration meets these needs in the following ways:

Integrates Data Between Applications

Integrating with business applications provides your B2B online business with considerable visibility and the entire business’ enterprise-level view. When you synchronize customer data, you tend to acquire a single view of every customer through various business operations. You can also track and monitor the supply chain, inventory patterns, and finances thoroughly.

This way, you can enjoy efficient business processes, acquire better data, and make better business decisions. Moreover, this seamless integration enables you to provide your customers an amplifying experience across various selling channels, devices, and touchpoints in their entire buying journey.

Provides Appropriate Business Control

By integrating IT VAR E-Commerce Software, you can control your business competently. You can even manage all aspects of businesses, including procurement, inventory, orders, customer relations, finance, quoting, and other crucial processes from a single location. By doing so, you can break down vast pieces of information, enhance efficiency, and increase employee engagement and productivity all over the organization.

Streamlines B2B Business Processes

You can provide online shoppers and sellers streamlined multi-process experience based on the level of integration you have opted for. Having a swift, seamless, and personalized experience allows the shoppers to view products from their custom catalog, order, and checkout hassle-free. If they have negotiated all the credit terms with the IT reseller, they can effortlessly add products to the shopping carts and checkout without making any online transactions.

The orders are passed to your sales team for processing and fulfillment and the accounts team to raise invoices. Moreover, the product count is adjusted by the inventory management, thereby improving customer satisfaction and positively impacting retention rates.

Diminishes Data Redundancy And Error

eCommerce integration reduces the need for human interventions, which will diminish errors from the repetitive manual process and enhance productivity. It is one of the B2B Ecommerce Features for IT Resellers that enable you to maintain customers, products, orders, and shipping information and make customer interactions across multiple touch-points upgraded automatically. Hence, your organization will be free from data redundancy, duplicity, or error.

Types Of B2B eCommerce Integration

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

Organizations having VAR ERP Software achieve multiple customers, orders, inventory, and accounting data. ERP implementation provides a seamless flow of bidirectional information between applications, which eliminates the need for manual data entry. It also streamlines back-office operations and improves the overall customer experience.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

An eCommerce platform for IT & Office Supplies VARs provides CRM integration that improves customer management and retention. Usually, eCommerce businesses fear a lack of personalization. However, with CRM integration, personalized experiences come in handy. A reseller eCommerce platform ensures that the customer data collected can be used to build customer loyalty and develop efficient marketing, sales, and customer service processes and strategies.

Inventory Management System

The added resellers vars sell their products in multiple channels. In such cases, tracking inventory manually becomes a daunting and time-consuming task and even leads to errors. Having an inventory management system helps in syncing orders of all the selling channels in real-time, thereby making stock management, inventory forecasting, analytics, etc., effortless and appropriate.

PunchOut Catalog

B2B buyers constitute internal processes and approval workflows for purchasing the products. They also use a procurement system to streamline their spending. For this, they need PunchOut, a functionality that enables them to access your eCommerce platform from within their procurement system, browse pre-approved products, add them to the shopping cart, and go through their internal processes before making a purchase.

Product Information Management (PIM)

Since B2B businesses work under multiple channels of selling and constitute numerous product catalogs with customizable products and solutions, they need Product Information Management (PIM) integrated into their system. It helps them in centralizing product management, descriptions, and rich content which eases the process of collecting, managing, and updating product information. They even create a product catalog and distribute it to different channels.

How To Select The Right B2B Integration Solution?

Now that you know the reasons for choosing the B2B integration solution, the next thing of concern is how to select the appropriate ERP solutions for your business. Here are the following points you need to consider while choosing the best solution for your business.

Deployment Integration

The first thing you need to look for integration is the deployment model. These models are of three types, namely on-premise, cloud, and hybrid. On-premise integration is installed, deployed, and managed on your organization’s server. Cloud integration is the software provided “as-a-service’’ and hybrid is the combination of both on-premise and cloud models. All these deployment models work differently in different resellers var business requirements.

Security

In today’s digital world, securing your customer’s data plays a very crucial role. Hence, you should look for ERP software that provides inherent security mechanisms, like private VPNs, HTTPS, secure file transfers, advanced authentication tools, etc.

Flexibility

Every B2B business has unique integration requirements. Getting a reseller eCommerce platform with an integration solution addressing all the business requirements is a cherry on the cake. Moreover, the integration you choose to build or purchase can positively and negatively impact your business as a whole. Hence, it is recommended to do your proper research and opt for flexible integration software.

Cost Of Integration

Cost of integration is a crucial point ERP VARs needs to consider while adopting the eCommerce integrations. You need to look after the maintenance costs, upfront costs, upgrades, IT support costs, etc., before making purchasing decisions. Further, you should take into account the training costs of the staff and employees. All these aspects will help you in determining the appropriate integration solution for your organization.

Conclusion

The tremendous scope of B2B integration provides you with so much information to learn from. Moreover, the emergence of internet and cloud solutions has changed the way entrepreneurs used to see this solution. Using this seamless integration, you can not only improve your business processes but also boosts customer satisfaction and retention rates simultaneously.

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