Deliver seamless self service experience

Below is a guide to building a successful e-commerce self service environment, for your trade supplies customers.

We all like to feel more in control of our lives – especially when it comes to dealing with businesses, either as a consumer or as a business buyer. If many of your customers are SMEs, chances are they’ll be ordering from you on the go. 40% of people start and end a purchase on different devices, some of which will be mobile.

89% of companies in the retail and trade supplies trade don’t feel their e-commerce platforms are up to the job of delivering what the customer needs when it comes to being online.

If you’re wanting to win business over your competitors, how could you enable this customer journey?

1. Capture all of the buyer’s history so you can completely tailor their experience, and make it all available online. Not only do you get better results from your marketing campaigns (as they are fed with a complete picture of the customer) your customers can access past order history and re-order with one click.

2. Create bespoke pricing and promotional activity tailored to their activity, as well as have a general catch-all pricing and promotion strategy for the rest.

3. Link your channels together for maximum customer flexibility. Let the customer interact with you online in the same way they do in store, make the brand experience seamless.

4. Scale for growth – establish an infrastructure that can cope with the growth in customers and can help link together all your interactions with them. Cloud provides a flexible option for this, as it can scale with your business and remove the headache of infrastructure management.

5. Connect finances and order transactions to speed up order to cash as you let customers access their account and resolve their own queries.

The ability to achieve all of these things in a relatively short period of time is available to right now. E-commerce systems that have been developed alongside Enterprise scale projects can be made available via the Cloud (or on premise), providing a wealth of functionality that can be deployed quickly and cost effectively.