Although 50% of all manufacturers say eCommerce will be their primary channel for receiving customer orders by 2020, many aren’t doing much to make that happen.
Why? It’s because they struggle with scaling to meet market needs, delivering custom pricing and promotions, and getting a holistic view of customers, according to a report by CloudCraze’s “2106 State of Digital Commerce Report.”
The report found that:
eCommerce implementations are costly: 31% of brands spent more than $2 million for their current eCommerce site
Speed to launch for eCommerce technology is an issue for many brands: 44% say it took longer than a year to implement their current site
Cost and speed-to-market issues are magnified with the largest companies: It took 73% of the largest companies (more than $25 billion in revenue) longer than a year to implement their current eCommerce sites and over one-third of these organizations paid more than $3 million to build them.
Companies face problems with scalability and flexibility: Quickly updating to the customer and company’s evolving needs, scaling to the changing market, and getting a holistic view of the customer are the top three pain points for brands
Companies view CRM-based systems as more innovative than ERP systems: 48% of respondents believe CRM-based systems are more innovative
Supply chain communication is inefficient: Less than one-third of the total respondents consider their supply chains to be very transparent
Cloud-based systems are more transparent and reactive than on-premise systems: Cloud users report their supply chains are very transparent (31%) and very reactive (39%) compared to only 9% and 15% of on-premise users respectively
Legacy systems experience challenges with scalability, flexibility and customer visibility: Roughly two-thirds of brands using legacy systems report each of these challenges
Manufacturers will have to overcome these issues since B2B eCommerce today is a trillion dollar market, more than four times the size of the B2C market, and growing at an annual rate of about 19%, according to Forrester Research.
