B2B e-Commerce Site Maintenance - Your Data

In this five-part series, I’m addressing the most frequently-faced pitfalls of B2B e-Commerce website maintenance, and providing insight to how you can foresee and forestall their impacts. There are all kinds of posts on the internet about how important it is to have a B2B e-commerce site, and how to choose the right one. But what do you need to know once you choose a solution and implement it?

Today’s Topic: Your Data

A B2B website will challenge your business to produce accurate master data and digital assets in time for seasonal launches and updates. Here is a short list of the most common challenges businesses face.

• A brand-wide commitment to wholesale digital transformation. In the implementation of a new B2B website, communication about the project is often limited to those it impacts the most - Sales, Customer Service and Customers. Change management needs to include Product, Master Data, Marketing, and Planning, who will also be impacted. A B2B website requires near-100% accuracy and completeness in the data and assets provided. It’s important to consider how non-customer-facing teams will need to change their processes to ensure the requirement is met.

• Impact to brand calendars. When implementing a new B2B website, the timing for delivery of data and assets for a seasonal launch may mean changes to - or new - due dates on various team calendars. Product must provide accurate information about the seasonal line to the Master Data team with enough time to ensure UPCs will be available to load to the B2B site for the seasonal launch. Marketing (which may own the seasonal catalog) previously may only have had to produce assets for a print catalog. Who will produce the digital assets needed for the new site, in time for seasonal launches? Planning may work with Customer Service to manually control the entry of certain production orders into the ERP. How will this work if anyone can enter an order on the website at any time?

• The need for customized data. Your B2B website will require data elements that often do not exist in your ERP - or anywhere else that’s easy to access. Product Navigation, Catalog Sortation, Technology Mapping to products, and Product Features are all great examples of information that is not typically maintained anywhere. This leaves brands with two options: 1) automate product feeds without the needed data or 2) employ additional resources to generate it. Most brands with product lines in excess of 15,000 UPCs will need a full-time website admin to enrich data with the necessary custom fields.

Taking these elements into consideration when implementing a new B2B site can prevent or minimize disruption and confusion and ensure a successful go-live. If you’re experiencing challenges with an existing site, chances are the issues are related to these elements as well. Spending time in a cross-departmental debriefing after seasonal launches can identify pain points, with enough time to resolve them before the next launch.