The last decade has seen the evolution and rise of the e-commerce industry. Not only we witnessed increased consumer interest and participation, the industry also recorded humongous sales figures and increased demand. It was a time where B2C e-commerce seemed winning the race with B2B e-commerce which is not the case now and in India, this will be witnessed in another couple of years. Either B2B or B2C, the role of technology is the base and the existential factor when it comes to E-commerce industry.
Redefining the Consumer Shopping Experience:
E-commerce industry has fallen short of retail outlets and cash transactions - in the actual shopping experience. But it has brought in whole lot of new, innovative and useful factors to make the shopping experience easy and hassle free. Any purchase can be done at the top of a button and gets delivered at the doorstep. What else can a millennial buyer ask for?
Providing personalized data in B2B sector:
With companies switching to B2B e-commerce, more and more real-time procurement data will be captured.This data will help B2B e-commerce players to better understand the behavior of the business buyer and offer data driven insights.B2B e-commerce companies will use this data to provide personalized experience to every buyer / business.
Artificial Intelligence drives the E-commerce industry:
Moving forward, Artificial Intelligence will find a huge blueprint in B2B e-commerce; unlike B2C e-commerce where there are large numbers of users and use-cases, B2B e-commerce will have fewer numbers of users doing large ticket transactions under limited use cases. This makes application and adoption of AI very easy yet very powerful.AI is set to bring efficiency for businesses in terms of decision making around purchases, automation of several mundane tasks, provide critical insights, free-up several man-hours behind procurement and making business purchases intelligent and low cost.
Decision making during procurement process:
Usually the procurement managers or executives who for corporates find difficulty in making decisions during procurement process as it will be impactful on growth and the business of the company in many levels. Technology will also help the procurement teams of businesses to better understand the needs of the business and give them transparent insights to make more informed complicated decisions.
Similarly, Business to Business E-commerce companies will go on to build customized dashboards for their customers which will provide much needed data-points and purchase recommendations. Hence a job of a procurement manager will be made simple and thereby adds value for the human resource.
B2B e-commerce companies will take the personalization further by building integration APIs with the buyers existing ERP/CRM platforms to make the purchases more structured and seamless.
B2B e-commerce will also see application of several deep technologies such as IOT, which will help B2B companies to further strengthen their Omni-channel presence. Many of the experiments which have failed in B2C e-commerce might actually find success in B2B - such as Kiosk Based sales, IOT Stores for large businesses, IOT driven reordering for critical products, etc.
Seamless Payment Process:
If there’s one other thing that has been remarkable about E-commerce industry is the mode of payments which is completely digital in most cases. Though individuals are gradually moving to online payments, corporates are already in it. E-wallets and gift cards are in the surge these days. Thanks to the technological developments, this wiped away the fear of non-transparency and the safety of money.
Thus Technology’s role in e-commerce is inevitable and seamless. It is the root and base of E-commerce, right from its origin to each and every development that is happening on daily basis in the industry.
(This article is attributed to Mr. Karthik Ramaiah, Co-Founder at Kobster)
