Did Your Distribution Business Make the Most of eCommerce Holiday Sales Opportunities?
A 13% increase in online sales during Nov and Dec was predicted. How did your Distribution business compare?
Have you looked at your Q4 Distribution Sales numbers? Could they have been bigger with just a few changes to your Ecommerce initiatives?
The holiday season estimate from Forrester was for a 13% increase in web sales this year. That’s smaller than the previous year’s growth, but still a very valid and growing sales channel even for Business to Business (B2B) sales. The primary growth area for B2B is more purchasing professionals turning to the internet to research products, find new sources of supply and automate their purchasing process.
What can your Distribution business do to be there to meet their needs?
Talk to existing customer buyers and find out how they are using the internet
- what are they finding easily?
- what information do they want, that they can’t find?
- what is the level of product detail they need to make a purchasing decision?
Look at your website and it’s Ecommerce capabilities
does it provide the information your buyers are looking for? Or, is it just a brochure with little detailed information?
- does it just provide a phone number to call or is it interactive?
- how can you make the detail they want more visible, easy to get to?
- can your ecommerce website design be streamlined to reduce the number of clicks needed to find information?
- most important, how many clicks and input fields does it take someone to make a purchase?
Lots of that new online volume will be from mobile devices! Is your Ecommerce site Mobile enabled?
Is your website compatible with mobile access on a cell phone or tablet? Check to verify how it looks and if it works with a touch screen.  Or, are the links too small to tap with your finger?
If you are not mobile ready, add a high priority project to get a mobile app created or convert your website to a responsive design.
Finally, get ready to track your progress on increasing your Ecommerce sales. Is your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system correctly set up to indicate the channel your orders were received from? If you are going to put effort into increasing your online sales, make certain you can track your results with metrics. A year from now you’ll want to know if your investment was worth the time and money!
Contact Socius and the Distribution 2020 team for more information about how your Microsoft Dynamics ERP can support and grow your Ecommerce channel.
