Businesses that sell to other businesses face unique digital challenges. Think of complex pricing structures, customer-specific catalogs, large product volumes, and integration with existing ERP and CRM systems. At the same time, business customers expect the same speed and user-friendliness as their personal customers. Think, for example, of being able to place a repeat order with the click of a button. Composable Commerce offers a flexible, future-proof solution, whether you're a wholesaler, manufacturer, or brand with multiple sales channels.
What can Composable Commerce do for your B2B channel?
Composable Commerce means building your digital landscape with individual, specialized components that work seamlessly together via APIs. No more cumbersome, All-In-One solutions, but a flexible ecosystem where you choose the tools that best suit your processes. This gives B2C retailers customer-focused portals, flexible order flows, integrations with back-end systems, and the freedom to quickly add new features. But the B2B side goes even further: a basic e-commerce environment can be expanded into one that handles complex pricing strategies, larger virtual catalogs, and allows retailers to quote prices. But how does this work, and what else can Composable Commerce do for the B2B market?
What are the benefits of Composable Commerce for B2B sellers?
A Salesforce survey of 4,000 large commerce companies reveals that restrictive technology is the single biggest challenge for retailers. And this is especially true when technology is more important than ever: Gartner, the leading authority on market research, predicts that by the end of 2025, 80% of all B2B sales interactions will be digital. Companies that don't invest in technological innovation will be left behind.
A Composable platform is currently the most powerful solution a company can have. This makes it ideal for B2B sales, as Composable platforms can better accommodate the complexity of this market. Large and complex catalogs can be personalized for different customer groups without having to rebuild existing systems.
A key trend in current B2B sales is that the buying experience must increasingly resemble B2C sales. Customers increasingly expect to be able to buy both privately and professionally in the same way. This presents a challenge for many traditional B2B platforms: they are structured very differently and therefore cannot easily adapt. A Composable platform can meet this need: its modular design allows for the easy integration of specific needs. And when the market changes and a new popular trend emerges, a Composable platform adapts along with it.
What does it yield?
Moving to Composable Commerce requires a thoughtful approach at first, but yield benefits quickly:
- Increase ROI.
This cutting-edge technology increases your return on investment. With a Composable platform, you can not only offer a better customer experience than your competitors, but also expand more easily into new markets. Expand across borders and adapt your platform to regions, languages, and currencies. You can even experiment with other forms of sales, such as D2C. - Reduction of TCO.
Your Total Cost of Ownership is often lower than with a traditional platform. Because a Composable platform is always built using Cloud and SaaS technology, you have lower upgrade, hosting, and maintenance costs. - Reduction of TTM.
Your Time to Market decreases because new releases can be launched faster. Your teams can collaborate more efficiently and launch promotions and discounts faster. - Increase of you Market Share.
Composable platforms can scale quickly while maintaining their performance. This allows them to better handle increased traffic from promotions and discounts, while still offering your customers a smooth experience. This allows your platform to maintain high performance even during peak periods, retaining customers who would otherwise leave. - Improve your risk management.
With SaaS services, you can negotiate detailed SLAs (Service Level Agreements). This allows you to agree in advance on how easily your system should be accessible and how much downtime is acceptable. Should you ever be unavailable, you can even be compensated. - Improve your SKU-processing time.
You can process orders faster because you can scale more easily than with traditional platforms, allowing you to handle more traffic and transactions, run promotions, and maintain your performance. - Increase your AOV.
You can easily add tools that align with your own business goals. For example, you can focus on increasing your average order value by adding new search features or adding features that facilitate repeat orders. Moreover, a Composable platform offers lightning-fast performance, which has a demonstrable impact on conversions and revenue.
Our Experience: the Plaisio B2B-Story
For the Greek retail giant Plaisio, which operates in both B2C and B2B, we jointly developed a new commerce platform that seamlessly supports both channels. By applying a Composable approach, we were able to provide customer-specific portals, dynamic pricing, and integration with their backend for the B2B segment. The result: greater control, faster development, and a stronger digital presence.
When Plaisio approached us with their desire for a more powerful platform, we explored the matter further together. After all, before we could determine the best way to build a platform, we first needed to understand all the platform requirements. Plaisio outlined four key requirements:
- The platform has to be fast.
With the old platform, they were losing conversions due to slow loading times. Moreover, they couldn't respond quickly enough to competitors, which cost them valuable time. - The platform must scale quickly and with predictable costs.
Peak periods such as Black Friday were very taxing on the old platform, and they wanted to be able to handle this better. - The platform should be easy to use.
They wanted to be able to respond quickly to new market developments and therefore implement changes easily. This would also free up time to avoid maintenance work, allowing them to develop new features. - The platform should provide more freedom.
The old platform was developed using the services of a single vendor. While this isn't necessarily a bad thing, it can cause problems: you can become trapped in vendor lock-in. This happened at Plaisio. The old platform became too restrictive for Plaisio's ambitions and began to limit their growth.
This gave us a clear picture, and we knew exactly what kind of platform could best help them with this: a Composable platform!
