We had a chat with B2B eCommerce platform Yodify about their history, lessons learned and how they are positioned to revolutionize B2B eCommerce.
B2B eCommerce is a hugely up-and-coming industry, with 2023 the year the industry surpasses the $2 Trillion USD annual mark in the US alone and continued growth expected just shy of 11%. With many businesses looking to diversify the way they ply their trade, a changing of the guard in ownership, and purchasers and salespeople transitioning to a younger demographic, there is a ton of untapped potential.
We posed some questions to CEO Brian McClelland of Yodify, a B2B eCommerce & Digital Catalog website platform. We talk solutions to many common issues B2B companies have digitizing their business in a meaningful capacity.
Why is there a need for a platform built specifically for B2B?
Today’s corporate purchasers are accustomed to buying online from large companies whose custom-built websites often cost millions of dollars. To spend this kind of money is well beyond the reach of small and medium sized companies, yet they have virtually the same requirements and audience when it comes to selling online.
Website companies will gladly tell clients they can build them an ecommerce site, the problem is these sites often end up being custom, very expensive, and less than what the client envisioned at the outset. Often this is because of scope creep, and a lack of understanding as to what all is entailed in creating a professional purpose-built eCommerce website that meets the needs of themselves and their varied clientele.
Companies procuring an eCommerce website without any experience are effectively stepping into a minefield, there is so much that can go wrong, and sadly, all too often it does.
There are many simple eCommerce platforms out there that cater to the individual entrepreneur. Many of these platforms offer similar functionality to one another, a basic checkout, basic product pages, simple configurators, and elementary inventory controls.
Unfortunately, these platforms just aren’t designed for B2B sales and can be very difficult to adapt as a functional, sound solution. What they often lack is the sophistication of their tools to scale to the complexity of B2B inventory & pricing updates, the nuance of B2B transactions including account pricing, net terms checkout, volume discounts, integration of lead times, and model number configurators that can often reach many of millions of possible permutations.
Additionally, adding and managing product data at the volume and level of detail that B2B necessitates is a huge hurdle in its own right. We see too many online catalogs & stores whose owners ran out of steam after the first 100 or so products due to the poor tool sets and services provided.
That’s where Yodify comes in, we know eCommerce inside and out, we have decades of hands-on experience building and running eCommerce websites for industrial companies who sell complex products. We’ve refined the process so well that we decided to help other companies with their catalog and eCommerce requirements, saving them time and money. We simply created a platform that encompassed all the sophisticated tools we’d built over two decades and developed an intuitive user-interface to empower clients to easily manage and even build their own websites.
With the incredible growth in the B2B eCommerce sector businesses know they need to step up and implement professional and robust online product catalogs and stores to engage the web-savvy customer demographic that now effectively insist on utilizing eCommerce. There is a limitless amount of untapped potential in the B2B space for businesses and their clients. Professional and interactive online catalogs and eCommerce stores cultivate relationships in a digital age, 24 hours every day. Now there’s a purpose-built platform for B2B, it’s Yodify.
A website is much more than just a place to display and sell products. A website is a digital expression of a company, a consummate guide to all things customer-related. A great website should mirror the companies’ best qualities and DNA. A professional design, intuitive navigational structure to guide customers to exactly what they’re looking for whether it’s a product or brand, corporate policy, order history, addresses, payment methods, quote history or contact details, all presenting well and reliably on mobile, tablet and desktop. It’s ideal to connect your eCommerce store to your accounting system with an API, then you get real-time inventory and your sales personnel and customers see what you actually have in stock.
A great website is a wealth of knowledge for both your employees and customers, it emulates knowledgeable engineers, technicians, support staff and sales personnel, and it supports them too. It’s not meant to replace great staff, it’s a platform for them to continually enrich to meet their customers’ evolving needs.
Yodify fills this large gap in the market for capable solutions that address the many pain-points of running an effective B2B sales and quoting system.
What are the challenges of selling complex products online?
Some products, particularly in the industrial space, are immensely complex, and a single product series can often address many unique applications – differentiated by a single digit in a 10 to 40+ character model number. This typically leads to dozens of pages of single SKU listings that are likely not relevant to a given purchaser. With subtle differences in a quagmire of choices, this leaves far too much content for purchasers to sift through. Looking for a needle in a haystack is not an ideal research & purchasing experience.
Organizing products by high-level series is the first step to providing a clear path to purchase (or quote) products for B2B clients. We create MPN/SKU lists within each product series to provide an additional layer of structure & clarity, while still catering to convenient filter & search-based browsing.
Powerful dynamic model number configurators are available to empower sales teams & customers to build a model number based on the application requirements, giving a massive boost to understanding, accessibility & efficiency. Clear communication between customers and sales teams begins typically with online research and the easier it is to get on the same page, the faster the order process is.
How do you solve the issue of product data management?
If any business resources are limited, product data management can be an absolute time-sink, often performed as an additional duty by one or more individuals in an organization, these individuals often having other priorities. This generally leaves the task incomplete and woefully inadequate, resulting in dumbing down of their website by giving up and simply pointing their traffic to their suppliers websites, effectively telling their customers to go elsewhere.
This is another key hurdle we have overcome with the Yodify platform. By identifying early on that half the struggle of creating and maintaining a digital catalog in the industrial, commercial and wholesale space is the management of product data, we created the Yodify Library.
The Library removes the burden for each business to recreate the same in-depth product information from scratch every time, providing a shift in focus and resources from creation to curation. Single click adoption from the Yodify Library of pre-built products (many tens of thousands of product series with trillions of configurable SKUs) makes populating a catalog a breeze, done in matter of minutes, not months. Products are continuously added and updated, in partnership with brands and clients to keep their Yodify-powered sites up-to-date with relevant content.
Why are quality B2B eCommerce solutions so expensive?
This is something we hear a lot. Many companies spend tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes millions, working with firms that don’t understand their business, only to end up with an ill-suited & ill-fated solution delivered months or years overdue. Typically, in order to get anything live in the desired timeframe there is compromise, often foregoing core functionality that websites require in order to be classed as a true asset.
The answer is it doesn’t have to be expensive. There’s been a glaring gap in affordable B2B solutions. Yodify is uniquely positioned to deliver the functionality customers everywhere need to run their business that fits within their budget.
Yodify, a powerful website building platform, is adaptive and flexible with sophisticated tools enabling clients to build and customize their websites to suit their requirements. We have industrial, commercial & wholesale clients that have implemented and effectively manage their critical online stores. By providing superior tools and support we deliver the best B2B solution in the world in a cost-effective, transformational way.
What makes Yodify uniquely positioned to deliver?
I have a 25+ year background designing and building eCommerce sites for industrial manufacturing, distribution, resellers, and manufacturers representatives, I initially commissioned a well-known national tech company to build my first corporate website back in 1999, to my detriment they proved they could charge enormous sums of money month after month, and take well over a year to supply a virtually useless website that didn’t provide the any of the functionality they promised. This frustrating path, paved with wasted time and money, led me to overcome these challenges by hiring my own team of extremely talented developers and designers to build a solution that works the way serious B2B businesses need it to. I’ve heard many business people over the years tell me they’ve had similar negative experiences, and once I’d built everything my companies needed, I decided to help others, thus Yodify was born.
It is my pleasure to deliver repeatable success in launching client’s eCommerce websites & online catalogs with the crucial functionality required to meet the needs of industrial, commercial and wholesale businesses throughout the world.
Taking the lessons I’ve learned and my passion for excellence, we’ve distilled Yodify into a feature-rich and powerful website platform that delivers mission-critical solutions for industrial, commercial and wholesale B2B. Book a demo with the Yodify team today for a custom walkthrough of exactly how the platform can benefit your business.
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