Who ya gonna call when e-commerce goes down?

Every IT vendor with their hat in the ring frames the ecommerce question as a matter of technology. But it’s so much more than that. It’s a matter of your core business and competence, your needs, and most importantly–as SAP found in a recent study–it’s a matter of where you’ll place your trust.

Just the little things, really!

Yes, you’re making a decision about the technology and the architecture. But more importantly, you’re making a business model decision on who you’re going to work with, how, and at what level you’ll work with them. You’re also making a decision with lots of trust behind it. For better or worse, that decision will affect the life of your e-commerce endeavor.

I want to change this conversation. We’re 10 years into the technology-centered debate. Does anyone really believe that Amazon Web Services, Azure, or any other hosted services provider isn’t here to stay? Do people really believe that the only way to run their datacenter is to put it where they can touch the rack to give themselves confidence? Those days are over!

Today, the real question is:

Who are you going to call when your e-commerce store goes down?

I think that’s a valid question. Research has shown that people will spend more to avoid risk and loss than to win something.

Who owns your ecommerce stack, top to bottom?

When a B2B e-commerce store goes offline, the first question is, “What part of the stack broke?” If you can’t answer that question, who are you going to call? Who owns your ecommerce stack from top to bottom?

Our business model is built to own that question. Since we manage the entire stack, we give you one throat to choke when something breaks. That’s one phone number to call–though actually, you won’t have to call. Our monitoring is so sophisticated, we discover outages and issues immediately. In fact, we’ll notify you when something goes bump in the night–and we’ll let you know we’re fixing it.

In other words, we empower you to stop worrying about ecommerce and get back to the core of your business.

How is this possible? Through the power of our cloud business model.

The essence of the cloud model: Partnership first

Believe it or not, the cloud model isn’t about the technology. It’s about the partnership. When we started this company, we deliberately chose a cloud model because it would empower us to be trusted advisors and partners. It would enable us to create better value than what the market was offering in on-premise solutions.

How? Because a cloud model gives us full visibility into the stack. For example, when something breaks, our engineers don’t have to call your customer to find out what browser they were using, what items they placed in the cart, what they clicked on, etc. Our engineers actually see all that data and more in our analytics tools. They can pinpoint exactly what conditions created the error, which gives them the tools they need to find a solution fast.

So how does all this relate to trust?

What some companies call “trust”, others might call “locked in.” But “trust” and “locked in” aren’t the same thing. Trust degrades to “locked in” when the trust has been broken or value is no longer being delivered. That happens. But our ideal client is self-aware enough at the onset of our relationship to admit that their core competency isn’t B2B eCommerce. They know their strengths and weaknesses well enough to want to lean on the experts.

This is an important point. Who are you going to trust? To some degree or another, everyone trusts themselves. I trust myself to get up in the morning, make some coffee, and start working. I trust myself to make a good decision on what car I buy or where I choose to live.

But you don’t know what you don’t know.

On my own, how trustworthy am I, really? I don’t always make good decisions. I’ve bought a lemon or two in my time, and I’ve lived in some places that weren’t ideal. What if I had asked a trusted advisor for help in making those decisions?

B2B companies face the same situation when they select an ecommerce solution. The easiest thing (seemingly) is to trust yourself and no one else. Make a one-time purchase for an on-premise solution, kiss the vendor goodbye, and trust yourself to maintain the solution, stay ahead of security risks, keep a pulse on ecommerce UX trends, and maintain tight integration to SAP.

Yikes. Do you have the competence (or capacity) on staff to do all that? Each one of those is a fulltime job, if not more.

How smart companies place their trust

Smart B2B firms know their limitations. They’re realistic about their staffing needs and their staffing capacity. They understand the burden that they’ll take on if they launch an on-premise ecommerce solution.

Smart B2B firms also know how to pick a trusted partner for ecommerce. They know where their limitations lie. By engaging a prospective vendor in conversation, they get a sense for the vendor’s genuineness and trustworthiness. It’s often a person-to-person evaluation. Would I trust this person to access my SAP system?

We’re happy to say, over the last 10 years–which is a lifetime in the B2B eCommerce world–numerous firms from the midmarket to the Fortune 100 have placed their trust in us as a cloud partner who manages their entire e-commerce stack. That gives us pride.  

What should you expect from a trusted cloud partner?

A whole lot, actually. A trustworthy partner for cloud-based ecommerce should manage the entire technology stack for you—and offer other benefits, too. Here are the benefits that a trusted cloud partner can provide through e-commerce:

• Eliminate order errors in SAP. Our real-time integration queries SAP and only allows 100% error-free orders to post to SAP.

• Integrate e-payments with SAP to get paid faster at a lower processing cost.

• Real-time SAP inventory displays in the e-commerce store so your customers see what they can buy right now.

• Offer configurable products in the e-commerce store through our integration with SAP variant configuration.

• Customized B2B order management gives you the portal you and your customers need to see SAP order data in one place.

• Improve customer support by eliminating the phone/fax/email burden on your CSRs so they can focus on more complex problems.

• Personalize your customer experience with individual catalogs and suggested products related to your customer’s major products.

Everything required to implement, deploy, support, enhance, and extend that technology—that’s our business model. We are a trusted partner. We’re not selling software and running away. The bulk of our compensation comes over the long haul as a client stays in production. We stand in stark opposition to software companies which “cash in” right away and then walk out of the picture. We’ve been in business for 10 years, and our first 3 clients are still with us today.

In cloud we trust

The market has shown a preference for cloud-based software, but there’s still a lot of work to be done. Too many B2B firms believe the lie that on-premise will give them more “control.” Actually, it will–but with great power comes great responsibility. Not every company is prepared to take on that responsibility–nor should they, strategically. They are manufacturers, not eCommerce companies. Most manufacturers don’t supply their own phone systems. They don’t build their own delivery trucks. They outsource the things that they need which aren’t their core competence.

At Corevist, we want to change how B2B manufacturers do business. We want to enable their digital transformation (which means a better bottom line for them) while maintaining the highest-quality SAP ecommerce solution on the planet. We’ve been doing it for ten years—here’s to another decade and more.

Moving forward: Case study

Want to learn more about cloud-based ecommerce that integrates with your SAP system? Click below to download a case study on our client, Drive Medical. This global medical manufacturer was struggling to keep their online catalog updated. With Corevist Commerce, Drive Medical achieved a real-time integration to SAP that revolutionized the company’s business. No more syncing the catalog, and no more manual order entry by CSRs. Click to read more!

Download the case study