Have you ever encountered a situation where customers visited your site intending to order but went elsewhere because your page didn’t load or was too slow? Losing customers in such a way reduces your company’s revenues and can harm its reputation too.
Adopting scalable eCommerce software for B2B early on permits easy growth and provides a positive customer experience. Best of all, it is possible to achieve without significant investment or increased expenses. Moreover, considering custom marketplace platform development can be a strategic move, allowing you to tailor your eCommerce platform to your unique business requirements and customer preferences.
This article explores eCommerce scalability, the benefits it provides, and the consequences of ignoring it.
The Importance of B2B eCommerce Scalability
Digital commerce is booming. In fact, trends show B2B eCommerce sales in the US alone are likely to reach a massive $3 trillion over the coming four years. Similarly, retail is experiencing significant growth, with digital sales predicted to account for 31% of the US market by 2030. As a result, businesses are rapidly moving their sales online, creating scalability challenges.
Planning for scalability early on can prevent downtime, ensure timely deliveries, and keep customers happy. Ignoring scalability risks losing customers, making a well-devised scalability plan critical for adapting to changing demands and thriving in the digital environment.
What is Scalable B2B eCommerce Software?
Scalability in eCommerce does not relate solely to the ability of software to handle increased traffic, but it also encompasses several other factors, including:
1. User Experience
Everyone who shops on eCommerce sites expects to find what they are looking for quickly and easily without encountering any issues. Therefore, a growing eCommerce business needs software that can manage an expanding product range, increasing transaction volume, and more customers without downtime or slowdowns.
2. The Needs of Your Business
Scalable eCommerce allows for efficient operations, new opportunities, and revenue maximisation. Moreover, it reduces errors, saves time and money, and provides multiple catalogues and websites enabling you to target a wider audience. Additionally, inventory management and automated workflows streamline your business operations.
Scalable eCommerce also ensures security and compliance with expanding capabilities and new requirements while protecting customer and company data. The overall result is improved customer satisfaction and more conversions.
3. Business Agility
Increased agility and flexibility lead to revenue generation, customer-centricity, and sustainable growth.
Scalable eCommerce allows for pivoting new business models, such as franchises or marketplaces, and supporting multiple models without having to retool. They are crucial for companies wishing to grow through mergers and acquisitions, as they enable seamless integration and prevent system incompatibilities, costly workarounds, or re-platforming. Additionally, scalability removes barriers to growth by offering vendor agnosticism, allowing businesses to choose digital commerce software that doesn’t stand in the way of their operations or goals.
4. Opportunities for Growth
To avoid falling behind, your eCommerce software must easily accommodate your business growth, for example, through acquisitions, opening new offices, or adding distribution centres.
Scalable eCommerce solutions enable easy expansion to neighbouring verticals, new geographic locations, and new selling channels via unlimited localisation and multiple websites. Scalability ensures site speed, accessibility, and security – essential for customer conversions and retention – are never compromised. With scalable eCommerce software, it is possible to adopt any business model and support unlimited sales channels, thereby building resilience and increasing awareness and sales.
Scalable eCommerce Software Key Benefits
Scalability offers many more advantages than just enhancing performance and readiness for expansion and growth. For example, it also brings:
- Greater personalisation possibilities that give each customer a convenient and unique purchasing experience.
- Cost and time savings due to increased efficiency from automation.
- Simplified launching of new product lines, catalogues, and storefronts, so you can quickly and easily enter new markets and adopt different selling models.
- Detailed analytics and data giving detailed insights into customer purchasing behaviour. Such data allows you to focus your marketing and sales activities with pinpoint accuracy.
All the benefits offered by scalable eCommerce software will help you stay ahead of the competition and future-proof your business for years to come.
How to Switch to Scalable eCommerce
To embrace scalable eCommerce, it is necessary to establish clear goals and allocate the resources required to implement them. The following steps will guide you to do this:
Understand your business and customer needs
Before implementing a scalable eCommerce solution, be sure to fully understand your business and customer needs. What are their expectations, how can you meet them, and what are your growth plans?
Engage stakeholders and allocate resources
Scalable eCommerce requires collaboration between IT teams, sales operations, and business partners. Involve stakeholders from every department early on to ease friction during adoption and create greater ownership of the transformation.
Evaluate and select the best solution for your business needs
Research and evaluate different solutions that fit your needs. Consider infrastructure, systems, and processes that may need modification. Measure performance and make any necessary adjustments.
Key Features of Good Scalable eCommerce Software
Choose eCommerce software that can grow with your business and meet your long-term needs, not just your current ones. Look for a robust and scalable solution that offers powerful features and enterprise-level capabilities, such as:
- Built specifically for B2B, or at least has robust options to render it suitable for B2B applications.
- Open-source code to avoid being tied to one particular vendor.
- An API that enables front- and back-end interaction with as many business systems as you are likely to need.
- Powerful search features and catalogues capable of containing unlimited products.
- Robust analytics and reports with segmentation capabilities.
- Workflows geared towards maximising your and your customers’ efficiency.
- Ability to deploy flexibly in the cloud or onsite.
- Solid security and compliance features.
Oro’s Scalable eCommerce Software Solutions
Oro is a market leader in scalable digital commerce solutions that can help businesses achieve their goals and support their growth plans. Whether you want to start with a single functionality, validate your idea incrementally, or pivot quickly, Oro’s products can accommodate your needs.
Oro offers a range of solutions, including OroCRM for centralised customer communications and marketing and OroCommerce for digital commerce. Why not start with OroCRM and easily expand to OroCommerce when your business is ready to grow?
Scale Your eCommerce Business with OroCommerce
Scalable B2B eCommerce software is crucial for businesses wanting to stay ahead in the competitive online market. As they expand, they must be able to manage a growing number of visitors and sales. Moreover, the ability to automate internal processes and gather valuable customer data allows for increased efficiency, a better marketing strategy, and a vastly improved customer purchasing experience.
At Oro, we recognise that each business has distinct scalability needs and growth plans. That’s why our applications are open-source to give you maximum flexibility. Our products provide comprehensive features, capabilities, infrastructure, and support ecosystem. With flexible B2B eCommerce software from OroCommerce, you can be confident that your business can overcome any obstacles long into the future.
