B2B-selling organizations are witnessing unprecedented growth in the digital commerce landscape. As companies strive to enhance their digital maturity and keep pace with technological advancements, understanding the language of modern commerce has become a critical step forward. From basic terms to technical jargon and eCommerce sales acronyms, mastering the language is essential for business leaders aiming to thrive and stay competitive. This multi-part blog series will define these crucial terms, equipping firms with the knowledge they need to navigate the complexities of modern digital commerce and drive sustained success in an increasingly digital world.
COMPOSABLE COMMERCE
Composable commerce is an approach to eCommerce technology that leverages three core traits — cloud-native, component-based and tech-agnostic — to allow businesses to choose the commerce components that best work for them (search, cart, checkout, etc.) and easily integrate them. This modular approach enables businesses to create a powerful commerce architecture that meets their specific needs with best-of-breed solutions, ensuring flexibility and scalability for future growth.
It is widely acknowledged that composable commerce is the evolution of headless commerce, invented by Dirk Hoerig, co-founder of commercetools and introduced in 2013 to make it easier for businesses to capitalize on additional sales channels such as smartphones. Unlike traditional monolithic eCommerce platforms, which offer a one-size-fits-all solution, headless and composable commerce provide an open, agile environment that empowers you to build outstanding buying experiences and respond to customer expectations on the fly.
Adopting composable commerce is a key strategy for B2B firms looking to increase their digital maturity as it allows them to gain the flexibility and agility needed to expand their commerce capabilities and tap into growth opportunities quickly. With a composable solution in place, manufacturers, distributors and wholesalers can provide more tailored and responsive customer experiences, adapting to changing market demands and technological advancements. Ultimately, it empowers you to deliver unique value propositions and retain a competitive advantage.
My perspective of composable commerce is building something modular instead of monolithic. With that comes the advantage of flexibility so you can meet business goals faster. In healthcare or any other industry, this flexibility provides businesses with the option to scale fast and meet their targets in a relatively fast time frame, bringing in the best-of-breed components to develop a system that runs as a seamless ecosystem, yet allows you to plug and play.
BACKEND LEAD, ALCON
OMNICHANNEL COMMERCE
Omnichannel commerce refers to a seamless and integrated approach to delivering customer experiences across multiple digital channels and touchpoints. It gives customers the confidence that a company’s branding, pricing and campaigns will be consistent regardless of how or where a customer interacts with a brand. In addition (and possibly more importantly), it ensures that customers can continue their buying journey even if they switch from one channel to another mid-journey.
For B2B firms, delivering omnichannel commerce ensures they can meet the growing expectations of business buyers who are now demanding purchasing experiences akin to B2C interactions. Basically, it makes the online purchasing experience better. But, the benefits extend beyond just making customers happy. When you implement true omnichannel commerce, you are able to gather more comprehensive data on buyer behaviors and preferences, which empowers you to deliver more powerful, personalized experiences, enhancing buyer satisfaction, fostering stronger relationships and improving customer retention.
The concept of omnichannel is also a little bigger than just meeting customers where they are (by enabling them to shop on any channel) — it’s about meeting the customer's demands where they are. I always say it's about being omnipresent wherever the customer needs to be. You go in, stand next to them and deliver.
VICE PRESIDENT, IT DIGITAL PLATFORMS, BEACON BUILDING PRODUCTS
UNIFIED COMMERCE
Unified commerce is the concept of centralizing all the data a business collects across all its brands, websites, stores, marketing channels, etc., onto a single backend — basically, creating one interconnected system of record. It is similar, yet different, from multichannel and omnichannel commerce in that it encompasses both digital and physical experiences, and acknowledges that customers don’t necessarily want the same experience on every channel or touchpoint.
Once a B2B firm centralizes all of its data onto a single backend, it creates what’s often referred to as a “golden record” for each customer — a holistic view of the customer journey, from browsing to purchasing, across all touchpoints. This enables you to better understand their preferences and behaviors.
This is particularly beneficial in a B2B environment where the buying process is a lot more collaborative and there are multiple decision makers, along with approval flows based on authorized spend amounts, etc. With a unified approach, you can facilitate buyer interactions within, gain visibility into the purchasing process and identify opportunities to better support the journey
Above all else, the single golden record that unified commerce delivers provides a better foundation for generative AI tools to tap into. So, ultimately, your customers get more personalized product recommendations, promotions and marketing messages.
We had problems in other systems — the data was constantly being synced up from one system to another — and then you'd lost it. Now we have a data lake. We process data and we have a personalization engine. So, we can pull that all into marketing automation where we drive progression marketing. But you can't do that without knowing where your data sits, where that source of truth is and where the golden record is.
VP OF TECHNOLOGY, ISC2
BUSINESS MODELING
Business modeling is the strategic practice of creating a digital commerce experience that reflects how each of your business lines/units/departments operate so the ecosystem you build supports these exact needs. It considers various components of the business, such as pricing, discounts, contracts, etc. and the unique journey each of your customers take when interacting with your company within a digital commerce ecosystem and empowers you to model your data to fit your business operations.
For example, say you have 100 business customers, and each one has negotiated a different price point with you. How do you remember that? How do you remember that all associates from customer A get 10% discount on item xyz, but associates from customer B always get free shipping, etc. Business modeling enables you to map all of the information out and reflect it in your digital experience.
B2Bs running on legacy systems are unable to leverage business modeling properly because their out-of-the-box design forces you to fit your business to their data model. With commercetools B2B Commerce, you can model your data based on how your business actually operates.
Business modeling is particularly critical for complex businesses that sell through multiple business models. For example, B2Bs and B2B2Cs, as these often have different groups of B2B customers (SMBs vs. large enterprises). It enables you to build out customized frontend experiences for each group while maintaining your centralized backend, giving you the utmost flexibility while delivering cost-efficiencies.
So most commerce solutions that are popular are basically purpose-built for B2C. Most just kind of slap on some B2B functionality and say, ‘Oh, we can do both.’ But, these distinctions really matter, so seek commerce SaaS with a flexible data model.
RESEARCH DIRECTOR, IDC
ELECTRONIC DATA INTERCHANGE (EDI)
EDI has been around since the 1960s and was originally created to replace paper-based processes for exchanging business documents. It works by converting data from a company's internal systems into standardized formats that can be exchanged with other businesses. This allows for seamless communication between different companies, regardless of their technological capabilities.
Many industries, such as healthcare, still use EDI because it works and its trusted. However, in the world we live in today there are more modern technologies such as APIs that are easier to use and have robust security for sensitive patient data.
EDI continues to be used in the B2B industry as it streamlines communication between trading partners, reducing manual data entry errors, enhancing transaction speed and lowering operational costs. Since many B2Bs continue to rely on EDI, it’s important for B2B leaders to understand the team and how it supports business operations.
We have one distribution partner in the US. They can manage to ship within one or two days, and we are not good at shipping. It's not a secret. So, we said, 'Let's set up an online market, a shop, a flagship store, especially for small customers via EDI and APIs.' We redirect orders to them and it's a win-win situation that gives a lot of possibilities for joint product development and also creates digital ties with their strategic partners, which is very good.
INTRAPRENEUR, MITSUBISHI CHEMICALS AND ADVANCED MATERIALS
USER EXPERIENCE/USER INTERFACE (UX/UI)
While user experience is pretty self-explanatory, people tend to use it interchangeably with user interface (UI) which creates some confusion. When you talk about UX, you are referring to how users feel when interacting with a company’s website, which encompasses the entire journey from the moment they land on the site to the moment they leave, hopefully after making a purchase. The goal, of course, is to offer a UX that aligns with your brand, engages visitors and is easy to navigate so customers can find what they need and checkout easily.
The UI of a website is a critical component of the UX as it focuses on the visual elements that users encounter while on your website. It includes the colors, fonts, menu bars — all the details that make a site look good. However, if the UX isn’t an intuitive, easy experience, how good your site looks doesn’t really matter.
UX/UI is crucial for B2B firms because it directly impacts how customers interact with their digital platforms, influencing buyer satisfaction, efficiency and overall business success. It is especially critical for B2Bs to design a UI that delivers a UX that is intuitive and fast. Buyers are busy and they want to be able to find what they need, access information and complete purchases quickly so they can get back to work. A positive UX/UI can differentiate you from competitors, foster long-term customer relationships and drive higher conversion rates, ultimately contributing to increased profitability.
When I was running a B2C site, we would intentionally add some friction to several areas of the site because we wanted the user to stay and explore the site and learn more. In B2B, it's the opposite. We want our customer on the site to be able to navigate as fast as possible. We understand that they're not there to discover and browse and spend hours and hours — they're there to do their jobs.
VP OF DIGITAL, DAWN FOODS
Conclusion
The majority of B2Bs today are just launching their first digital experiences or are in the midst of a digital transformation to modernize their underlying technologies and infrastructure. Understanding concepts like composable commerce, EDI and business modeling, as well as the multitude of terms associated with adopting technological advancements, can not only help you make the best decisions for their business, but it can also make the journey a little easier.
To learn more about how the B2B industry is evolving, download our white paper, Pivotal Trends and Predictions in B2B Digital Commerce in 2024.
With over a decade of experience across product and marketing teams in the tech world, Julia specializes in creating innovative, customer-first strategies and driving cross-functional growth and go-to-market initiatives.