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Shoptalk US is just around the corner! We invite YOU to join us for this exciting three-day conference from March 26th to March 29th in Las Vegas. With over 8,000 attendees, 500+ speakers, and 300+ exhibitors, Shoptalk US is the retail industry’s premier event of the year. By attending, you’ll learn from industry leaders, gain new ideas, and network with peers to stay ahead of the game in retail.

The dedicated HCL Customer Experience team will be there, and we are offering YOU the chance to sign up in advance for 1-1 meetings with the team! We look forward to sharing insights with you on how to transform your digital commerce strategy and drive growth in today’s rapidly evolving marketplace.

Our expertise in the retail industry has already helped some of the biggest brands unlock growth with our commerce solutions. We’re excited that several of our HCL Commerce customers, including Abercrombie & Fitch, Lowe’s, Boots/Walgreen Alliance, and IKEA, will be keynote speakers at the event.

And that’s not all: We have a special treat in store! Visit our coffee cart for a FREE cup of coffee!

Don’t miss out on this incredible opportunity to learn, connect, and grow your business! Let’s grab a cup of coffee together, and let’s discuss how HCL Commerce can help you transform your digital commerce strategy and drive growth.

Send an email to David Lebowitz, Steven Drane or Sierra Bhatia and let’s pre-book a 1-1 meeting at Shoptalk US!

Learn more about Shoptalk here.

This executive conversation by Digital Commerce 360 with Senior Director of Product Management, HCL Commerce, Brian Gillespie first appeared in the Digital Commerce 360 report Methods to Mastering E-commerce Marketplaces. Download the full report here.

B2B e-commerce is more competitive than ever, and many companies are turning to marketplace strategies to gain a competitive edge. Marketplaces offer companies an opportunity to both expand their product assortment and their reach with very little business risk. To discuss a modular approach to building a robust e-commerce site that leverages the power of marketplaces, Digital Commerce 360 spoke with Brian Gillespie, senior director of product management at HCL Commerce.

What is driving the growth of B2B marketplaces?
B2B companies are looking for ways to rise above the competition, and creating easier, more satisfying customer experiences is one way they’re doing that. Marketplaces make it easy for B2B companies to offer their buyers a one-stop shop. They give B2B buyers more product options while allowing B2B companies to expand the breadth of their offering, and they also offer more flexibility around the supply chain.

For example, one large automotive company implemented a marketplace to create an all encompassed parts and accessories shop for both its B2B and B2C customers. The company has brought all of its partners and distributors onto the marketplace, where customers can go to purchase both physical and digital goods from a single location — simplifying the experience for everyone.

How have marketplace technologies evolved in recent years?
Marketplaces used to be an afterthought from a commerce perspective. You had to stand up a B2B e-commerce site and then contract with a third-party vendor to implement a marketplace that needed to be integrated with commerce platform. It was a complex process.

Now, marketplaces are native in e-commerce solutions. You no longer need third-party integrations or to synchronize data across different platforms. It’s a single solution with all the tooling in place, so they’re very easy to stand up without the support of IT.

What typical challenges do B2B companies face when implementing marketplace initiatives?
It’s important to make sure your organization is ready for marketplaces. There are a lot of back-end processes that challenge companies: How do you negotiate with your suppliers from contractual standpoint? How do you settle and handle payments across the organization? There are a lot of complexities on the commerce side which is solved with the new marketplace solution, however, organizations need to look at business processes such as the back-end payments and accounts receivable.

What strategies or technologies help them overcome these challenges?
Composable commerce lets B2B companies piece together e-commerce sites with the features they need for their business, but then they have to tie these pieces together from different vendors. HCL Commerce takes that same modular approach, but it comes from a single vendor, HCL. Each feature — including marketplaces — is its own module, and then we ensure everything works together (search, promotions, B2B pricing, contracts, entitlements, buying experience, business tooling, etc.).

The B2B organizations no longer have to stitch everything together. Additionally, with everything in a single platform, all the data is in one place — giving companies and customers visibility into inventory, product information and pricing.

Marketplaces no longer have to be complex. With a single solution, you can get them up and running quickly and easily.

Download the full report here.

This executive conversation by Digital Commerce 360 with John Beechen, Product Manager, HCL Commerce first appeared in the Digital Commerce 360 B2B E-commerce Quarterly Market Report, Q3, 2022. Download the full report here.

Creating B2C-like online shopping experiences in B2B
B2B buyers today want a B2C-like online shopping experience. As e-commerce technology has evolved, B2B companies now have more options to offer convenient online shopping options to their customers. But some companies still believe their business is too complex to support easy e-commerce transactions — and they’re at risk of getting passed up by their more forward-thinking competitors. To discuss how the combination of strategy and technology will help B2B companies delight customers with more B2C-like shopping experiences, Digital Commerce 360 B2B spoke with John Beechen, product manager at HCL Commerce.

What are the biggest e-commerce challenges B2B companies face?
B2B companies often don’t have a strong relationship with their customer because they’ve sold through channels outside of their control. Coupled with the death of the third-party cookie, companies need new ways to better understand how their customer wants to buy and the channels they want to buy through — so that they can personalize the experience. This creates complexity.

The other challenge is the investments companies made in their marketing solutions, has resulted in data about customer behavior locked up in silos. To deliver a personalized experience, B2B companies need modern solutions to unlock and serve up the right information and data from those silos in real-time.

What do the most successful B2B companies’ e-commerce strategies look like?
B2B companies create the most successful e-commerce strategies only after they conduct a full evaluation of their entire sales process and touchpoints with their customers to understand any friction points. If a company launches an e-commerce site but has no idea who their customers are or how they want to buy, their customers will not use their online store. It’s a waste of time and money.

What technologies are critical to B2B ecommerce success?
B2B e-commerce is just one component of a successful B2B engagement solution. A B2B portal — where customers can log in to get invoices, order history, product literature and more — is a key component. In this portal, to make life easier, the customer should only see the products they are entitled to purchase and their specific contracted price. The buying experience should also provide the customer with options for their preferred method of payment.

B2B companies also need technologies to drive market awareness and encourage deeper engagement through curated experiences. This comes from experiential data, which needs to capture and analyze customer behaviors throughout the entire relationship — differentiating between company-specific data and buyer-specific data.

Another capability that makes it easier for customers is punchout, which allows a buyer to buy from within their own procurement platform, punching out the order to the e-commerce solution. Cloud-native architecture, intelligent search capabilities, inventory visibility, and analytics tools are also important technologies in a successful B2B e-commerce platform.

How can B2B companies get started with their e-commerce initiatives?
They can partner with a technology provider like HCL. We look at a company’s entire sales process and help them understand how they want to compete. Then we usurp their competition by doing something new and unique using technology. HCL’s CX Studio is a free advisory team within HCL Software that helps companies develop their customer experience-related strategies and priorities, based on the company’s business priorities and desired outcomes.

Download the full report here.