POWERFUL PARTNERSHIPS

Gesso: Extending Online Sales to Manufacturing

Great partnerships between powerful platforms make it easy for manufacturers to become leaders in digital commerce. Let us make those introductions for you through our dynamic partner network.

Digital Transformation: More Than Commerce

Digital transformation for B2B Manufacturers is about more than ecommerce capabilities. According to The State of Composable Commerce 2023, 31% of companies surveyed use a content management system (CMS), with 30% also relying heavily on an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. 

This reliance on these critical platforms is exactly why Gesso’s partnership network includes the likes of Acumatica, Drupal and Storyblok. Our goal with these carefully selected partners is to provide the core systems a B2B manufacturer needs to meet their business and customer experience objectives successfully.

Enterprise Resource Planning 

ERP: Industry-focused business functionality that helps companies see and connect every facet of their business in the cloud.

Acumatica

Positioned as a leader in cloud-based ERP solutions, Acuamtica’s offering starkly contrasts traditional, monolithic on-premise systems, such as SAP or NetSuite. Acumatica’s cloud-centric approach brings scalability, accessibility, and a significant reduction in total cost of ownership, marking a new era in ERP technology.

Content Management Systems

Best-of-breed: SaaS or Open Source content management that gives non-developer users the freedom to build unique and rich front-end content.

Storyblok

Storyblok's integration with Gesso revolutionizes content management. It allows manufacturers to create rich, dynamic narratives by enabling users to edit frontend components, not just static content pages. This partnership empowers marketers to control content directly, ensuring brand consistency and relevance.

Drupal

Drupal CMS makes customizing the look of your site easier, adds support for decoupled navigation, improves content modelling and editing, block management, performance, and more — including giving non-tech users like marketers the ability to edit and update frontend components beyond static pages.

Design System

Modern & scalable, Gesso’s design system acts as your brand’s backbone by maintaining consistency and serving as the instruction manual for your online assets. 

The hidden gem in Gesso, the magic that works behind the curtain, is the specially configured and curated design system.

A design system is a collection of reusable functional elements–components and patterns – guided by clear standards that product teams use to create a consistent experience across a range of products. In a decoupled (headless) architecture, any “head” framework that can consume the design system's components, resulting in a seamless, consistent UI across sites, applications & devices. 

Figma

Figma is a highly collaborative rapid prototyping and user interface design tool. Applications such as Adobe XD or Sketch are similar tools. 

We use Figma in our design system pipeline, allowing us to update ‘tokens’ in a design file to reflect the look and feel of a component in a live project build. Figma is a powerful prototyping and design tool that allows as much or as little team collaboration as needed.

Storybook

Storybook is an open-source tool for building UI components and partial layouts in isolation. It streamlines UI development, testing, and documentation. Storybook is the “realization” of the conversation between UI/UX and front-end developers. Storybook is used to demo how components behave and function and help give context to design elements.

Ecommerce

Gesso can help overcome the complex product configuration edge cases found in B2B while leveraging best-in-class SaaS B2B platforms.

BigCommerce

Meet buyer demands with a more intuitive, customizable ecommerce platform —built for the unique needs of B2B. BigCommerce provides the necessary infrastructure for intricate sales processes, making digital commerce more accessible for manufacturers.

Shopify

B2B on Shopify is a suite of features that allows manufacturers and B2B to sell through an online store. Core functionality includes customer-specific catalogues, payment terms, adding purchase order numbers and draft orders, and choosing currencies while connecting multiple customers and locations in a single company profile. 

Drupal Commerce

Drupal Commerce powers ecommerce innovation through every stage of growth. At its core, it is lean and mean, enforcing strict development standards and leveraging the best features of Drupal for maximum flexibility. Ecommerce platforms are often developed with an application mindset, highlighting what you can do with them out of the box. Drupal Commerce was created with a framework-first perspective, focusing on what you can build with it. Drupal Commerce enables teams to adapt to change and scale efficiently.

Gesso Partnership Ecosystem: Making B2B Commerce Better

In the report mentioned above, 57% of respondents claim they had not implemented a composable commerce approach because of the time it takes to implement the needed transformation. Rather than taking years to have a solution come to fruition, Gesso can bring fundamental change to an organization quickly, with improvements to features and custom functionality iteratively, fostering a culture of cutting-edge innovation and adoption.

Gesso’s ultimate goal is to reduce the time it takes B2B Manufacturers to create an impactful and profitable online presence. Using a composable approach to digital commerce with an accelerator like Gesso makes it possible to implement the actual change manufacturers need to modernize their sales process and technical infrastructure in record time. 

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Editor’s note
This article was originally published on December 28, 2023. It has been updated for accuracy and freshness