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Your business suffers from disconnected data.

Siloed systems and outdated platforms lead to operational business pains.

Data is the lifeblood of all B2B and manufacturing companies. It fuels business model decisions, creates customer opportunities, and identifies areas where companies can realize operational efficiencies. Unfortunately, many companies cannot leverage the full potential of the data at their fingertips. It lives in legacy systems, disconnected workflows and stand-alone platforms. 

We have outlined which of your areas of operations are suffering from disconnected and siloed data and the typical scenarios where we find clients in pain.
 

SECTION 1/6

Shipping & fulfillment

If most of your answers in this section are YES, you are having issues with your shipping and fulfillment. Read below for some of the typical causes from past clients.

• Doing manual labour where you can implement automation — Often, companies are unaware of the possibilities for workflow automation due to the limitations of their commerce platform and the lack of integrations available.
  
  Example: Is your team manually checking FedEx rates and creating and printing the appropriate labels for fulfillment? The solution would be to integrate your commerce backend with FedEx and do this entire process via a web service.
• Don’t have accurate or appropriate data — Many clients believe automation is not possible because they need to pull exact information to determine shipping rates (dimensions, weight), and that data isn’t available within the commerce platform. This lack of information could be a limitation of your current platform. We can build a more robust commerce solution that uses product and container information to quickly and accurately determine shipping rates within the checkout flow.
• Product anomalies or conditional rules — Certain business models have restrictions on how much of a product can be shipped or where they can ship to, affecting the user checkout flow. Same as above, this could be a limitation of your platform.

Solution

With an open source commerce architecture, you aren’t forced to choose a single digital commerce platform and rely on its core competencies. You can deconstruct commerce components (i.e., shipping), build the exact functionality that best suits your business needs, and create automated workflows that streamline operations.

SECTION 2/6

Inventory management

If most of your answers in this section are YES, you are having issues with your inventory management. Read below for some of the typical causes from past clients.

• Managing inventory across multiple sales channels — Nowadays, it’s common for companies to sell through various avenues, both digital (website, 3rd party marketplaces) and physical (retail location, trade shows). Unfortunately, what’s not common is an inventory management system that can service all avenues simultaneously and update immediately. This disconnect can cause two outcomes:

1. Overselling — Your various channels pull stock from the same inventory management, but if numbers don’t update in real-time, you risk selling products that are no longer in stock. These shortages lead to penalization on 3rd party marketplaces (Amazon) and poor customer service.
2. Underselling — To ensure you don’t oversell, you have to allocate stock to each channel which could mean leaving money on the table when a user has to purchase less than they wanted. It also means more manual management of your channels and your stock levels.

Solution

With an open source commerce architecture, you can take a headless (API first) approach. This solution allows for unlimited integrations with various channels and platforms and gives you complete control of your data which can then be aggregated and disseminated to the right systems.

SECTION 3/6 

Reporting

If most of your answers in this section are YES, you are having issues with your current reporting capabilities. Read below for some of the typical causes from past clients

• US tax rates are super complicated — If you sell in the US, you know how complicated tax rates can be. Not only do they change on the state level, but by county and zip code as well. Those parameters also change quite often. If you manually update your tax tables, you spend a lot of time doing work that you could automate.
• Unable to automatically isolate tax for reconciliation — To ensure you aren’t paying tax on tax, you need to separate your taxes from your sales revenue. You also need to separate your sales tax and your shipping tax for proper reconciliation for most companies. We’ve had several clients doing this step manually. The good news is that this, too, can be automated.
• Relying on standard reporting — SaaS platforms are built for the masses, so their reports are often top-level analytics offering you a 30,000 ft view of what’s going on. Often clients have to take their data and manually create reports specific to departments or company-wide KPIs.

Solution

With an open source commerce architecture, you no longer need to rely on the native capabilities of your commerce platform to perform the reporting needed.

• You could integrate with an automated tax software that updates your tax tables, extracts tax data and imports it to your accounting software automatically. Saving you time and money on manual labour and human error.
• Reporting can be done by integrating with a robust reporting and analytics suite, or custom reports can be built that pull the data directly from your commerce backend, CRM, and marketing platforms.

SECTION 4/6 

Operations & labour

If most of your answers in this section are YES, you are having issues with operations and labour. Read below for some of the typical causes from past clients.

• You have outgrown your manual business model — This is a good problem to have. It is also the most common pain we see with our clients. They have experienced accelerated growth and are stuck working with platforms that once did what they needed but now aren’t able to keep up with the demands of the growing business. Instead of adopting new and better systems, clients hire more people and create manual workarounds, forcing their workflows into an antiquated system. Why do they do this? Depending on their current commerce solution, they may not be able to integrate with new systems or customize existing ones, and the idea of moving to a new commerce solution sounds too daunting to take on.

Solution

With an open source commerce architecture, you are not restricted to any one platform. The modular nature of open source makes it easy to adopt and adapt new and existing systems to suit the exact needs of your business. This modularity allows you to streamline your operations, consolidate redundant technology and eliminate swivel chair processes for optimal efficiency.

SECTION 5/6 

Marketing & sales

If most of your answers in this section are NO, you are having issues with your sales and marketing functions. Read below for some of the typical causes from past clients.

• Your commerce platform limits the abilities of your marketing team — Commerce platforms are built to sell. The act of selling is different from generating business. The core capability of a commerce site is putting an item in a cart and taking that cart through the checkout flow. The core responsibility of a marketer is getting the user to put the item in the cart. Your team needs to have the ability to create narrative-driven customer journeys that drive them to make a purchase. With most commerce platforms, content is secondary, but any marketer will tell you it needs to be the site's primary focus.
• Your commerce platform does not have personalization capabilities — Personalization tactics are the true differentiator in digital commerce offerings. Being able to deliver custom messaging, suggested products based on past orders or current items, and upsell items at a glance lead to increased revenue and improved customer experience.

Solution

With an open source commerce architecture, you can seamlessly integrate a content management system and a commerce platform. This ability gives your marketing team the freedom to create personalized customer experiences, test product offerings, and sharpen messaging without sacrificing the brand.

SECTION 6/6 

Current platform capabilities

If the majority of your answers in this section are YES, it sounds like you are wishing for, or require a lot of, functionality your current platform is unable to provide. Before jumping ship to a new platform or even spending countless hours researching platforms, we encourage clients to truly understand their business needs. Invest in a solution that will give you a return in the long run. If you focus on upfront cost and basic needs, you will be right back here.

If the majority of your answers in this section are NO, we probably weren’t asking questions applicable to your needs, our bad. We believe anyone working in digital commerce should always be looking for what’s next and how they can push themselves to be better whether you need to improve operations, grow sales and customer retention, increase brand awareness, or all of the above. Challenge yourself to take an honest hard look at your current commerce platform and ask what you want and need it to do in order to be better.

If the majority of your answers in this section are WE ALREADY HAVE THIS CAPABILITY, it sounds like you have a relatively robust commerce platform. BUT you wouldn’t have come this far if you didn’t feel like things could be better. Be sure to read through the diagnostics above in your problem areas and start thinking about how you can strengthen your commerce business. Challenge yourself to take an honest hard look at your current commerce platform and ask what you want and need it to do in order to be better.