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How Affordable?

Look Beyond the Cost of Software

When evaluating a B2B commerce platform, the important question isn’t simply, “What does it cost?”

The better question is:

“What will it enable our business to do better?”

A well-designed B2B commerce platform can help your company increase sales, serve customers more efficiently, make your salespeople more productive, reduce repetitive work and get more value from the ERP and business systems you already own.

That is where affordability becomes value.

Make It Easier for Customers to Buy From You

Your customers are busy, too.

They shouldn’t always have to call or email a salesperson to find a product, check information, place an order or take care of routine account business.

A B2B commerce platform gives your customers another way to work with you—at the office, at home or after your business has closed for the day.

Make it easier to do business with you, and you create more opportunities to do business.

Help Your Salespeople Sell

B2B ecommerce doesn’t have to replace your salespeople. It can make them more effective.

Routine transactions and information requests can consume a surprising amount of a salesperson’s day. Giving customers convenient online capabilities allows your sales team to spend more time on the work where people add the greatest value: understanding customer needs, solving problems, developing relationships and generating new business.

Your commerce platform can also become another tool your salespeople use to serve their accounts.

Technology handles what technology does well. Your people spend more time doing what people do well.

Reduce Repetitive Work

When your ecommerce system and ERP work together, information doesn’t have to be repeatedly entered, copied, emailed and looked up by employees.

Integration can reduce:

Duplicate data entry
Manual order processing
Routine customer inquiries
Time spent looking up information in multiple systems
Errors caused by transferring information manually
Administrative work associated with online orders

Every company is different, but reducing repetitive work can improve both productivity and customer service.

Grow Without Growing Overhead at the Same Rate

Growth often creates an uncomfortable problem.

More customers and more orders can also mean more phone calls, more emails, more order entry, more customer-service requests and more administrative work.

A B2B commerce platform provides another way to handle that growth.

Customers can perform many routine activities themselves, while your employees remain available when their knowledge and assistance are actually needed.

That can help a business increase transaction volume without requiring administrative costs to increase at the same rate.

Get More From the Systems You Already Own

Your ERP contains an enormous amount of valuable business information.

The challenge is making the right information available to the right people at the right time.

Active Lightning’s B2B commerce platforms integrate ecommerce with established business systems, including Epicor Prophet 21 and Acumatica. Instead of creating another isolated source of information, your online business can work with the systems your company already depends upon.

That helps protect the investment you have already made in your ERP while extending its usefulness to customers, salespeople and other members of your organization.

Why Build It All Yourself?

Sophisticated B2B ecommerce can require far more than building a website.

Customer-specific requirements, ERP integration, business rules, account structures, pricing, ordering processes and the needs of sales and customer-service teams can turn a seemingly straightforward ecommerce project into a substantial software-development undertaking.

Active Lightning has already done much of that work.

Our platforms provide a developed foundation that can be configured and customized for your business rather than requiring you to begin with a blank sheet of paper.

You benefit from software and experience developed over many years while retaining the ability to address the requirements that make your business different.

What Is It Worth to Your Business?

The answer will be different for every company.

Consider what your business currently spends—in both money and employee time—on activities such as:

Entering and processing orders
Answering routine customer questions
Looking up products, pricing and account information
Moving information between ecommerce and ERP systems
Correcting errors
Supporting salespeople
Maintaining separate business processes for online and offline customers

Then consider the value of making it easier for existing customers to buy from you, giving salespeople better tools, and creating an online channel that can accept business around the clock.

That is the comparison that matters.