ABOUT B2B COMMERCE

THE SOLVABLE PROBLEM

Have you ever spoken to a merchant about what the buying process is like for them from a wholesaler or manufacturer?  I bet I could guess their answer, "It sucks! It does, it's not fun to use, its ugly, theres too much information...".  So we built a solution with a clear problem to focus on:

"B2B buyers increasingly expect modern and personalized experiences typical of the B2C world that are optimized to support complex B2B ordering processes."

This projected started with the enough simple objective of improving our customers ability to enrich the buying process by wrapping static content around their e-store.  But in scoping the project further when talking to key target beta-customers, researching the competitive landscape,  and listening to feedback from our teams in the field we found the Infor's legacy solution had much more work to do.  

PAIN POINTS

While Infor's strategy is a focus on deep last mile micro-vertical functionality for key industries, the architecture and go-to-market strategy for its legacy commerce solution were preventing it from being competitive in the market. Key pain points included:

1. Inability to publish or manage enriched content like home pages, brand pages, about us information around an e-store

2. Existing legacy solution lacked an architecture to support HTML5, modern web controls, and web responsiveness

3. Difficult to integrate with Infor and 3rd party systems.

To address these issues, we lifted our legacy on-prem product up into Infor's multi-tenant cloud, isolated the commerce engine infrastructure and built a modern widget based content management and site building platform around it.  Finally we bundled a series of other Infor solutions include a Product Information Management system and product recommendation engine.  

WIREFRAMING

Wireframes were an effective tool to iterate through ideas quickly, assure those ideas were targeting the pain points identified, and created the beginnings of a foundation we can use to test with actual users.   Below are some examples of low fidelity wireframes produced in partnership with UX designers that made it into a clickable prototype we put in front of actual end users for feedback during usability testing.  

USABILITY TESTING

After leveraging requirements to develop rough wireframes we rapid prototyped an interactive clickable prototype.  We then partnered with a performance cycling manufacturer to connect with local merchants in New York City who regularly buy from their online portal.  We visited multiple merchants in their stores both observing what their existing buying process looked like as well as ran 1-on-1 usability tests using our prototype.  Through this exercise we were able to validate the expected pain points we initially identified and observed how they work around these issues in their day-to-day lives.  

BUILDING IT

Feedback and analysis from usability tests as well as requirements from other prospective early adopters helped further refine and solidify wireframes which would become the foundation for our detailed user stories.  From here, I partnered with engineering and UI design teams to build and iterate functionality and interface for our solution.  

Relevant and Related information

The balance between serving up the most critical information to focus end-users attention on just what is required to take action vs supporting the complex buying processes which make the B2B world work is and was among the biggest challenges faced in this project.  Unlike consumers, merchants and buyers often use multiple sessions to create and orders, which may consist of hundreds of SKU's meant for a seasons worth of inventory purchases.  We adopted a traditional B2C order history list view to provide a visual at-a-glance look at a draft order before enabling buyers to dive into a detail view of that draft order where they can manage style matrix's, quantities, delivery methods, notes, and more.  

ENRICHED MULTIMEDIA

A hallmark consumer grade expectations are communication through visual mediums. Bold imagery enable more efficient scanning especially through dense or complex SKU matrix's.  Videos allow for 3D viewing of product and more effectively tell a story.  Thus we integrated a full blown PIM system into the solution for cataloging galleries of images, support documentation, specifications, with support for multi-market modeling.  

Personalization

In direct response to the problem we set out to solve at hand, personalization presents a massive opportunity to the B2B world.  Not traditionally seen as a priority from the view of manufacturers and distributors, more and more there is an understanding that buyers and merchants are bringing the expectations being established in their personal buying experiences as consumers to their day jobs.  Now suppliers have more opportunity to up-sell and cross sell in ways already proved in the more competitive and experimental consumer space.  We brought these capabilities to the forefront with a built in promotions engine when interviews and testing showed high levels of engagement from end-users.