eCommerce for Manufacturers: 4 Success Tips

When we talk to manufacturers about how (or whether) they sell online, we often hear something like this: We know we need to offer better online shopping experiences if we’re going to improve conversions and revenue and grow our business. But our products are complex, our requirements are rigorous, and our budget isn’t endless. We’re not sure if a commerce solution is capable of supporting our needs.

These feelings are natural. The products manufacturers sell – and the buyers being sold to – create unique challenges for manufacturers, which include but aren’t limited to:

• Large, technical product catalogs
• A huge amount of complex product data
• Thousands of product configurations
• Needing to connect a commerce engine to an ERP
• The threat of SKU proliferation, also known as SKU explosion
• Supporting conditional or multi-geo pricing, bulk ordering capabilities, and more.

You just have more to consider when a single sprocket fits 27 different models of a bulldozer, or when you need personalized pricing for B2B buyers, or when launching your industry’s first D2C site means supporting a custom-configured purchasing experience.

Fortunately, you don’t have to choose between a rigid, ineffective, out-of-the-box commerce platform or a costly, custom, homegrown solution when you’re seeking manufacturing eCommerce success. Learn about why manufacturing eCommerce expectations are rising and the benefits manufacturers yield when they offer a strong online shopping experience. You’ll also get four eCommerce tips for manufacturers, and learn how leading manufacturers upleveled their commerce by using Elastic Path Composable Commerce.

A Raised Bar for Manufacturing eCommerce Experiences

There’s a dirty little secret about manufacturing eCommerce: it’s still just commerce.

Sellers sell and buyers buy. Commerce is commerce, and if you’re a manufacturer, your buyers are still modern internet users, who are used to searching for products and engaging with dynamic product pages and checking out fast and stress-free when it’s time to purchase.

Just because your products and sales process is complex, it doesn’t mean your digital storefront has to be. And if your digital storefront is slow and clunky and complicated, even a B2B buyer is less likely to tolerate it. You’re selling to real people – a mindset of good-enough-for-a-manufacturer about your commerce site will depress conversions, revenue, and the growth of your business.

Benefits for Manufacturers When They Offer Strong eCommerce Experience

When you’re a manufacturer who offers strong commerce experiences, you get a compounding set of benefits:

1. Direct selling and digital relationship building with customers

Compared to manufacturers that sell through distributors, you get strengthened customer relationships and the ability to have customers engage regularly on a platform that you own, monitor, and control. The result is a deeper relationship with your customers that isn’t hampered by intermediaries or middlemen.

2. Collecting and operationalizing customer data for personalization

By selling on your own storefront and building direct relationships, you also get the ability to collect customer data. Over time, you learn about your customers’ needs, preferences, and behaviors, making it easier to offer 1:1 personalized experiences.

3. More revenue and higher customer LTV via stronger, business-specific merchandising

With customer data and full control of pricing and discount strategies, you can increase a customers’ lifetime value and set prices, discounts, and membership perks that contribute to healthy profit margins. Your competitors that don’t sell from their own site risk relying on a marketplace or distributor that slaps the same sale across all items regardless of customer behavior – cutting into profit margins, revenue, and even profitability.

4. Ability to maintain large, technical product catalogs:

You can sell your entire product catalog– which may have a large number of configurations and SKUs – when you sell directly from your own site. You also scale faster, without needing to hire more sales reps or partner with more distributors or wholesalers to get products in front of new or existing customers.

eCommerce Tips for Manufacturers

If you work at a manufacturer that is launching, upleveling, or even just evaluating commerce solutions, consider these manufacturing eCommerce tips.

1. Support a rich product catalog, detailed product descriptions, and appealing product imagery

Your buyers should get the information to self-educate – it shouldn’t be normal to visit your website, look at your product catalog and individual product pages, and not have been able to locate the products they are looking for. But many manufacturers are so lacking in details online that elements like product imagery, filtering in the product catalog, strong product detail pages, and more aren’t fulfilled. This craters conversion and erodes buyer trust.

2. Have a plan to mitigate SKU proliferation/explosion

As a manufacturer, your products are often highly configurable, meaning that a single product could have dozens or hundreds of associated SKUs. Whether through SKU-less merchandising or a different tactic, always have a plan in place to mitigate an explosion in your SKU count, which can become challenging to manage for your merchandisers.

3. Personalize with geo-specific experiences and membership programs

Many buyers from manufacturers are repeat purchasers who can benefit from membership programs, loyalty catalogs, and other loyalty experiences. And many manufacturers sell products that are configured, priced, measured differently based on the country, continent, or general geography. As a manufacturer, you should be prepared for both these types of personalized experiences to drive conversions and revenue.

4. Never forget you’re selling to people who desire D2C-level experiences

Whatever your business model, focus on the experiences that regular people want when they shop online: a fast site, strong site search and product discovery, multiple payment options and easy checkout, customer reviews, and more. Remember, there’s a raised bar for manufacturing eCommerce experience – it looks pretty much like strong D2C commerce.

Uplevel Your eCommerce Manufacturing With Elastic Path

Elastic Path has brought exceptional manufacturing eCommerce to life for a host of businesses, including Astrak Group, Pella Windows & Doors, Cymax Group, and Konica Minolta.

Elastic Path Composable Commerce has a flexible architecture that enables manufacturers to provide digital shopping experiences that grow their business without sacrificing reliability or security.

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Here are just a few of the commerce use cases Elastic Path supports for leading manufacturers:

• Complex catalog management: By redesigning underlying data structures including separating product data from pricing data and rethinking catalog management and merchandising capabilities, Elastic Path helps support huge product catalogs and prevent SKU explosion for earthmoving parts manufacturer Astrak Group and furniture and home goods manufacturer Cymax Group.
• Multi-geo pricing: Astrak Group, Cymax Group, and Konica Minolta, a multinational manufacturer of business and industrial imaging products, all sell internationally and need to support multi-geo pricing needs.
• Launching in a new market fast: Even with the need for product data decoupling, no experience in the U.S. market, and the requirement for more than 40,000 product pages to be live at launch, Astrak Group used Elastic Path to launch a new storefront, EPD Parts, in months. The site has a 99 out of 100 Google Lighthouse site speed score, and is more than 400% faster than the Shopify sites that Astrak uses in other markets.
• Connecting the commerce engine to an existing ERP: Connecting a commerce engine to an existing ERP that handles data management is a common requirement for manufacturers. Pella Windows & Doors connected Elastic Path Composable Commerce to their ERP using an integration that runs in Amazon Web Services (AWS), which hosts their Elastic Path solution. This connection helped Pella build a lead and revenue-generating digital commerce experience that nobody else in their industry is doing.

Responsible for commerce or digital experiences at a manufacturer? Try Elastic Path Composable Commerce for free to sample our manufacturer-friendly commerce solutions today.