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The explosion of the Internet, dating back to the late 1990s, has fueled the online marketplace like never before. Today, the e-commerce landscape continues to evolve rapidly, with global retail e-commerce sales expected to exceed $8 trillion by 2027, accounting for more than 20% of total global retail sales.
For brands that want to create lasting and meaningful relationships with their niche audience within the consumer market, execution of B2C e-commerce strategies that create relevance, resonance, and reach depend directly on the B2C software being used to create complex, multifaceted customer experiences.
Definition: B2C e-commerce is the transaction of goods or services within the digital sphere, between an online business and an end consumer. B2C e-commerce offers benefits for both businesses — scale, simplicity, and ease — and for consumers — convenience, choice, and an array of customization possibilities — which has made the e-commerce industry one of the quickest growing areas within the modern economy.
To meet today’s customer expectations and outpace the competition, your e-commerce software should address every stage of the shopping journey—from the first click to the final checkout and everything in between. With the right features, you can transform every interaction into an opportunity to delight your customers and drive growth.
Imagine knowing what your customers want – before they even ask. That’s the power of a fully-integrated CRM system. By centralizing your customer, sales and product data, a CRM system will provide actionable insights into customer preferences, helping you to deliver personalized experiences that build loyalty and drive sales.
An integrated CRM works seamlessly with your e-commerce platform to automate crucial workflows like abandoned cart reminders or personalized post-purchase thank-you notes. It also equips your customer service team with real-time access to order histories and preferences, empowering them to provide fast, personalized support.
B2C e-commerce thrives on timely and relevant communication, and omnichannel marketing automation platforms like SAP Emarsys help businesses deliver it at scale. Your chosen e-commerce software should help you:
By automating email campaigns, SMS alerts, push notifications, and more, you can stay connected with customers at every stage of their journey without manual effort.
Your customers demand relevant, personalized experiences, and the right B2C e-commerce software can help you deliver upon those expectations, with features including:
Omnichannel marketing platforms like SAP Emarsys use advanced AI to personalize everything from email subject lines to the very content your customers see on your website.
Data is the backbone of your e-commerce marketing success. Your chosen e-commerce software needs to have comprehensive analytics and reporting capabilities that help you:
With analytics capabilities covered, you’ll have the data to know what worked before, and the insight to know what will work next.
Your customers don’t just shop across one channel – from in-store to app to website, they’ll engage with your brand across many channels during their purchasing journey. Your chosen e-commerce software should help you manage campaigns and automations seamlessly across those channels. Top-tier omnichannel marketing platforms will empower your marketing team to:
Platforms like SAP Emarsys excel at enabling omnichannel orchestration, ensuring consistent messaging wherever your customers interact.
► Website Marketing. Use your website as a strategic marketing channel to collect emails and drive revenue in new ways that go beyond your product pages.
Personalized Product Recommendations. Differentiate recommendations based on who each person is and what they’ve bought before.
Once you know what kinds of campaigns you want to run and which channels your audience spends most time on, you can begin to extrapolate further to ask more pressing questions about data, new-age technologies (like AI and machine learning), and the mechanics of how personalization works.
The ultimate intent should be to tie it all back to your strategy, not the tech itself. So, with these common channels and programs in mind, what else should you consider?
There are several key considerations, questions, and features to make sure you take into account when selecting B2C software, and which will help guide you toward the best option. Below, we highlight a few of the most important.
When selecting the best B2C software, begin with the overarching customer experience and revenue growth objectives that you want to achieve. Then find a solution that can help bring those to fruition.
Today’s B2C e-commerce teams must deliver communications via the channel that customers want to engage through, with the right messages in each channel. Since most of today’s consumers are extremely digital-savvy, marketing platforms must enable you to deliver content across a wide range of channels and devices.
Ask yourself, can you communicate with consumers through these channels? More importantly, can it be done with a single piece of B2C software? Ideally, you’ll want to centralize all of your work within as few tools as possible to still meet your goals.
For any B2C marketing organization, data is the most valuable asset in your arsenal. When it comes to researching and identifying new solutions, don’t shy away from asking explicit questions about how your customer/historical/transactional data will be collected, aggregated, and analyzed from an end-user perspective.
You know your data better than anyone. How will that data be gathered from a slew of sources and housed in a new platform? How will practitioners access and utilize this data?
With all the new channels and devices available to today’s consumers, most e-commerce teams need a way to wade through the noise and automate communications. Self-learning technology is the answer. It’s also where data comes in.
B2C software should be able to compile and analyze large amounts of consumer data from multiple channels, creating a 360-degree picture of customers on an individual level. Only the most advanced B2C software can truly (many claim to be able to; few actually can) turn that data into insights, “self-learn,” and make decisions about the next-best option.
The right B2C marketing software can give your team a competitive advantage by uncovering hidden consumer insights. This allows you to predict individual behaviors, trends, and propensities within your customer base, as well as broader industry tendencies. The key is to ask the right questions and fine-tune the parameters of your software to align with your specific goals—a capability that few B2C software systems offer.
While many e-commerce solutions offer storage and access to impressive data sets, it’s essential to have a plan of action to leverage these numbers effectively. Comprehensive B2C marketing platforms not only enable you to understand your customer data but also empower you to make data-driven decisions to optimize current campaigns and adjust your overall strategy.
If your B2C e-commerce team is looking for the best software to match your specific needs, start with a broad set of options, and then narrow them down based on specifics about what you need, including:
At the end of the day, it’s less about the software itself, and more about what you can do with it. It’s less about the vendor — though making the best choice for you is important — and more about how you align your business goals with how the B2C software can help you achieve them.
The 5 types of B2C models are:
B2C, or Business-to-Consumer, refers to the traditional retail model where businesses sell products or services directly to individual consumers. D2C, or Direct-to-Consumer, is a newer model where manufacturers or brands bypass traditional retail channels and sell directly to consumers.
While both models involve selling to consumers, the key distinction lies in the supply chain and the intermediary role of retailers. In B2C, retailers act as intermediaries, purchasing products from manufacturers or wholesalers and then selling them to consumers. In D2C, the manufacturer or brand eliminates the retailer and establishes a direct relationship with the consumer, often through online channels.
An example of a B2C application is any software or platform designed to facilitate interactions between a business and individual consumers. This could include:
These applications are all designed to make it easier for businesses to connect with and sell their products or services to consumers. They also provide consumers with a convenient and accessible way to shop, find information, and interact with businesses.
Kirk Donlan is a content marketing manager at SAP Emarsys where he uses his marketing, customer success, and copywriting experience to develop engaging, industry-specific content for marketers and marketing leadership.
Connect with Kirk: LinkedIn
Kirk Donlan
Product Marketing Manager
