Wholesale Distribution
Give your business customers a world-class consumer experience, while you give yourself a world-class B2B selling machine.
Your customers’ buyers and other users are also consumers – they expect a consumer-like experience. You need to give them all the functionality of the best consumer sites.
Increasingly, you need to reach them on mobile devices – in the field, at the counter or in the warehouse. Agility and innovation for competitive advantage online is as important to you as to any online seller. Yet you also need to handle the complexity of product sets, customer segments, specialized catalogs, order processes, account management and more that no B2C solution was built for. hybris delivers the best of both worlds across a variety of distribution verticals:
Electrical distributors
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Electrical distributors have a number of challenges in simplifying how their customers want to order and pick up items:
- Many have multiple source vendors for the same (commodity) item but the customer may only want to see a single item described
- Customers may want only to have a sub-set of the catalog available for viewing by their purchase agents, maintenance personnel doing ordering, or job site personnel authorized to order/pick up items
- Some items may need to be specified at a higher level than SKU, such as the case with a mini bill of materials where the customer wants to order a set of items that have already been pre-defined together
- Local regulations may limit certain items for certain geographies
- Contractors who pick up orders at a location want to do so efficiently, be confident that orders are complete before going to the pick-up site, and have the option to have payment separately handled from the person picking up
This level of specificity in product assortment, driven by individual customer needs, requires a powerful commerce platform that is sophisticated enough to manage such specificity as product by customer across thousands or millions of items and, at the same time, offer an easy-to-use customer experience. True, a purchasing agent at a company may well have skills to deal with complexity but often the person who orders or picks up an order may only be dealing with a portion of the relationship and needs simplicity in interaction.
hybris has the sophistication to handle complex interactions with straightforward user interfaces that are well-suited for the electrical distributor market.
hybris has the sophistication to handle complex interactions with straightforward user interfaces that are well-suited for the electrical distributor market.
Food and beverage distributors
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Food and beverage distributors have a variety of challenges in serving their customer base which can range from full-line grocers to food service entities, from convenience stores to vending machine operators, and from ballparks to restaurants. Each of these types of customers have their own needs and demands:
hybris is a platform that supports such complexity in ordering and diversity in customer models in food and beverage wholesale distribution.
- Grocers may want direct store delivery with orders prepared on site
- Food service companies may want recurring orders and location-specific product authorizations
- Convenience stores may want standardized assortments but allow for some localization that their franchise stores may determine separately
- Vending machine operators may want not only mobile ordering, but to also have digital content fed over the web to a vending machine at a particular location
- Ballparks may need orders consolidated across shippers to provide for efficient movement of product to service locations in the venue
- In addition to the food and beverage orders themselves, restaurants may require customized logo materials (whether physical signage, cups, and displays or digital content shown on menu boards or signage) for a chain store environment that accompanies food or beverage orders
hybris is a platform that supports such complexity in ordering and diversity in customer models in food and beverage wholesale distribution.
Technology distributors
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Technology distributors often face challenges in competing with their own suppliers who can also sell directly to the end customer. So what are the elements of a successful technology distributor that leads their customers to choose them instead of managing the ordering and fulfillment processes internally? There are a number of considerations that affect their decisions and influence the distributors decision on a platform that can respond effectively to their customers’ demands:
- Technology life cycles are often short, meaning the end customer may not want to take on the risk of carrying even short term inventories.
- The end customer may have distributed operations and may not want to have each location dealing directly with the manufacturer; rather, they want to control purchases centrally yet enable the efficiency of localized fulfillment by using a distributor to service their sites.
- Technology products often have supply constraints as products move through their life cycles or face component shortages. In these cases, the end customer may want alternatives/substitute items that a distributor carries rather than wait for the ideal item to be available off back order.
- Technology distributors can also provide valuable services in configuring products, integrating them with existing technology, or serving products post-purchase. These services often rely on product and service information content that backstops the sales and servicing representative, including making such information available to the end customer.
B2B2C
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Because the hybris B2B solution includes the consumer-facing customer experience ranked “leader” by both Gartner and Forrester, it is an ideal framework for creating a down-channel or direct-to-consumer implementation.
hybris OmniCommerce for wholesale and MRO distributors
At hybris, our OmniCommerce solution for distributors includes:
Building and maintaining a compelling and efficient customer experience requires constant change -- and so your technology infrastructure must be capable of changing just as fast. At hybris, we recognize that the luxury of a traditional multi-year, big bang approach to solving problems is too costly and often arrives too late to stay current with changing business demands.
Therefore, hybris has architected the OmniCommerce solution to be installed faster, configured more efficiently and enhanced continuously to meet the needs of your customers and your business model. Not the fastest time to a cookie-cutter solution, but the fastest time to innovation.
And there is no need to rip and replace everything: you can focus on the modules of highest business value and align implementation with your business strategy. With our best-in-class partner network, we offer the best adjacent software and implementation support to meet the pace you need for the capabilities you desire.
- Seriously B2B
- Native B2B functionality. Only hybris delivers a rich set of B2B functionality built on the same platform – including support for procurement processes, organizational hierarchies, employee entitlements, volume purchasing, and enterprise-class reporting – enabling you to cater to your channel, small businesses and franchisees to extend your reach.
- Multi-site. hybris’ built-in multi-site and multi-line infrastructure enables manufacturers to quickly extend to new geographies or adopt a niche line strategy to broaden distribution.
- Seamless convergence of digital and physical commerce touchpoints (e-commerce site, search and transactional; physical locations; direct mail/email; catalog/phone order; mobile devices; trade publications via QR/NFC)
- Lifecycle commerce for products and services that focuses on real-time enablement of the demand chain and associated information flows
- Networked, (near) real-time interactions among all commerce participants, from manufacturers and distributors to retailers and end customers
- Evolutionary future stage of commerce that incorporates components of e-commerce (single channel focused), multi-channel and cross-channel (connecting multiple channels) but provides a single, seamless platform for executing customer-facing commerce capabilities and transactions
- Open platform architecture responds to changes in commerce environments
- Plug and play for adding individual channels, new forms of commerce
- Suspend/resume in a real-time manner across any channel
- On premise or on-demand or hybrid for commerce execution
- Cloud enabled for operation from anywhere to anywhere
Building and maintaining a compelling and efficient customer experience requires constant change -- and so your technology infrastructure must be capable of changing just as fast. At hybris, we recognize that the luxury of a traditional multi-year, big bang approach to solving problems is too costly and often arrives too late to stay current with changing business demands.
Therefore, hybris has architected the OmniCommerce solution to be installed faster, configured more efficiently and enhanced continuously to meet the needs of your customers and your business model. Not the fastest time to a cookie-cutter solution, but the fastest time to innovation.
And there is no need to rip and replace everything: you can focus on the modules of highest business value and align implementation with your business strategy. With our best-in-class partner network, we offer the best adjacent software and implementation support to meet the pace you need for the capabilities you desire.
The result
What are the common elements that cut across verticals and business models that manufacturers may choose to adopt? What are the benefits for adopting a platform approach for supporting commerce? Among the impacts:
- More efficient selling/buying process, increased loyalty, thus more sales
- Omni-channel. Even before they come to your location or talk to your sales rep, your customers are researching and making their product decisions online. hybris gives an optimal, consistent user experience in store, on the web, or on mobile devices. And it works in both directions: hybris gives you one view of your customer and the seamless customer interface gives your customer one view of you and your products.
- Master data management. A seamless cross-channel experience is impossible without the right master data management (MDM). It allows you to create product and service catalogs tailored to customers, segments, and touchpoints. This approach not only reduces the cost of maintaining all the rich and complex content, but also increases revenue and conversion rates across channels. hybris MDM delivers better search engine optimization, native support for rich content and faceted search, and effective management tools to support deep inventory and deeper availability through special order.
- Social connectors. Increase conversion rates through “hybris Extend”, a key capability of hybris’ agile software platform for easy integration with complementary business solutions, which includes our social media integration with Google, Facebook, Pinterest, Bazaarvoice and others. Combine your knowledge of customer buying behavior with individual customer preferences (“small data”).
- Big Data. Connect to “big data” to compare and contrast effectiveness of targeting, communicating, and converting across channels. Find untapped profitable niches. Reduce costs through more effective routing of communications. Reduce churn with "next best offers", real-time recommendations and geo-fenced eligibility.
- AOV. Increase average order value with powerful, business-user-driven cross-selling and up-selling capabilities.
- Touchpoints. make your connections to customers seamless across digital and physical touchpoints through our native commerce capabilities and with OmniCommerce Connect. hybris OCC makes it easy to reuse commerce processes and data across all touch points, increasing the speed and lowering the costs of providing new transactional interfaces. So whether you are looking to connect fixed station or mobile point of sale, assisted selling devices, or digital signage, you can achieve the seamless experience that your customers are demanding.
- Much more efficient development and operations.
- Fastest time to value. Full-function sites can be operational in less than three months. With hybris, you can spend more resources on custom innovations. With others, you'll spend your resources just to custom-build what hybris offers as an out-of-the-box OmniCommerce solution.
- Empower business users. hybris’ intuitive user interface and native content and print management for digital and physical assets enables your business users to maintain content and manage workflows on their own, without requiring IT, speeding your response to changing conditions while controlling costs.
- hybris is the last commerce platform you will ever need.
- Agile architecture. All hybris components are built on a single platform that leverages open standards in a modular, service-oriented architecture. This means a more consistent user experience, faster time to value, and limitless innovation without jeopardizing maintainability and upgrades.
- Flexible deployment models. hybris allows you the flexibility to deploy as traditional perpetual license on-premise, or as subscription-priced on-demand, or as a managed service. IT departments need not trade off other priorities and are able to deliver online projects in months rather than years. And because the software is identical in any deployment model, you can move easily from one to the other as your needs change.
Our customers are our proof.
hybris serves over 500 customers around the world. Here are a few wholesale distribution examples:
Global electrical supplier operating in 37 countries extends to SMB segment, implements omni-channel “click & collect”.
Global fluidics leader, hybris provides MDM and commerce back-end to IBM portal, JD Edwards and Endeca environment.
Specialty chemicals distributor with subsidiaries in 70 countries, global MDM solution ensures consistent product data in four languages.
World´s # 3 food service provider and # 2 uniform supplier manages multiple B2B self-service solutions on single hybris platform.
#1 MRO supplier, 2 million customers in 157 countries, 1 million SKUs and 500,000+ orders/day on hybris.
Health care industry’s leading supply contracting company manages data and contracts from thousands of suppliers in a single hybris system.
Europe’s largest electronics distributor consolidates multiple sites with B2B Accelerator, B2C experience.
Plumbing wholesaler delivers consumer experience with B2B functionality.
#1 replacement tire distributor with 40,000 SKUs and 60,000 customers plans to move 80-90% of total sales to hybris.
UK’s largest supplier of catering equipment manages > 18,000 SKU´s and thousands of daily orders.
Wholesale distributor of building materials operating 3600 locations in 34 countries, using hybris B2B Accelerator.
hybris replaces major competitor at leading European paper, facility supplies, and industrial packaging supplier.
hybris is the future of commerce ™.
Learn why Forrester ranks hybris among the top commerce platforms in the world.
“The Forrester Wave™: B2C Commerce Suites, Q3 2012.”
“The Forrester Wave™: B2C Commerce Suites, Q3 2012.”
Learn the framework that can be used to demonstrate the advantages of a new e-commerce implementation.
Building an ROI model to Evaluate Your B2B E-Commerce Initiative
Building an ROI model to Evaluate Your B2B E-Commerce Initiative
Do you want to deliver a first-class multichannel B2C experience to your B2B customers?
Learn how hybris B2B Commerce makes it possible.
Learn how hybris B2B Commerce makes it possible.