Digital Commerce

Our B2B Commerce Assessment is a comprehensive analysis and optimisation of your organisation’s digital maturity. To do this, we first record the current situation of your B2B Commerce, whereby six key topics guide us. We then determine the desired target maturity level. Together with you, we derive the necessary actions and discuss the concrete implementation. The basis for this is our agile B2B Commerce Framework.

Since COVID-19, the consumption patterns and purchasing expectations of both customers and suppliers have undergone a radical change. Consumers are increasingly shifting their purchasing decisions towards digital channels: Companies' challenge at this point lies in synchronizing across multiple channels and customers touchpoints to provide them with a seamless customer experience through an interconnected portal.

PwC supports your organization by implementing a “Digital Experience Portal” to create a holistic platform solution transforming existing processes, personas and data into a 360-degree customer view. As a result, your organization will improve its internal and external network collaboration in an efficient and cost-effective way.

By a platform, we mean the single- or multi-sided business model where participants on one side benefit from the presence of other players. For example, in Uber, passengers’ benefit from many drivers, while drivers benefit from a higher number of passengers.

Above all, an effective platform strategy should answer one of the most critical questions: how do companies increase their attractiveness to potential future participants while still building a platform? Once you have the answer, you should establish rules of the game that apply to both platform participants and operators. For example, does the operator actively participate in platform activities? Or do they withdraw, acting mainly as  administrators and earning from the multi-sided business model? 

Ultimately, it is a matter of ensuring and strengthening the platform participants trust. After all, the platform operator gains deep insights into the market and individual participating companies.

One of the most important trends in platforms is enterprise marketplaces – online marketplaces operated by traditional organisations where external merchants sell their products directly to end customers. The Gartner Hype Cycle for Digital Commerce also highlights this concept. But to successfully establish such a platform, companies need the right technology and the right strategy.

This is where PwC comes in. We support you in all the decisive steps:

• Defining your strategy
• Selecting the right technology
• Implementing the project

To focus entirely on their customers and optimise the customer journey, companies should optimise aspects such as business model and product development. The technical side also plays a central role in e-commerce. The goal should always be to offer customers the best possible user experience.

The headless approach helps achieve this goal: separating the front end from the back promotes business agility. It makes it possible to react more quickly to new or changing conditions or customer requirements. But the headless approach is complex in terms of technology and organisation.

Mastering the complexity

To make the headless approach work, companies should form separate teams for the front and back end and clarify responsibilities regarding APIs and architecture. A certain level of maturity and competence in terms of the (agile) development process is an advantage. Alternatively, companies should aim to reach the required maturity level as quickly as possible.

PwC supports you in all essential measures, enabling you to introduce the headless approach and realise its full potential.

These measures include:

• Defining a comprehensive e-commerce strategy
• Establishing an e-commerce organisation
• Defining a target operating model

Whether during implementation or as part of project management – we are a strong partner at your side.

Companies need professional and agile project methods to react flexibly to changing customer needs. But this is often lacking. We work with you to develop agile methods that help you leverage e-commerce solutions within the shortest possible time. Customer analytics enables you to learn much more from your customers' feedback than before. The result: your web stores evolve into true omnichannel customer experiences. We can also support you in building a change management and adoption (digital enablement) team that considers and involves all areas of your sales organisation in the digital transformation.

The optimal interaction of different technologies enables personalised and unique shopping experiences. Another success criterion in this context is effective data analysis. Processing all relevant data from your marketing, CRM, and web store systems creates complete customer transparency. We call this ‘360° transparency’.

We support you with proven digital expertise so that your sales organisation can increase your sales via cross-selling and bundle services. Contact us. We look forward to exchanging ideas with you.