Ecommerce Insites: Blog for Manufacturers, Distributors, and Retailers

I recently read an article from Modern Distribution Management that talked about the power of cross-selling to current customers as a way to increase each existing customers' spend with your organization and drive sales. In the article, I was reminded of a cross-marketing and data mining myth that I first heard in business school but is completely relevant to today's distributor. It goes something like this:

Distributors, if you are still on the fence about the viability of ecommerce as a growth strategy for your organization, let Best Buy's current state of affairs serve as a warning to you: Any company who sells your products via ecommerce is your competition, even if they aren't taking away your business right now. 

Launching a new or redesigned ecommerce site is a powerful way to revitalize and grow your B2B business. However, launching a site at the wrong time can quickly squelch the potential of an ecommerce site and even have the exact opposite effect. Here are three scenarios that you should consider when choosing when to launch a new ecommerce site:

Due to my daily exposure to both the exceptional and the less-than-stellar in ecommerce, I am incredibly hard to please during the online shopping experience. I admit it. Too often I stumble onto sites that offer me some of the information I am looking for, but leave me wanting more in some way. I recently visited the Dansko.com site and was pleasantly surprised by the amount of product content their site offers but without overwhelming the shopper. Instead of taking my usual route of pointing out what is wrong with a site, I want to show you an example of exceptional product content on an ecommerce site.

At first glance, I thought AmazonSupply.com was simply a (potentially very powerful) new extension of the successful Amazon.com ecommerce brand. I also thought that the new industrial supply site would simply be Amazon.com, Part II in that it would offer industrial products in the Amazon.com style. Today I realized that my assumption might have been wrong, at least in part.

The recent launch of AmazonSupply.com challenges the ongoing success of wholesalers and distributors in the industrial, scientific, and business supply verticals. No doubt, by now you've wondered how your B2B organization can compete in the ecommerce space with the likes of Amazon. Not only do I believe that can you compete, but I believe that your B2B wholesale or distribution organization can flourish alongside AmazonSupply.com.

Earlier this week I posted my opinion on AmazonSupply.com and whether it posed a potential threat to distributors and wholesalers in B2B ecommerce. It turns out that Forrester Analyst, Andy Hoar, agrees. (Read his blog post here.) Hoar makes some very astute observations of which the most telling is in his summary. Hoar states:

Last week I posted an article about why page titles are important for B2B ecommerce sites. Today I want to address another important aspect of each page on your site that will positively influence search engine optimization (SEO) and will improve the chances that your site will "get the click" once you reach the top of the rankings: meta page description.

Last week a few colleagues and I were talking about the recent launch of AmazonSupply.com and the implications for B2B organizations, specifically wholesalers and distributors. The consensus in the room was that while it is only in the beginning of its lifecycle, AmazonSupply.com will be a major competitor and influencer in the B2B ecommerce space and that B2B organizations should not dismiss the potential impact. Rather, they should create a strategy that boosts their performance in the ecommerce space before AmazonSupply.com eats their lunch.

I need to bring a strange trend into the light in hopes that we can obliterate it from the world of B2B ecommerce. This trend has to do with the titles of the pages on a website. In recent days I've noticed that all too many page titles on B2B sites are: