Lauren Habig
Sr. Director of Industry Marketing
The Business-to-Business (B2B) eCommerce market is worth $12.2 trillion and growing at a staggering rate of 10% per year. That makes it six times larger than the Business-to-Consumer (B2C) eCommerce market and an opportunity no B2B supplier can afford to ignore.
This growth coincides with new B2B eCommerce platforms offering greater accessibility and functionality at a fraction of the cost. But with so many B2B eCommerce solutions on the market, it’s hard to know which is best for your business. Here’s a deep dive into the three types of B2B eCommerce platforms—traditional, SaaS, and headless—and their pros and cons.
Key Players: Adobe Commerce
With a traditional B2B eCommerce platform, you purchase a license fee, and your dev team builds a solution on top. You maintain complete control over your code, and the sky’s the limit in terms of what you can create. It sounds great, but developing your solution is a supremely technical endeavor. You need a skilled IT team to build and maintain the solution, which is a significant drawback compared to modern alternatives.
A traditional B2B eCommerce platform is not the easy way to go. You have to do it all: Hosting (although many traditional platforms have started to offer this service), PCI compliance, patches and updates, integrations, and new features. It’s not a cheap option, either. Even if you go open-source (no license fees), you’ll still pay at least six times more than you would for a SaaS solution. So why do so many firms choose the traditional route?
One of the biggest (perceived) benefits of traditional B2B eCommerce platforms is security. People think: “If we keep our sensitive data in-house, then nobody can touch it.” This makes sense in theory, but not in practice, for the same reason you wouldn’t keep your life savings in a shoebox under your bed. As Leo Reiter, CTO at Nimblix, surmised: “Cloud providers live, eat, and breathe network security while most other organizations don’t list it as one of their core competencies.”
Perhaps the biggest drawback to traditional B2B eCommerce platforms is their lack of agility. Making changes to your website is slow, technically demanding, and may cause downtime. Scaling your solution and experimenting with new features is far more complicated than it would be on a SaaS or headless platform.
What’s GOOD about traditional B2B eCommerce platforms?
What’s BAD about traditional B2B eCommerce platforms?
Key Players: Shopify Plus, BigCommerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud
SaaS B2B eCommerce platforms are the go-to choice for mid-sized enterprises because they’re cost-effective and easy to use. Most people adjust to the various dashboards and drag and drop tools in minutes and even tackle custom coding tasks with practice. With SaaS, you can launch your eCommerce store in a matter of weeks and instantly generate revenue. A traditional B2B eCommerce platform, on the other hand, takes months or even years to develop.
With SaaS, you effectively “rent” an eCommerce solution that’s already been developed by the SaaS vendor. All you have to do is personalize the platform. In return for a monthly fee, you gain full access to the software via your web browser as well as maintenance, hosting, security, updates, and upgrades. You’re not tied into a long-term contract, and costs aren’t front-loaded, so you have the freedom to switch to another SaaS vendor if prices skyrocket or a better alternative enters the market.
The significant downside to SaaS is that you don’t own your website or control your code. And every company that shares the platform is running the same technology as you. Therefore, there are concerns over a lack of customizability, but these fears are primarily averted with APIs. With a few clicks, you can integrate a vast array of third-party specialist tools and technologies. And with so much competition among SaaS vendors, new built-in features come thick and fast and often exceed expectations.
Epicor CPQ is one such tool that can be integrated into your SaaS B2B eCommerce platform. It provides a visual product configurator that customers can use to customize products to their exact requirements, with the rest of the transaction handled seamlessly by the eCommerce platform. It’s a fully immersive shopping experience that gives customers a clear understanding of what they’re buying and boosts conversion rates by an average of 60%.
What’s GOOD about SaaS B2B eCommerce platforms?
What’s BAD about SaaS B2B eCommerce platforms?
Key Players: Elastic Path, Reaction Commerce, Four51 OrderCloud
With headless commerce, the front- and back-ends of your B2B eCommerce platform are “decoupled.” They each have their codebase developed, deployed, and maintained separately.
Your back-end handles the nuts and bolts of your eCommerce operation, such as logins and accounts, payment processing, inventory management, and fulfillment. And you have complete freedom to use any front-end (or front-ends) you wish to display your content across your different channels.
An API layer manages the flow of information between your back-end services and front-end touchpoints, giving your customers a consistent omnichannel experience wherever they interact with your brand, through any device.
This API-first approach means you can add a new channel at any time with minimal impact on your underlying back-end systems. You can start new customer conversations, adopt the latest technologies, and efficiently react to ever-changing market conditions.
What’s GOOD about headless B2B eCommerce platforms?
What’s BAD about headless B2B eCommerce platforms?
