Infinite Adaptability in B2B eCommerce
The Adaptability Challenge in Digital Commerce
As digital commerce grows, more companies realize that providing the best digital customer experience means winning the market share from competitors. It is important to realize that this works not only for B2C but for B2B as well, see for example a deep research by Deloitte devoted to the importance of B2B customer experience.
McKinsey points that to win this competition the company should “put digitally driven commerce at the center of their organizations so they can orchestrate experiences that meet customers’ ever-rising expectations.”
Those who enter this competition race quickly discover one key factor to success: the speed at which B2B digital channels can adapt. Adaptive digital channels allow companies to keep up with the competition and evolve to meet changing customer expectations.
Moreover, digitally mature companies create fundamentally new services that proactively shape the expectations of the entire market. This strategy as well requires infinite flexibility and adaptability.
However, the necessity for businesses to quickly adapt their customer experiences often conflicts with the actual development velocity. We see this all the time — development teams are unable to maintain the necessary high speed of change in the long run.
So, what’s holding them back?
Having studied many such cases, we at Virto see that the critical problem does not lie within these development teams themselves but in the fact that they have to work with static platforms. We define a static platform as a platform not designed for continuous, rapid changes.
To meet the expectations of today’s B2B environment, companies need to migrate their digital channels to an adaptive digital commerce platform.
What Is an Adaptive Digital Commerce Platform?
Virto Commerce is an adaptive digital commerce platform.
An adaptive digital commerce platform is designed to allow continuous changes for an arbitrarily long time.
Using such a platform, developers can constantly and quickly adapt customer experience to meet changes in the market and match consumer expectations.
Adaptive digital commerce platforms provide an opportunity for small teams (1–3 developers) to add new features (services, integrations, scenarios) every 1–2 sprints for at least 3–5 years. The speed and cost of development should remain stable, manageable, and utterly predictable during the entire platform lifecycle.
These effects are achieved thanks to what McKinsey describes as a well-architected framework.
Adaptive platforms are essential for companies focused on continuously improving customer experience and building new business models.
What Does Infinite Adaptability of B2B Customer Experience Include?
Infinite adaptability has many aspects to it. The significance of each of the aspects may vary from company to company, but, in general, infinite adaptability implies at least the following:
1. Functional adaptability is the ability to endlessly add new and modify existing customer services without losing the speed of innovation and without exponential growth in costs. There should be no feasible difference between working with native code for the first time and modifying legacy code later down the line. When a business needs to change, it just does so.
That means if a checkout procedure has been changed 10 times in the last three years, the next change should require only about the same amount of effort as it was for the first time.
2. Non-functional adaptability is the ability to quickly and predictably adapt one’s system to meet customer expectations for speed, stability, and operational data in response to changing market requirements.
Where necessary, a company should be able to increase the volume of their catalog from 10 thousand to 20 million products or increase their expected traffic 20 times during the Black Friday sales, or, in response to a growing volume of orders, increase order processing speed from 10 to 50 orders per second.
3. Usability adaptability is the ability to continuously improve customer experience usability without changing the purpose or data flows of the service.
Preferences and trends change very quickly and significantly affect customers’ loyalty. Being able to adapt usability to new trends in small steps makes it possible to retain customers while keeping the service consistent.
4. Industry adaptability is the ability to create digital channels tailored to new markets or target audiences by reusing existing components and services.
For example, a grocery wholesaler with a digital channel for retailers can create a separate digital channel for the HoReCa segment reusing the functionality of their existing catalog, logistics, and user management but changing their personalization and loyalty services.
5. Regional adaptability is a feature especially valuable for multinational companies. It is the ability to quickly scale an ecommerce solution to different regions by reusing previously developed components and adding new ones specific only to this new region.
This approach combines quick scaling with easy customization.
For example, when launching in Europe, a company might reuse core services like their digital catalog and account management tools developed for their US solution and then add GDPR-specific services and a unique checkout flow on top.
6. Integration adaptability is the ability to improve customer experience predictably and securely by combining any platform function with external services or internal systems.
For example, thanks to integration adaptability, a company can provide the client with the status of a contract approval in an internal document management system, provide the client with a service for automated receipt of the reconciliation act, or integrate the system with a new search engine.
7. Component adaptability is the ability to replace external services, and provide any data required by B2B clients via a digital channel. It is similar to the composability idea promoted by Gartner.
For example, thanks to component adaptability, a company can replace getting prices from ERP with a third-party real-time price engine, replace a native PIM solution with an external PIM, or replace a built-in recommendation system with a third-party AI service.
8. Adaptability of development resources describes the ability to balance development speed and cost, by increasing or decreasing the number of teams working on adaption of the ecommerce solution.
For example, when launching a new business model, there might be a need to release many changes as quickly as possible. Adaptive platforms allow adding new teams at peak times and allow collaboration without interfering with each other’s work.
Although this list is not exhaustive, these are the mandatory properties for adaptive ecommerce platforms.
The combination of these properties allows companies to continuously improve their existing customer experience and implement new business models. The rapid deployment of new business models will enable companies to proactively shape customer expectations and seize the initiative from competitors.
What Is a Static Digital Commerce Platform?
Now let’s dive deeper into the definition of a static platforms.
A static platform is, in essence, a collection of services, scenarios, and integrations that a vendor has combined and provides to their client as a complete solution.
In some cases, the availability of services can be configured by settings within the system or through the installation of additional plug-ins that have limited effect on business scenarios or integrations.
Unfortunately, the architecture of static platforms doesn’t allow painless significant changes during the lifecycle of a digital commerce solution. Static platforms meet the initial requirements of the clients and assume that new requirements are not going to come through. So, the solution continues to exist in an unchanged form ad infinitum.
Most of the current ecommerce vendors offer static digital commerce platforms.
How to Identify an Adaptable Digital Commerce Platform?
At the moment, the only way to determine the adaptability of a digital platform is to conduct a thorough analysis and involve software engineers who will be in charge for adapting the client experience over time.
There are no specific markers that allow one to determine the adaptability of a platform based on, say, marketing materials. So, for companies focused on innovation, the involvement of technical specialists in the decision-making process is mandatory.
It’s important to note that specific technological properties such as modularity, headless, microservices, composable, cloud while being valid on their own don’t indicate the adaptability of a platform.
The adaptability of a platform is not determined by these features but, instead, how they are all implemented within a savvy, flexible architecture. Virto Commerce is powered by the Atomic Architecture™, which was specifically designed to create adaptive solutions in the digital commerce domain.
Conclusions
Adaptive ecommerce platforms are a prerequisite to compete in the new B2B omnichannel environment. The only way to identify adaptability in a platform is to involve technical experts that can verify all the properties of adaptability and architecture consistency.
Our aim at Virto Commerce was to build an ecommerce platform that allows infinite adaptability to keep up with the ever-evolving customer expectations while outpacing the competition. The adaptive ecommerce solution is the only way to deliver an excellent customer experience without increasing the costs.
To sum up, boundless ecommerce is easier than you might think. When the platform allows you to implement any necessary changes and innovations infinitely — there is no question about the possibility of an upgrade, and you just do it.
Author: Nikolay Sidelnikov
Business Product Owner at Virto Commerce
