Big names like Mazda Europe, Colgate and Black & Decker have reaped strong benefits from adopting B2B-centric digital commerce cloud SaaS

The way consumers in the United Kingdom purchase vehicles has been transformed significantly as a result of the pandemic. Sales transactions that once started in a showroom are increasingly beginning online.

To address this dynamic change in consumer behavior, Mazda Motor Europe transformed its digital commerce operations with a “vehicle stock locator” system across all UK Mazda dealerships. Since the launch of this digital commerce tool, the firm has received positive feedback from dealers, reporting better qualified leads and improved sales efficiency. In fact, 60% of customers are coming via dealer websites to the stock locator, and 85% of those result in conversion.

The firm’s Vice President for Communications & Public Affair, Matthias Sileghem, said the initial step in “transforming the buying experience has generated some great feedback from dealers and customers,” referring to a PCI-certified B2B digital commerce platform Mazda Europe had adopted.

The same digital commerce platform offers an application programming interface which allowed Stanley Black & Decker to quickly empower sales reps to leverage an online dashboard to access customer analytics and insights to provide personalized service to each customer. Nearly 50% of the firm’s B2B orders are now made through a ‘bulk order feature’ on the digital platform that saves its sales reps countless hours of line-by-line order entry and eliminating the potential for incorrect orders due to human error.

Similarly, other firms have enjoyed the benefits of this digital commerce platform — VTEX — that caters for premier retailers and distributors — to rapidly build and deploy B2B commerce sites and multi-seller marketplaces, addressing the changing dynamics of digital business operations:

    • Colgate needed promotions and catalog solutions tailored to its business placed online in under 100 days. Since launching its marketplace for B2B sales consultants, the average monthly sell-out rate has increased by 496% YoY. The firm’s Director of E-commerce at Colgate-Palmolive Brazil, Danilo Turbiani, said: “The continued focus on product customization adds a lot of value to our dentist customers. Now, they can order any product they want, at any time. We have a broader range of delivery and covered areas, and dentists are making more orders, more frequently.”
    • CAE wanted a more intuitive and seamless customer experience, so it was able to implement five B2B and B2C ecommerce websites in just eight months using VTEX. These sites ranged from medical instruction to business aviation learning to the complex landscape of simulation training.
    • Briggs & Stratton used the same platform to eliminate two legacy commerce platforms, reducing maintenance costs. By unifying everything under one technology stack, the firm is now enjoying higher operational efficiency.

Said Mariano Gomide de Faria, founder and co-CEO, VTEX, which runs on AWS: “B2B e-commerce can be more complex than B2C. Every business has different and specific needs from the implementation to strict security protocols and data privacy. By offering a robust, composable solution, our mission is to support these businesses’ complexities so our customers can deliver frictionless consumer-like digital commerce experiences that support the entire B2B customer journey.”