E-commerce for auto suppliers: Marketplace model transforms industry
The marketplace model is transforming industries, from e-commerce for auto suppliers to electric utilities. Discover the benefits + examples.
Customers in the automotive aftermarket expect retail-quality online buying experiences. And companies from Amazon to Walmart have set the bar high, focusing on convenience with extensive product selections, consistent availability, and fast delivery.
Automotive suppliers can take advantage of the same marketplace model and approach as the retail giants.
By personalizing and digitalizing customer interactions, you can enhance and elevate the buying experience, improve enterprise agility and efficiency – and put the competition in the rearview mirror.
Automotive aftermarket: Trends and lasting impacts will transform the industry
Global trends and changes are transforming the way work and commerce are done across industries and lines of business.
The COVID-19 pandemic has, of course, had major economic impacts too. To see how the pandemic was affecting our customers, we looked at customer utilization rates of the SAP Commerce Cloud solution.
Our analysis showed that online order volumes in weeks 8 to 13 of 2020 – which corresponded with the onset of the pandemic – were 69% higher than in the previous-year period.
As recovery from the pandemic progressed, our continued analysis showed this trend nonetheless continued.
Our customers’ online order volumes were significantly higher from January to June 2021 than in the same period in the previous two years:
- 47% increase in 2021 over 2020
- 166% increase in 2021 over 2019
Digital sales journeys are clearly becoming the new normal. Many buyers and sellers find online commerce experiences to be as effective as, and even preferable to, in-person transactions, and the business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce channel is growing fast.
WOW factor: The $920 billion automotive aftermarket is expected to grow to $1.38 trillion by 2030.
Personalizing B2B commerce
Market trends go beyond online order volumes, with a wide range of impacts.
Here are five important areas of change and actions to consider when it comes to the future of B2B:
- Consumerization and the B2B experience:
– Personalize consumer experiences with B2B processes and best practices - Digitalization of complex buying and selling journeys:
– Simplify processes and automate manual, repetitive, and time- and resource-intensive tasks to improve efficiency and productivity while reducing costs
– Safeguard the supply chain for enhanced customer service and revenues
– Improve workflows for order management, pricing calculations, and negotiations
– Power innovation and scale to meet demand and support growth - New digital engagement models:
– Empower people with personalized self-service portals that are available 24×7
– Adopt new customer touchpoints quickly
– Offer consistent sales and buying experiences across channels
– Make it easier for customers to find, configure, and buy the right products with guided selling
– Take advantage of intelligent capabilities for predictive product recommendations, up- and cross-selling, and more - Direct consumer access and interactions:
– Adopt and create innovative strategies to interact directly with consumers
– Take advantage of markets previously served indirectly while protecting existing channels
– Improve transparency and get a better understanding of customers and their relationship with your brand and your organization - Evolution of business and service offerings:
– Enrich traditional relationships with your customers through added-value services
– Transition from selling products to providing solutions
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More acceleration down the road for the automotive aftermarket
With the accelerating growth of e-commerce – which creates opportunities to modify business models and adopt new ways of interacting with customers – automotive suppliers and distributors face pressure to transform now.
Retail giants are quick to fill gaps and expand their footprint into new industries like automotive – but the big retailers can’t match the automotive experience + expertise of companies already established and successful in the industry.
Automotive suppliers and distributors can gain a strategic advantage over big retailers – now it’s a race to see if they can convert on the experience.
