How to transform your B2B digital commerce business to profitability and grow
Digital commerce is becoming a greater percentage of overall B2B sales – learn what it takes to stand out from the crowd.
With millennials and Gen Zers making up 71% of business buyers today, the B2B industry is rapidly changing. These digital natives expect seamless buying experiences, including easy access to digital catalogs, expansive product ranges, transparent availability and pricing, and rich product data.
Offering this kind of seamless experience isn’t easy. In fact, many e-commerce B2B wholesale distributors report that their top issue is supplier catalog onboarding. Handling the management of hundreds of suppliers and their product catalogs at scale is one of the toughest challenges they face. Inconsistent data, low data quality, and varying formats make it difficult to manage a digital catalog online and maintain accuracy.
Product information and imagery are key for 70% of buyers, which makes getting supplier catalog onboarding right all that more critical for wholesale distributors in today’s digital world.✅ Bring a SKU live in one day.
✅ 30x increase in productivity.
✅ Better B2B customer experience.
Find out how it’s done HERE.
Supplier catalog onboarding: The SKU deluge
As product assortment grows, wholesalers are now managing hundreds of suppliers and millions of SKUs, pushing the limits of what they can do manually.
Suppliers often have varying categories and formats, provide 200+ product attributes per SKU, and differ vastly when it comes to maturity level and integration methods, such as online forms, bulk import, API, and FTP.
According to McKinsey & Company, it often takes 10 to 15 interactions with each supplier to launch a single SKU, with two to five hours spent verifying product data per SKU.
This manual process involving emails, phone calls, and file exchanges can lead to delays and errors that hurt the customer experience, undermine sales, and ultimately damage the bottom line.
Streamlining supplier catalog management
For Graybar—a Fortune 500 distributor specializing in electrical, communications, data networking, and industrial products—adding new products to its catalog from its network of 1,200 supplier partners was a long and painful process.Each new SKU typically took days of back-and-forth for Graybar’s online data team, with suppliers sharing files manually over email.
Graybar needed a catalog management solution that allowed suppliers to upload catalogs autonomously, ensure completeness and quality of data, and free the team to work on other tasks. The company’s PIM system didn’t provide the supplier-specific capabilities it needed.
While it considered building its own solution, Graybar chose Mirakl‘s Catalog Platform, which enables it to manage all supplier product data from a single interface. Suppliers can now easily add products to the platform autonomously, speeding onboarding and saving time for Graybar’s team. AI helps ensure product information is accurate and complete.
The results have been amazing. Suppliers can bring SKUs live in one day for faster speed to market. Graybar can easily manage and update thousands of products, boosting productivity 30x faster than manual processes.
Maximum agility, built to last
By smoothing the process of supplier catalog onboarding, wholesale distributors can provide the seamless experiences today’s buyers expect. They can respond quickly to market demands and meet customer needs as they change. This kind of agility has become table stakes for driving growth and remaining competitive in the digital age.