Remember the good ol’ days of dial-up internet? Doo-de-doooo, bleep-bloop, scratch, scratch, ding! You know what I’m talking about.
A lot has changed since then. Now the internet is omnipresent. It’s with us in our pockets, on our nightstands, at the grocery store, in our cars. We don’t hear it, it’s just there. It’s changed the way we shop, work, travel, communicate—it’s completely changed the way we live.
For this reason, businesses today have no choice but to accept it and evolve or get left behind, B2B companies – especially manufacturers included. What used to be done over fax, phone, a warehouse sale, for instance—has now gone digital. And without a solid ecommerce strategy in place, manufacturers risk losing potential customers and will definitely lose sales. If they continue this way for too long and they’ll become as obsolete as those modem screeches of the 90s and early 2000s.
What’s more, manufacturers face a number of digital disruptors. Private label brands are coming onto the market via resellers and distributors. Behemoths like Amazon and Alibaba are also launching their own product lines that compete with those of manufacturers. All of these things pressure the manufacturer to do something different for revenue generation.
The good news? There are as many ways to optimize your ecommerce capabilities as there are disruptive forces in the marketplace. It starts with understanding your business objectives and then deploying the right tactics to achieve them. It could be a B2B portal, a configure price quote application, a mobile experience for your sales team—it could even be a direct-to-consumer website where you can sell your products directly. You don’t have to be a disruptor, you just have to get started.
And the best part? It doesn’t have to be hard. Let a digital agency like Shift7 be your guide.
Interested in getting started? Connect with us at Shift7Digital.com/contact-us.
Plus, continue to follow along with our Future Proof video series to learn more about how manufacturers can thrive in a digital world.