Register Now

insight
Blog
By: Sagar Sharma

Why B2B Healthcare Ecommerce Evolving Towards Unified Process of Content Management?

B2B eCommerce solution gives a golden opportunity to the healthcare industry to stay ahead of the challenges which customers are facing during this COVID-19 pandemic and to tackle those demands of customers.

Recent study reports show around 85% of B2B buyers interact and purchase products from the healthcare product manufacturers through digital. As the consumer prefers to engage with the companies in the healthcare industry digitally, companies are trying to satisfy their potential consumers to gain their loyalty and to improve their shopping experience.

This article elaborates why and how companies using B2B healthcare commerce adapt towards a unified process of managing their product content.

B2B Ecommerce in Healthcare Industry

B2B eCommerce leverages companies in the healthcare industry to sell their products worldwide. Apart from allowing consumers to buy products from healthcare companies, B2B eCommerce solutions offer a lot.

  • B2B eCommerce solutions reduce the time to process B2B orders.
  • Delivers better customer experience.
  • Improves customer interactions with companies.
  • Increases business sales and the company’s ROI.
  • Delivers optimized and personalized content to consumers.

Apart from that, B2B Ecommerce solution transforms Healthcare Industry by solving the common challenges of the healthcare industry through the below-given 5 ways.

  1. Delivering a suitable solution to all the pain points of healthcare companies.
  2. Delivers exceptional online shopping experience to enterprises.
  3. Buyers can buy products at a reduced cost.
  4. The flexibility and audit ability of B2B Commerce supports companies to carry out regulatory entitlements.
  5. Improves sales in different channels.

In addition, unifying B2B healthcare commerce allows companies to gain a competitive edge in today’s dynamic market.

Unifying B2B Healthcare Commerce

The growth of eCommerce development leads to rapid and dynamic changes in the B2B Healthcare Commerce industry. Manufacturers in the healthcare industry are selling their products to both customers and also to businesses in large numbers this forces manufacturers to adapt to a unified platform that can support both B2B and B2C sides.

Here are lists of few vital reasons that manufacturers in the healthcare industry prefer the Unified process of content management.

  • To simplifying branding and marketing
  • To reduce operational cost
  • To easy business operations
  • To reduce purchasing time for B2B Customers
  • To Improve Shopping Experience

Well, before getting into the core topic, let’s discuss the unified commerce platform and how it is beneficial.

Unified Commerce Platform – A Brief

Unified commerce can be defined as the process of integrating all backend systems/channels of a business in a single platform where the potential buyers/customers interact. This kind of setup supports an omnichannel journey and delivers a unified view of the product content via a centralized platform.

This unified commerce platform allows businesses to collect consolidated data insights, end-to-end growth and delivers a seamless shopping experience to potential consumers.

The Importance of Unified Commerce

Unified commerce is the right set of technology for the healthcare industry to invest in, to get the ultimate results of loyalty from the potential customer, improve the efficiency of business operation, and take a vital decision in today’s data-driven market.

Well, many business people in the healthcare industry are aware of omnichannel commerce and its benefits. This unified commerce goes ahead of omnichannel commerce when it comes to gathering and managing all data under a single platform. By implementing a unified commerce solution, businesses in healthcare eCommerce can improve their customer experience by offering comprehensive profiles to potential customers to improve their business sales.

Unified commerce offers a centralized eCommerce platform for integrating multiple software and to enable operational efficiency. Here are the Interactional benefits B2B Healthcare eCommerce can get through unified commerce

API Integration

Integrating multiple singles to collect data under a single platform is one of the magical benefits B2B Healthcare eCommerce can get from API Integration. API (Application Program Interfaces) is a term that is specifically used to create a certain workflow by using which multiple systems can communicate with each other.

Business Process Integration

Business Process Integration commonly termed as BPI is a platform in which business operational data is collected and shared automatically among multiple applications/systems. ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) is the perfect software example when it comes to illustrating the BPI (Business Process Integration).

Data Integration

Apart from just integrating systems and business applications, unified commerce integrated data at the database level. Unified commerce solution carried ETL process to integrate data from the different databases in three steps, data extraction, data transformation, and data loading to target systems.

Meanwhile, ETL transfers data in batch by batch which is not ideal for real-time applications, in such a scenario unified eCommerce offers an alternative platform iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) which performs the data transfer automated among different systems.

User Interface Integration

The user interface (UI) brings the integrated data to the presentation level. The presentation level plays a key role in delivering integrated data from the different systems/databases to offer a consolidated view to the potential consumers to interact with them.

Many B2B Healthcare eCommerce suffer due to clunkier and less effective UI due to the integration of many systems. However, a cloud-based unified commerce platform offers high flexibility to the business involved in the healthcare industry to carry out various integration and implementation methods without any hassles.

Benefits of Unified Commerce Solution in B2B Healthcare Industry

  • B2B Healthcare Industry can deliver strategic, and fully AI-based personalized content to their potential buyers at every touchpoint. This boosts the shopping experience of the customers on all devices.
  • The unified commerce solution helps businesses in the B2B healthcare industry to implement innovative business operational ideas continuously without causing any disruptions or delays.
  • Unified commerce solutions help eCommerce businesses to launch new sites in quick time and to roll out the necessary promotional activities faster, thanks to the simplified data integration. Apart from that, it helps the online store to manage complete eCommerce operations including orders effectively.
  • Cloud-based Unified commerce solution delivers robust, reliable, and highly stable IT operations to the businesses involved in the B2B healthcare industry. Also, the scalability of Unified cloud solutions helps businesses to expand their business operation easily.
  • Centralized data storage offered by a unified commerce solution maximizes business productivity through automation. This helps B2B healthcare businesses to cover new regions and go globe time in a short time.

Unified Omnichannel Experience for B2B Business

Digitalization has boosted the digital marketing experience allowing the public to shop online. This online shopping has made it easier for the public to select the products and services of their choice at a click of a single button. Different items from pins to a car all can be shopped online. For such a time of business organization, it is important to provide the best and the truest details to their customer.

The organizations should provide the best e-commerce platform for extending B2B sales. The omnichannel solutions help the organization to enhance the customer experience. It helps them to target a wide range of audiences. Understanding the customer’s needs and providing them with customized or personalized service will help to satisfy their needs. This helps the organization in retaining its customers and attracts new ones.

Factors affecting the growth of B2B e-commerce

Few key distinctive factors play a crucial role in shaping the growth process of B2B e-commerce providers. These include:

Decision process

B2B sales take a long time and money for attracting the right kind of customers. The decision process involved more than one member before finalizing the product purchase. These decisions are dependent on the business needs. The product purchase cycles take a long time and involve nurturing leads and relationships with the clients and customers.

These prospects of the decision process are time and cost-intensive. Outsourced providers help to bridge the gaps and provide valuable insights and solutions. For enterprise sales, these decision processes are very common. These demands are increased for entry-level, small to medium-sized businesses.

Marketing process

The marketing of any product is a very important process as it helps in creating the recognition platform for the product. A proper marketing process or strategy helps in reaching the larger crowd most effectively. During the B2B sales, more brands are involved, thus making the sales difficult.

The use of different types of marketing strategies helps to get better results. The contents for the products help in defining the marketing strategy. The main focus for the consumer-focussed environment is building trust within customers and creating brand awareness. B2B e-commerce aims for educating and informing the clients and customers.

Unified experience

For most companies having a product-based business, it is important for having a unified user experience. This helps in creating a clear distinction by separating the B2C and B2B markets and e-commerce platforms. This helps the organization in targeting the right type of audience by unifying the shopping experiences.

The different e-commerce platforms allow the customers to switch from B2C experience to B2B using the same platform. The different sales platforms adapt them from time to time to provide the best seamless shopping experiences to their customers.

Personal touch

Most of the B2C e-commerce sites have evolved from Artificial intelligence (AI) and provide AI-based support experience to their customers. These techniques help in creating automated touchpoints that enhance the customer’s shopping experience.

The automated solutions implemented by the B2B e-commerce platform help to target the right type of audience and also depends on the product value. Personal contact plays a key indicator and a supporting factor leading to long-term progress and success.

Mutual benefit

Using B2B e-commerce helps to focus on proving the mutual benefit to the buyer as well as the seller. The B2B providers allow maintaining a long-term relationship that adds value to the client folio. Valuable feedback from the customers helps the business in the development of the new products and can encourage various innovations.

The use of automation and data mining process together and continuously leads to gathering more and adequate details regarding the user behavior. The unified process of managing product content data in the e-commerce environment will allow in improving the sales experience for the customers as well as for the business.

Creating a Unified Process For Better Product Content Management In B2B Healthcare Ecommerce

In recent years, B2B Healthcare eCommerce witnessed tremendous growth especially in COVID-19 pandemic B2B healthcare companies were forced to adapt and to elevate digital technology. Growing competition in the global B2B Healthcare eCommerce business in today’s market has forced them to offer seamless customer experience and to introduce transparency on their business operation, especially in product manufacturing and pricing.

This drives businesses in the B2B healthcare eCommerce industry towards a unified process to manage product content effectively. Here are the few aspects that businesses in B2B healthcare eCommerce can do for creating a unified process of data management.

Sourcing Data From Various Systems

Companies or businesses can create and own Product Information Management platforms to gather and distribute optimized product content to manufacturing and distribution units. Because they require a single source of truth to consolidate product information consistently.

Product Syndication

Syndicating product information with the aid of a PIM system to multiple channels will help consumers to receive accurate product data. However, there are few challenges that companies face when serving syndicated data to different channels in multiple categories.

To get rid of such challenges, companies and businesses need to develop a new kind of strategy for mapping and to carry out the automated configuration of data syndications of their product data in the PIM system.

Personalized Content

Implementing a PIM system offers a centralized location for storing and sharing optimized and personalized content to multiple channels. Though end users/buyers don’t interact with the company’s PIM systems, still they get personalized content through different channels. However, this kind of personalized content delivery can be provisioned by setting rules and building efficiency in PIM systems.

Conclusion

B2B Healthcare companies and distributors need to evaluate and keep ready their unified commerce solution to keep up with digital maturity on handling and managing their product content across multiple channels to witness growth in their business in the post-pandemic period of COVID-19.

Say goodbye to data chaos and embrace the power of PIM/MDM to supercharge your business growth!