Commerce & Customer Ordering
B2B Ecommerce for Print & Promo Distributors
Putting products online is the easy part.
The harder part is deciding what the store needs to know about the customer, the program and the order.
Who should be able to buy? Which products should they see? Can they personalize an item? Does somebody need to approve the order? Is the shopper paying by card, using a spending account or ordering against a company program? What happens to the order after checkout?
For print and promotional products distributors, those questions are often more important than the storefront itself.
A company store is usually part of a larger customer program. The buying experience has to feel simple, even when the rules behind it are not.
A store can look simple and still do a lot behind the scenes
Think about a company running a branded merchandise program across multiple locations.
An employee may only need access to a small approved catalog. A regional manager may see something different. Another group may be allowed to personalize certain items. Some orders may need approval before they move forward.
The customer should not have to think about how those rules are being enforced.
They should sign in, see what applies to them and place the order.
That is one of the useful things about B2B ecommerce for print and promo: the storefront can simplify the customer's experience without stripping away the controls the distributor needs to run the program.
Different customers need different buying experiences
A public online store assumes that most visitors can browse the same catalog.
Customer programs rarely work that way.
A franchise network may need location-specific products. A corporate program may restrict certain merchandise to particular teams. One customer may want a closed store available only to approved users. Different groups may need different products, permissions or purchasing rules.
Commerce supports customer portals with permission structures that can control feature, catalog and item access.
These controls shouldn't make ordering feel complicated.
The rules can stay in the background for the people who don't need to manage them.
For a simpler explanation of how these programs work, see What Is a Company Store?
Sometimes the product is not finished when it appears in the catalog
That is common in print and promotional products.
A shopper may need to choose a size or color, upload artwork, provide personalization or supply information that production needs before the item can move forward.
The product page then has another job beyond showing a picture and a price.
It has to collect the right information with the order.
Commerce, for example, can allow shoppers to attach files to certain print-on-demand items before adding them to the cart. Administrators decide whether the upload is optional or required, and the file stays with the item as it moves into the order.
Variant handling matters for the same reason. The specific item selected by the shopper needs to remain clear downstream so a supplier or fulfillment process knows exactly what was ordered.
These details are easy to overlook when evaluating ecommerce from the storefront alone.
They are harder to overlook when somebody has to fix the order later.
Checkout can either improve the order or create more cleanup
A clean checkout screen does not automatically mean the order is clean.
Shipping information, billing fields, customer codes and other program data may all matter after the shopper clicks submit.
Free-text fields are flexible, but they also create inconsistent data. One person types a location one way, another uses an abbreviation, and somebody downstream has to work out whether they mean the same thing.
Commerce allows administrators to provide predefined selections for configurable shipping and billing fields, so shoppers can choose from controlled values rather than entering everything manually.
The platform can also verify newly entered shipping addresses during checkout and suggest a corrected address when appropriate. The shopper can still use the address they originally entered.
Neither feature is dramatic from the shopper's perspective.
Better information enters the order without asking the customer to understand the operational consequences behind it.
Some company stores only need to exist for a while
Not every program is permanent.
A store might support an employee initiative, event, seasonal program or ordering window. Once the deadline passes, ordering needs to stop.
That sounds like a small administrative detail until somebody has to remember to open and close multiple customer stores manually.
Commerce can schedule storefront opening and closing dates. Before launch, the store can show an opening message. Near the end of the ordering period, customers can see a countdown. After the close date, the storefront closes automatically.
Customers get a clear message, and the distributor doesn't have to remember to close the store manually.
Some of the most useful ecommerce features are not designed to impress the shopper. They remove routine work from the people running the program.
The real test comes after checkout
An online order is not finished because the shopper received a confirmation page.
The distributor still has to execute it.
Inventory may need to be allocated. A supplier may need the order. Custom work may need to be produced. Shipping information has to make its way back into the transaction. Billing and payment still have to line up with what actually happened.
This is where a storefront can either become part of the operating process or sit beside it.
Commerce includes reporting around order-line transmissions sent to vendors. Administrators can see whether a transmission succeeded, is pending or failed, review its history and retransmit a failed line when needed.
The shopper will probably never know that report exists.
The operations team will care when an order does not reach a supplier.
That is why B2B ecommerce for distributors cannot be evaluated only from the customer-facing screens.
For a closer look at the ERP side of that handoff, see What Is ERP Software for Distributors?
What should you work out before building a company store?
Start with the customer program.
- Who is actually ordering?
- What should different users be able to see or do?
- Which products are stocked? Which are customized? Which are produced or sourced after the order arrives?
- Does the shopper need to upload anything?
- Are approvals involved?
- Does the store need to open or close on a schedule?
- What information has to be captured at checkout?
- And once the customer submits the order, where does it go?
Those questions shape the useful parts of the store.
Design still matters. The experience should be clear, responsive and consistent with the customer's brand. But the harder work is making sure the storefront reflects how the program really operates.
For the customer, most of that work should simply stay out of the way.
Where DemandBridge fits
Commerce supports company stores and customer ordering for print and promotional products programs.
It gives distributors ways to control storefront access, catalogs, ordering behavior and customization while connecting customer-facing commerce to the operational workflows responsible for completing the order.