eCommerce Platforms for Distributors and Retailers: What to Look For

By: Michael Marinaro

When’s the last time you took a long, hard look at your business’s ecommerce platform? Your customers are using it every day. If they’re not having efficient, personalized experiences on your ecommerce site, you could be leaving money on the table.

A seamless, easy-to-use ecommerce platform, quite simply, can help your business sell more product, keep customers happy, and fulfill orders accurately and efficiently.

There’s nothing more frustrating as a customer than dealing with a disjointed order management system and being unable to see inventory in real-time. Those failures lead to brand discontent, business efficiency and frustrated customers.

Our Go-To eCommerce Solution

Hands down, NetSuite’s SuiteCommerce is our go-to cloud-based ecommerce solution.

SuiteCommerce enables distributors and retailers to deliver personalized, efficient and engaging online experiences to customers.

The beautiful thing about SuiteCommerce is that it can be customized from top to bottom. As with all NetSuite commerce products, SuiteCommerce unifies ecommerce with your core operational business systems — providing a single view of customers, orders, inventory and other critical business data, enabling real-time understanding of your business and powering personal and relevant omni-channel experiences.

Essential eCommerce Platform Features

Let’s take a close look at what SuiteCommerce offers.

Online Storefront

Your brand is your business and SuiteCommerce helps reflect it with pixel-perfect design capabilities. Leverage modern, pre-built responsive design themes to quickly build your online store. A growing ecosystem of themes and extensions along with a host of features — including faceted navigation, elastic site search and the ability to save shopping carts and create lists — make it easy for shoppers to find, learn about and buy your products.

Site Management

Drag-and-drop tools allow you to edit pages and manage content. Use a selection of themes and layouts to update the look and feel of your site and add and configure new features and functionalities with extensions. Multiple changes to your site can be worked on and then scheduled for a future deployment based on business needs.

NetSuite website content management

Manage your website directly in NetSuite

Purchasing, Payments and Shipping

Offer customers payment options including credit cards, promo codes, gift cards and invoicing. Shoppers can check out as a guest or registered user. The entire shopping experience is secure with HTTPS support and integrated to common payment gateways for real-time credit card processing with PCI DSS compliance and multi-level fraud protection. Facilitate delivery with seamless integration with carriers for printing shipping labels and automatic tracking information.

Business Insight and Analytics

Configurable dashboards allow you to create reports and gain insight into your business. Integrations are provided for Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.

SEO and Marketing

Ensure SEO (search engine optimization) success with customizable H1, title, meta tags, SEO-friendly URL links and schema.org markup to increase click-through rates. Present upsells, cross-sells and related products based on merchant-driven rules such as browsing behavior or best sellers. Allow your brand enthusiasts to share content to social networks and provide product reviews. Drive sales with flexible promotion and campaign management. Email, cart abandonment and pop-up signup campaigns are easily executed with the Bronto Marketing Platform.

Customer Account

Managing your address book, viewing order history and checking order status can easily be done online. B2B buyers can generate quotes, quickly order from personalized catalogs, view outstanding and available balances and pay invoices online.

Architecture

With SuiteCommerce, you’ll never have to migrate your ecommerce solution again. SuiteCommerce is a SaaS (Software-as-a Service) multi-tenant cloud platform. Your ecommerce site will be easy to maintain: no “version lock” and no need to migrate between versions.

You can take advantage of new features and updates made automatically available with every release and select from a growing ecosystem of extensions to enhance your site.

Performance

Single-page architecture and a content delivery network provide a fast site experience, resulting in increased engagement and conversion.

Key Benefits of SuiteCommerce

To recap, here are our favorite aspects of NetSuite’s SuiteCommerce.

  • Full-featured ecommerce solution enabling engaging experiences on any device
  • True SaaS managed upgrades, no version lock
  • Easily manage and add new site features and functionality with extensions
  • One platform supports both individual (B2C) and business (B2B) customers
  • Graduate to SuiteCommerce Advanced as your business needs change
  • Ecommerce is unified with NetSuite order and inventory management, CRM and ERP

Need Help?

Looking to deliver an efficient and engaging online experience for your customers? Contact us online or give us a call at 410.685.5512 for a demo of SuiteCommerce.

Published June 24, 2021

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