In recent years, significant strides have been made in automation. If you want to stay ahead of your competition as a business owner, you must keep up with these developments. Stagnation is regression! Don't think that it won't escalate, as this issue affects both large and small entrepreneurs. In 2021, we saw a clear example of what can happen if you don't invest enough in automation. Supermarket chain DEEN with dozens of locations in North Holland concluded that it would ultimately lose the battle if it didn't invest sufficiently in automation. Therefore, the company chose to dissolve itself.
Higher demands
While a supermarket is certainly not a B2B company, the effect is the same. If you've missed the boat in e-commerce, you're so far behind that you must seriously consider whether the damage can ever be recovered. If your company is involved in B2B commerce, you will undoubtedly recognize that your customers are setting increasingly higher demands. They expect, for example, that you offer a personalized portal, where the prices applicable to them are listed and where they can place their orders super fast and very easily. Developers of such systems quickly respond to the ever-increasing demands of customers and adjust their applications accordingly. At the same time, your own sales team remains an indispensable link in the whole, but primarily to provide advice and issue quotes.
Flexibility
To give you as a business owner a high degree of flexibility, a German e-commerce specialist thought about eight years ago that it would be wise to devise a system where the front-end and back-end are decoupled. This allows you to respond much faster to new developments. This so-called headless e-commerce gives you as a business owner maximum freedom of choice and is now considered the most future-proof system for organizing e-commerce within your company. You can choose which content management system (CMS) you want to use in combination with the application for your e-commerce. Common options include Contentful, Storyblok, and WordPress, but if you prefer another CMS, that is also possible. In fact, you could say that this approach offers you the best of both worlds.
