October 29, 2013 at 10:31The first thousand online stores on our portal for e-commerce
It's time to talk about our large project for the AgoraB2B.ru e-commerce market.
What is AgoraB2B.ru and why does the market need it?
AgoraB2B is, first and foremost, a B2B portal - a platform in which interaction occurs between online stores registered in the portal and their suppliers.
What problems are there in the market?
Before telling how the portal works, we will dive into the principles of the companies in the e-commerce market.
There are various schemes for building online stores, but the most common is the following principle (I describe it very roughly):
We are looking for a market niche, we are finding suppliers who are ready to ship goods individually, a product matrix is created, the issue of product content is resolved, product content is placed on the window, promotion and sales begin. Such an online store does not have a warehouse with goods, and after an order is received from a buyer, an online store representative reserves the goods from the supplier and takes all the goods reserved per day in the evening.
This way of doing business allows you to have a fairly wide range of products, while not investing a lot of money in the goods. Most of the existing online stores work on this principle. In this model there is one narrow link - the supplier, or rather suppliers.
If an online store only places on its storefront those products that are always in stock at the supplier’s warehouse, then there are no problems, but often this only applies to the most popular product items. The rest of the goods of suppliers tend to run out, which means that online stores that place such goods on display cases incur losses by selling those goods that have ended.
What is wrong with suppliers?
In fact, everything is fine with suppliers, but they exist, as it were, in another world parallel to e-commerce. First of all, this is the world of big money, large orders, kickbacks and the complete lack of values inherent in the e-commerce market.
Suppliers perfectly exist for themselves, but 1, 5, 10 online stores come to them and want to ship goods individually. At the same time, online stores are asked to send information about the inventory balance of the supplier as often as possible, because the online store does not want to spend money on advertising goods that are not in the supplier’s warehouse.
What do most suppliers do in this case? That's right - they send online retailers to hell with their requests. In the best case, online stores find suppliers who provide single-piece shipment of goods subject to a deposit to the supplier's account. In this case, the supplier sends each morning a document with a list of balances.
It turns out that almost all online stores lose about 5% of orders due to the fact that they do not have accurate information about the balances in the warehouses of their suppliers. And the search for suppliers willing to work with online stores is not an easy task.
An additional challenge for online stores is the reservation of goods ordered by customers. With each purchase, you need to reset the supplier’s manager with a request to reserve the goods so that someone else does not ship it.
This process takes a lot of time, since it’s much more important for the supplier’s manager to order a large client who buys a large batch of goods than a single shipment of an online store.
From the foregoing, we can conclude that the supplier is doing well, and online stores have problems, but this is not entirely true. Distribution companies have more problems. Sales in various markets no, no, but sag, and significantly. Plus, competition is growing. Here, many wholesale suppliers begin to look at the e-commerce market, because it shows an increase of tens of percent in almost all categories of goods sold via the Internet. Most often, the supplier comes up with the idea of creating his own online store, and in most cases this is a strategic miscalculation. Firstly, because wholesale companies, as a rule, do not calculate (as such, that is, a business plan for creating an online store) (I say from experience with dozens of suppliers).
The approach is extremely superficial - there is a product, we will create a store window, we will pour money into advertising and start making money on the Internet.
The result is dozens of closed Internet projects and hundreds of thousands of rubles spent.
How do we propose to operate a wholesale company now, and what does our B2B portal provide?
Firstly, for a product to be sold on the Internet, in any case, the supplier must create high-quality product content. That is, the image and description of the goods in electronic form.
Secondly, you need to learn how to ship goods individually.
If the provider has both, we suggest that he connect with his 1C accounting system to our portal. We unload the supplier’s remaining stocks on the portal and give the opportunity to configure the display of balances on our portal in the form of real data or in the form of many / few. The supplier sets wholesale prices for this product, and online stores that are registered on our portal have the opportunity to download the supplier’s product content and, by making a mark-up, start distributing the product on the Internet without spending time creating product content.
In addition, the online store can, through the functionality of the portal, place an order with the supplier, almost like in a regular online store. If the supplier in his accounting system does not have this online store as a counterparty, then the order will be sent to the supplier by e-mail and in the supplier’s personal account on the portal. After the supplier starts a counterparty, the corresponding online store, the online store will be able to make reserves to the supplier through the portal just by clicking, without distracting the supplier’s manager. An order placed in this way will go directly to the supplier’s 1C.
For online stores that use the Insales platform , it is possible to automatically update balances in the window of an online store, depending on the balances of the goods in the supplier’s warehouse. The scheme looks something like this:
Our B2B portal is a fairly effective tool for interaction between suppliers and online stores.
In the near future, we plan to seriously develop the portal’s functionality in order to automate as much as possible the processes that today have to be done manually by both suppliers and online stores.
The need for such a tool is confirmed by demand - more than a thousand online stores have already connected to the portal. There are not as many suppliers as we would like, but we are still at the very beginning of the journey!
What is AgoraB2B.ru and why does the market need it?
AgoraB2B is, first and foremost, a B2B portal - a platform in which interaction occurs between online stores registered in the portal and their suppliers.
What problems are there in the market?
Before telling how the portal works, we will dive into the principles of the companies in the e-commerce market.
There are various schemes for building online stores, but the most common is the following principle (I describe it very roughly):
We are looking for a market niche, we are finding suppliers who are ready to ship goods individually, a product matrix is created, the issue of product content is resolved, product content is placed on the window, promotion and sales begin. Such an online store does not have a warehouse with goods, and after an order is received from a buyer, an online store representative reserves the goods from the supplier and takes all the goods reserved per day in the evening.
This way of doing business allows you to have a fairly wide range of products, while not investing a lot of money in the goods. Most of the existing online stores work on this principle. In this model there is one narrow link - the supplier, or rather suppliers.
If an online store only places on its storefront those products that are always in stock at the supplier’s warehouse, then there are no problems, but often this only applies to the most popular product items. The rest of the goods of suppliers tend to run out, which means that online stores that place such goods on display cases incur losses by selling those goods that have ended.
What is wrong with suppliers?
In fact, everything is fine with suppliers, but they exist, as it were, in another world parallel to e-commerce. First of all, this is the world of big money, large orders, kickbacks and the complete lack of values inherent in the e-commerce market.
Suppliers perfectly exist for themselves, but 1, 5, 10 online stores come to them and want to ship goods individually. At the same time, online stores are asked to send information about the inventory balance of the supplier as often as possible, because the online store does not want to spend money on advertising goods that are not in the supplier’s warehouse.
What do most suppliers do in this case? That's right - they send online retailers to hell with their requests. In the best case, online stores find suppliers who provide single-piece shipment of goods subject to a deposit to the supplier's account. In this case, the supplier sends each morning a document with a list of balances.
It turns out that almost all online stores lose about 5% of orders due to the fact that they do not have accurate information about the balances in the warehouses of their suppliers. And the search for suppliers willing to work with online stores is not an easy task.
An additional challenge for online stores is the reservation of goods ordered by customers. With each purchase, you need to reset the supplier’s manager with a request to reserve the goods so that someone else does not ship it.
This process takes a lot of time, since it’s much more important for the supplier’s manager to order a large client who buys a large batch of goods than a single shipment of an online store.
From the foregoing, we can conclude that the supplier is doing well, and online stores have problems, but this is not entirely true. Distribution companies have more problems. Sales in various markets no, no, but sag, and significantly. Plus, competition is growing. Here, many wholesale suppliers begin to look at the e-commerce market, because it shows an increase of tens of percent in almost all categories of goods sold via the Internet. Most often, the supplier comes up with the idea of creating his own online store, and in most cases this is a strategic miscalculation. Firstly, because wholesale companies, as a rule, do not calculate (as such, that is, a business plan for creating an online store) (I say from experience with dozens of suppliers).
The approach is extremely superficial - there is a product, we will create a store window, we will pour money into advertising and start making money on the Internet.
The result is dozens of closed Internet projects and hundreds of thousands of rubles spent.
How do we propose to operate a wholesale company now, and what does our B2B portal provide?
Firstly, for a product to be sold on the Internet, in any case, the supplier must create high-quality product content. That is, the image and description of the goods in electronic form.
Secondly, you need to learn how to ship goods individually.
If the provider has both, we suggest that he connect with his 1C accounting system to our portal. We unload the supplier’s remaining stocks on the portal and give the opportunity to configure the display of balances on our portal in the form of real data or in the form of many / few. The supplier sets wholesale prices for this product, and online stores that are registered on our portal have the opportunity to download the supplier’s product content and, by making a mark-up, start distributing the product on the Internet without spending time creating product content.
In addition, the online store can, through the functionality of the portal, place an order with the supplier, almost like in a regular online store. If the supplier in his accounting system does not have this online store as a counterparty, then the order will be sent to the supplier by e-mail and in the supplier’s personal account on the portal. After the supplier starts a counterparty, the corresponding online store, the online store will be able to make reserves to the supplier through the portal just by clicking, without distracting the supplier’s manager. An order placed in this way will go directly to the supplier’s 1C.
For online stores that use the Insales platform , it is possible to automatically update balances in the window of an online store, depending on the balances of the goods in the supplier’s warehouse. The scheme looks something like this:
Our B2B portal is a fairly effective tool for interaction between suppliers and online stores.
In the near future, we plan to seriously develop the portal’s functionality in order to automate as much as possible the processes that today have to be done manually by both suppliers and online stores.
The need for such a tool is confirmed by demand - more than a thousand online stores have already connected to the portal. There are not as many suppliers as we would like, but we are still at the very beginning of the journey!