Understand the components of an eCommerce system – get educated on every aspect of an eCommerce platform. Leave the M2B part out for now – just understand all the components. Learn how the customer experience is created, and how you use the out of the box (OOTB) functionality. What you will find is common features that span across platforms – things like the product information, shopping cart, and orders. That’s a lot of work I know – which means you probably don’t want to do this with 12 vendors.
Get IT and Marketing on the same page – yeah, I need about 10 posts on this one I know. To select a platform, you need a balance between what needs to be built (the experience) and how it will be built (the technology). If you can come together with joint requirements, use cases, and a joint business case you will be ahead of the game. IT – really understand what your business counter parts need, why they need it, and what tools they need to keep everything fresh. Your customer experience does matter, no matter how much of a geek you are. Marketing – regardless of what is out of the box, there is a bunch of work your IT team needs to do to get ready for this type of project within your internal systems. Help each other out – advocate for each other, and maybe even work to understand each other. I promise it will go a long way.
Figure out what requirements are unique to your business or industry – the tendency in developing requirements is to focus on where you are unique. While you certainly need to understand these unique requirements – the chances that a platform will provide these requirements out of the box are slim. Therefore, you need to select a platform that best meets the entirety of your needs, not just platforms that can custom build you unique requirements the fastest in a POC.
Use cases instead of RFPs – put your money and resources into building use cases. Use cases that address both common features (to help you differentiate the platforms) and a few to help you figure out how your unique requirements would be done. On the latter, ask a thousand questions – how did you build that? how was that customized? configured? Make sure that your team actually has read and agrees with all of the use cases. Ideally, everyone in the room would have had a hand in developing the use cases and even debated (even argued) about which ones should be in included. I am not saying don’t have an RFP, but make sure you concentrate on your use cases.
Integration, integration, integration – I can’t talk enough about integration. For M2B companies, integration is critical. Integration with ERP, CRM, Pricing Engines, Order Management, Content Management, PIM, and many others. Understand how integration will be done, and build requirements around integration that you can have a thorough conversation around. Will you use an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), bulk files? Do you have data quality issues that need to be included? There are so many methods of integration – understand everything around integration and all of your options. An integration conversation is typically done as part of a technical architecture discussion which is just fine. Your job is to understand how the platform integrates with your environment, so come prepared with questions.