What is your biggest B2B eCommerce Challenge? Sales Reps

Let’s imagine that you are a manufacturer or distributor selling a range of products. You have a team of sales representatives that process orders on behalf of their customers or accounts. These sales reps may be your direct employees or other types of trading partners.

If you don’t have a Web-based solution for your sales reps to process orders, then they are likely meeting with their customers, collecting orders, then processing those orders manually in your accounting system, ERP or over the phone to your back-office.

With the xTupleCommerce solution, sales reps can do all of this work directly on your eCommerce site. They can log into the site and use the Sales Rep Utility to purchase on behalf of their customers.

A sales rep may have a long list of accounts that they manage. When they log into the eCommerce site, they would start by updating the specific customer that they are currently representing. They’d also have the ability to choose a specific ship-to address and a future ship date for the order.

They would then continue adding items to the cart just like a typical eCommerce Shopping Cart, and they could process the order (either via a credit card or on the customers credit account).

There are a few more layers of complexity available, such as:

Pricing Schedules

Your sales reps may have negotiated unique pricing schedules. Once they log into your eCommerce site, they will see the product price update to reflect these negotiated prices.

Saved Carts

Let’s imagine that your sales rep is slowly building orders over a period of time. Maybe their accounts only process purchases on a quarterly basis. As they begin building a cart for your customer, they can save that cart to their profile and re-activate the cart at any time. Additionally, they can save notes and references along with the cart to help them stay organized.

Templated Carts

In some cases, your sales reps will have customers that order the same products time and time again. Perhaps those accounts are simply stocking their shelves every quarter, and the products rarely change. Your sales rep can save a standard cart that represent their accounts' typical purchases. When they are ready to start a new transaction for a customer, they will simply activate the Templated Cart, update quantities, and possibly add/remove products from the cart before making the transaction.

Multiple Ship-To Addresses

If the sales rep’s accounts have multiple addresses to order for, the Sales Rep can choose which is the required address at this time. For instance, imagine that the account has several retail shops. The rep can choose the appropriate location to order against.

Mobile Ready eCommerce Solution

The xTupleCommerce system is mobile-responsive which means that it will work on mobile devices, and your sales reps can do all of this work from a mobile device such as an iPad or smartphone. This will make it much easier for them to work while on the road.

As I promised, this is the next in a series of blog posts that introduces you to the xTupleCommerce system. Look for more upcoming information, and please don’t hesitate to contact me and the xTuple Web Services Group (WSG) team with questions.

Look for our YouTube Webinars on eCommerce and eCommerce tutorials on xTuple University.

Photo credit: Nina Frazier on Flickr