Importance of digital commerce
Data has become central to modern commerce. How a business responds to a customer order becomes one of the key differentiators for any firm. Intense competition and restrictions imposed by COVID-19 pandemic and key resources shortage have led to accelerated digital transformation across industries. Traditional business models face challenges embracing the evolving commerce landscape. Firms are reinventing the business processes and exploring all possible avenues to expand their customer base by taking out friction from the current business flow.
To provide a seamless experience for the customers, companies engage with customers across multiple channels and leading businesses have already enabled Omnichannel to maximize their potential reach. A company reaches its intended audience using multiple business models such as B2B, B2B2C, and D2C and in the process of managing orders flowing from these channels, they also interact with multiple internal and external systems. For example:
An order might flow from a third-party e-commerce platform, gets processed using internal ERP for inventory and financials and finally gets shipped from a third-party logistics company (for example, FedEx).
A B2B order gets fulfilled by third-party fulfillment center and order needs to be orchestrated to the relevant fulfillment center based on dynamic business rules like geographical constraints, order quantity, and so on.
Digital commerce is expected to manage these challenges efficiently and without bringing extra overheads of building new systems for every new avenue.