Although many business-to-business e-commerce executives often have Amazon Business in their sights as they plan how to better compete online, keeping up with or besting Amazon shouldn’t be among their top concerns—at least not for another year or so, Forrester Research Inc. says in a new report that offers e-commerce predictions for 2016
“Amazon Business is still in a ‘test and learn’ mode and needs more time to settle on and hone its B2B marketplace model,” Forrester says in the report, “Predictions 2016: The eCommerce Gap Widens; How Winning B2B and B2C Firms will Pull Ahead for Good.” The report was authored by Andy Hoar and Sucharita Mulpuru, Forrester’s leading analysts for B2B and retail e-commerce, respectively.
To be sure, Forrester recognizes Amazon’s dominance in e-commerce and projects that its gross merchandise sales in the United States—sales of third-party sellers on Amazon.com as well as Amazon’s direct sales—will top $100 billion in 2015. Amazon is No. 37 in the B2B E-Commerce 300 and No. 1 in the Internet Retailer Top 500.
In retail e-commerce, Forrester advises online merchants and consumer brand manufacturers to better compete against Amazon by looking “hard for unique merchandise to stay ahead of trends,” and to consider expanding their assortments by deploying online programs like their own e-marketplaces where they can feature products from third-party sellers.
For B2B companies, Forrester notes that B2B e-marketplaces like Amazon Business, Alibaba.com, eBay.com and others “won’t affect B2B e-commerce meaningfully until after 2016.” But that will likely change in 2017, and B2B companies should start planning now to take advantage of opportunities to sell through big online marketplaces instead of just trying to keep them at bay, and to consider deploying their own e-marketplaces to host third-party sellers, Forrester says. “B2B execs should prepare for a marketplace-influenced world by meeting with the major third-party marketplaces and own-site marketplaces vendors to explore marketplace options,” the report says.
The report also recommends these additional steps, among others, for B2B companies:
Prepare for more competition from web-only B2B companies that excel in offering self-service e-commerce. Learn from customers how they want to research and buy products, and receive customer service, then build out a range of services that let customers order through self-service e-commerce as well as through partial and full-service offerings provided by sales and customer service reps. “Just a minority of B2B companies have actually implemented the full spectrum of purchase options,” the report says.
Check out new offerings from e-commerce vendors, including companies like cloud-based customer relationship management technology provider Salesforce.com, which is looking at how it may extend its CRM software further into the e-commerce space. But B2B companies “must be wary of vendors bearing augmented platforms,” Forrester says. “Not all platforms will offer best-of-breed capabilities, and practitioners must do their homework to separate the good from the great.”
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