These days, most of the items my family purchases are delivered to our doorstep. It’s simply become an easier way to keep us flush with household products, as two working parents juggling free time against patience (or impatience) with the in-store experience.
A recent trip to a big box retailer reminded me of that fact. Lugging a toddler through crowded aisles, I struggled to find the baby section. Then I struggled to find the diaper aisle. Then … I struggled to pick a product while trying to keep the aforementioned toddler from sprinting towards anything breakable, swallowable, or sticky. It wasn’t hard to envision how much easier this would have been if I were at home, sitting in front of a screen.
As e-commerce technology improves by leaps and bounds, it tips the omni-channel scale, for many, in the direction of online. There’s no risk of wasting your time driving to a retail location or placing a catalog order, only to find out that product is not in stock. Features like real-time inventory, smooth payment processing and customized offers mean the user experience is often an improvement that saves time and money.
According to Internet Retailer, there has been a 75.8 percent increase in online retail sales in the U.S. between 2011 and 2015 (from $194.3 billion to $341.7 billion). eMarketer estimates sales will reach $491.5 billion in 2018.
And if that sounds like a big number, wait until you hear this – when it comes to B2B sales, Forrester Research projects these figures are on course to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 7.7 percent until reaching $1.13 trillion in 2020.
In the manufacturing industry, companies are looking for new ways to expand their reach to both end customers and channel partners, and e-commerce ought to be a no-brainer. But despite the fact that there’s money to be made in this growing segment, manufacturers often don’t use digital tools to their full advantage – especially when it comes to B2B transactions through their standard marketing channels, such as distributors, wholesalers, retailers, dealers, and the like.
We recently surveyed readers of IEN magazine, a group comprised of management in manufacturing companies, in an effort to learn more about their attitudes towards the role of digital transactions within their sales channels. The results, not surprisingly, revealed a mixed bag of businesses at varying points in their digital journeys. However, what was surprising was the number of respondents who fail to offer web purchasing of any kind.
So where does your manufacturing business fall on the digital spectrum? Are there missed opportunities that your competitors’ are embracing, while you sit on the sidelines? In an effort to take a deeper dive into these points, we’ve developed a custom report based on our research: The State of Manufacturing and Digital Commerce.
Click here to download the full report. It’s free, and it might give you some ideas on how to increase your profitability by providing your customers and sales channels the purchasing options they want and need — before they go elsewhere.
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