SAP Business One eCommerce Tips: Avoid the “Order Form” Website

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

For many small and midsize B2B or B2C businesses, offering online shopping/eCommerce is not only being recognized as an efficient way to do business by management, it is also being demanded by web-savvy customers. Some companies use short-cut or stopgap methods to address the online shopping demand, and this leads us to a discussion on an ecommerce website to avoid: The “Order Form” website.

The Order Form Website

After navigating the website of “PDQ Products,” a button is presented to Order Online.

Typically, we would expect to see a catalog of some sort, whereby we can log-in to identify ourselves, and view available product categories, items, prices and product photos, along with a shopping cart and a way to complete a transaction.

On the “Order Form” website, we are instead presented with a blank form, where we must enter our basic information, along with entering the item we are requesting.

This set-up is inefficient for both the customer placing the order, and for PDQ Products.

For the PDQ customer, they are being asked to enter information that PDQ already has on file. They are also being tasked to know the exact item number and cost of the item they are ordering.
For PDQ internal staff, they have to manually re-enter everything the customer typed into their system in order to process the order. There is the possibility that a customer typed an item number, address or cost incorrectly – which causes more inefficiency and errors.

PDQ could avoid these inefficiencies and provide superior customer service by incorporating an integrated SAP Business One eCommerce solution: rediSell for eCommerce, and SAP Business One for back-end processes like financials, customer information, sales orders, purchasing and item management.

rediSell’s solution for PDQ would be a full online shopping experience through a properly branded website, the ability to set up product categories and catalogs through the rediSell Uploader Tool, and integration of customer information, items, prices and images from SAP Business One. Additionally, orders placed through the rediSell website could be set up to automatically process in the SAP Business One system.

by Suda Sampath, IndyDutch Solutions