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What Makes a Great SAP Manufacturing eCommerce Experience?

You’ll often hear terms like frictionless to describe an ideal eCommerce buying experience. The goal is simple: Help customers move as quickly as possible through the sales funnel without burdening them or requiring human interaction. When it comes to SAP eCommerce, this can feel like a daunting task given the complexity of lead-to-cash SAP functionality compared to modern, front-end eCommerce solutions.

Your eCommerce Should Support (and Disguise) Your Business Complexity, Not Highlight It

Frictionless eCommerce for SAP manufacturers must enable account-level pricing, volume discounts, varying tax rates, variable configurations, and more. All this data resides in SAP–including the associated business rules and processes that drive your organization. Replicating this information in another system is untenable and unsustainable, so it’s critical your eCommerce solution uses real-time data in SAP for each and every order.

Leveraging SAP as the system of record (but behind the scenes) means customers filling online shopping carts have 100% accurate pricing and ATP, only see the products and configurations they are allowed to purchase, get accurate tracking information once an order is placed…and more. The shopping experience itself should disguise the complexity of your business process and catalog.

SAP eCommerce Shouldn’t be an IT Nightmare

Your IT department has never been more mission critical–or more stretched. SAP coding and integration skills are hard to hire and should remain focused on your core SAP ERP (and migration to S/4HANA), not on coding and maintaining connections to front-end systems.

The right SAP integration partner (think: enosix) takes the burden off your IT team, delivering SAP integrations to eCommerce platforms, CRMs, and other front-end systems in days and weeks, not months or even years. And once the connections to SAP are built, they are easily ported to S/4HANA at any point in the future and the data presented in the portal is 100% accurate to SAP because it’s virtualized directly from SAP in just split-seconds.

100% Accuracy Should be Expected, and Achievable, Every Time

Given the traditional complexity of integrating SAP with any outside system–including eCommerce–it’s tempting to scale back on functionality to deliver within time, budget, and talent constraints. But your customers expect 100% accuracy and anything else breaks trust and confidence in you and your platforms. 

The best way to achieve 100% accurate-to-SAP shopping carts is to virtualize SAP data directly in the commerce portal. No middleware, no pricing tables, no batch data uploads. 100% accurate pricing, availability, tracking information, and configurations–100% of the time, or your solution isn’t scalable or frictionless.

A great eCommerce experience isn’t nice-to-have anymore, it’s table stakes. Anything less puts revenue and customer loyalty at risk. Let’s talk about how to bring the power of your SAP ERP directly into your eCommerce platform. Or check out our eBook on B2B eCommerce for SAP Manufacturers: Challenges, Opportunities, and Revenue Impact.

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