Challenges persist as businesses of all sizes seek to up their game in e-commerce, according to a recent study of more than 300 marketing and IT professionals. The high cost and slow implementation speed associated with digital commerce improvements top that list, according to the 2016 State of Digital Commerce Report from B2B and B2C commerce provider CloudCraze and customer-relationship management software company Salesforce.
The companies surveyed 340 marketing and IT professionals from B2B and B2C companies to discover what they need in an e-commerce site and uncover the challenges they face in implementing those solutions. Key findings of the report include:
- eCommerce implementations are costly: 31% of brands spent more than $2 million for their current e-commerce site.
- Speed to launch for e-commerce technology is an issue for many brands: 44% say it took longer than a year to implement their current site.
- Cost and speed-to-market issues are magnified with the largest companies: It took 73% of the largest companies (more than $25 billion in revenue) longer than a year to implement their current e-commerce sites and more than one-third of these organizations paid more than $3 million to build them.
- Companies face problems with scalability and flexibility: Quickly updating to the customer and company’s evolving needs, scaling to the changing market, and getting a holistic view of the customer are the top three pain points for brands.
- Companies view CRM-based systems as more innovative than ERP systems: 48% of respondents believe CRM-based systems are more innovative.
- Supply chain communication is inefficient: Less than one-third of the total respondents consider their supply chains to be very transparent.
- Cloud-based systems are more transparent and reactive than on-premise systems: Cloud users report their supply chains are very transparent (31%) and very reactive (39%) compared to only 9% and 15% of on-premise users, respectively.
- Legacy systems experience challenges with scalability, flexibility, and customer visibility: Roughly two-thirds of brands using legacy systems report each of these challenges.
The survey polled professionals from a variety of industries, including manufacturing, financial services, healthcare, and retail, ranging in size from $100 million to more than $25 billion in annual revenue.
