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B2B eCommerce

Training Thursday: Customizable Web Catalogs in OroCommerce

November 16, 2017 | Oro Team

Rock crushes scissors, paper covers rock, and paper was replaced by e-catalogs! At least that’s the way it goes in the B2B game where digitizing the sales environment is always a winner.
Your B2B customers expect to buy online. Back in 2014, 
56% of business customers intended to make over a half of their purchases on the web by 2017, and that’s today. Many businesses took the hint and started launching B2B stores online to “webcase” their products.

So, now it’s time to up your game and take your online catalogs to the next level. How exactly? Training Thursday is here to help. Today’s session discusses how you can create personalized web catalogs in OroCommerce to provide the engaging and personalized experience your customer wants.   

Why Personalize Your B2B Web Catalogs?

Business buyers demand the same level of personalization they enjoy as personal online shoppers, if not more. 50% of B2B buyers surveyed indicate that improved personalization is a key factor in selecting a supplier. Sellers that meet these expectations will come out on top because they are delivering the experience buyers want. According to Gartner, by 2018, organizations that provide a personalized onsite experience will generate up to 15% more revenue than those who don’t.

Corporate buyers are busy and often pressed for time. Once logged in to an account, they want to only see the content relevant to their industry or vertical and their past searches and purchases. So respect their wishes, save them time, and provide them with personalized content. Personalize more than just the products they access on your site. Give them personalized landing pages, deals, and promotions too.

The Power of OroCommerce’s Customizable Web Catalogs

OroCommerce provides an almost infinite number of possibilities for personalized web catalogs. The application comes out-of-the-box complete with versatile catalog management capabilities. Easily create online product catalogs from the OroCommerce Marketing Menu. Then customize catalogs to cater to organizations, business units, customer groups, or individual buyers.

accessing-webcatalog

Accessing OroCommerce Web Catalogs in a couple of clicks.

Web catalogs are a powerful content management tool that enables sellers to create unlimited customizable versions of their OroCommerce storefronts. Once you create a web catalog, you can arrange the contents as desired. You can enhance the content of web catalogs by adding new pages using the following OroCommerce templates:

  • System page (e.g. SignIn page, Open Orders page, Request a Quote page, etc.)
  • Product page (direct link to product details)
  • Category page (direct link to the list of products with a category)
  • Product Collection page (dynamic filter-based segment that displays a custom set of products)
  • Landing page (direct link to a custom content page)

typesof-landing-pages-systpages

For a real-time, step-by-step demonstration, watch the video tutorial to see how to create and optimize web catalogs in OroCommerce.

New Video Tutorial: How to Create A Web Catalog in OroCommere

The new How to Create A Web Catalog training video will guide you through OroCommerce web catalog essentials. By watching, you’ll learn how to:

  • Customize web catalogs using different page types.
  • Create new web catalog records and assign them as the default catalog for all logged in users.
  • Create different content pages and optimize them for SEO.
  • Restrict particular pages to specific users only.
  • Build additional content nodes and customize menu items.
  • Create and modify product collections, and much more.
customizing-web-catalogs-backend-orocommerce

Configuring a custom landing page to be displayed only to specific customers.

To learn more, refer to the Web Catalogs Documentation.

Use Cases: Leveraging OroCommerce Web Catalogs

With OroCommerce’s flexibility, you can easily incorporate any level of personalization into your marketing. With such a high degree of personalization possible, practically the only limit is your imagination. Here are a few scenarios to show how web catalogs can be customized for different uses.

Specialized Landing Pages. It’s common to offer discounts on the first purchase to encourage new website visitors to become customers. But when these discounts are promoted sitewide, existing buyers aren’t pleased. By funneling leads to custom landing pages, new traffic is encouraged to convert and existing customers aren’t aware of the special offer.

Personalized Upsell and Cross-sell offers. Upselling and cross-selling are highly effective web tactics when you can get the right offer in front of the right audience. Personalize web catalogs according to your market segments. First, analyze your current customer base and segment into groups based on RFM metric, product categories, geographic location, industry or other characteristics. Then create targeted campaigns and promotions, tailoring the offer to the customer.

Personalize to Cultivate Loyalty. Personalize to make the customer journey as simple as possible and your customers will reward you with loyalty. Catalogs customized for the buyer will garner customer loyalty. For example, buyers don’t want to search 100,000 SKUs for the 100 SKUs they purchase.  Customized web catalogs empower buyers to quickly access the sections and products they most frequently use.

Customize for Split Testing. Use customized catalogs to determine the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. Distribute customized content through different marketing channels to determine what format, message and channel performs the best. A/B split testing is much easier when you can readily customize content.

Creating and maintaining online product catalogs in OroCommerce is easy. You can not only build new catalogs from scratch but also modify default catalogs and enrich them with new menu items. If you want, you can switch off the entire catalog and replace it with a new one. From creating a more satisfying customer journey to specialized split testing, customizable web catalogs are a powerful tool to build your online presence.

Want to learn more about providing a personalized customer web experience with OroCommerce? Contact us for a no-obligation demonstration.

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