Streamline B2B Procurement Process using PunchOut Catalog

As the owner of B2B ecommerce platform, having a sophisticated online store is not enough to attract large customers.

For instance, your ecommerce store might be offering a range of features to ease the B2B buying process. However, if your store cannot be directly viewed from your B2B customer's procurement application, you cannot expect to win new business.

If you are serious about acquiring new customers, it is important to provide a PunchOut ecommerce solution, meaning a B2B ecommerce platform that comes with PunchOut capability.

Offering a standard ecommerce functionality is no longer the only requirement to get business from B2B organizations. Suppliers that offer PunchOut apart from ecommerce are the ones that gain a competitive edge.

With PunchOut, the B2B customers can comfortably view your store/site via their procurement system. So even if your site is at a remote location, B2B customers face no issues in accessing your store using the procurement application.

PunchOut, as experts point out, is a protocol that links the procurement system with the supplier's B2B ecommerce store. To be more precise, it allows accessing remote catalog via the procurement application.

The ability to view supplier's site from within the procurement system is one of the greatest advantages that B2B customers can reap from using Oracle PunchOut catalog.

A single click allows your customers to initiate a PunchOut session and access the pre-approved contract catalog. As we all know, every B2B customer has a pre-negotiated contract catalog.

When the customer starts a PunchOut session, he gets direct access to his contract products. B2B customers don't have to wade through non-contract products to make a purchase.

PunchOut provides an Amazon-like shopping experience to B2B customers. From automatic logins to single-click reordering, PunchOut offers plenty of features to streamline B2B buying process. Customers can also view the list of favorites, upsell/cross-sell suggestions, etc.

B2B customers also don't have to deal with the time-consuming task of updating the catalog at their end. Once the supplier/reseller updates the catalog, it is automatically updated at the customer's end.

With PunchOut, B2B customers have better control over their purchasing process as they have access to pre-approved vendors only. This means no dealing with maverick spending. In other words, better management of expenditure is the hallmark of using PunchOut.

Traditional procurement process requires a lot of manual work. The purchase order created has to be recorded manually. With PunchOut, customers can send purchase orders electronically, which helps to reduce administrative costs.

From the supplier's point of view, PunchOut allows representation of product configurations. As a supplier, you can sell a number of configurations via PunchOut.

On the whole, if customer retention is your goal, what better way than offering SAP PunchOut catalog. It has shown to improve customer satisfaction that can go a long way in increasing your business revenue.

When you want to sell your products to large buyers, you have no option but to provide PunchOut. The likelihood of losing B2B business reduces considerably when you provide PunchOut-enabled sites. B2B ecommerce with the enhanced functionality of PunchOut is the need of the hour.