Highlights from B2B Online Chicago 2019

The ten24 team is back from representing Slatwall Commerce at the B2B Online conference in Chicago! B2B Online is a leading digital conference, where manufacturers and distributors learn about innovative, online strategies for their business.

During the two-day event, we had the opportunity to network with industry experts and business leaders. For the ten24 team, having conversations with business leaders and marketing teams about the challenges that they’re facing in the B2B eCommerce landscape is invaluable.

In addition to the challenges facing those teams, there are always new trends and developments in the industry to discuss. Hot topics at this conference included AI and personalization.

The Slatwall team also led two interactive roundtable sessions titled “Successful B2B eCommerce Starts with a Roadmap: Platform Best Practices.” At the roundtable, we led the discussion on the importance of building and developing requirements before starting an eCommerce project, and shared the process that we’ve developed over time.

The discussion at both roundtables was lively and included a wide variety of experiences (both good and bad) from different types of companies. Without exception, both sets of roundtable attendees acknowledged the importance of the process and recognized that the entire team at a company needs to be bought in.

Key Quotes from the Roundtables...

“Finding a good [web] consultant is like finding a good therapist”
If you’re lucky enough to work at a company that recognizes it has a lack of experience in planning B2B projects, there is a tendency to rely on hiring an outside consultant to manage the project for you. However, as the attendee pointed out, finding one who can understand a business, recognize the opportunity, and translate that into leading a web project is extremely hard.

“We realized we didn’t know what we were doing.”

No matter what you’re working on - it’s always dangerous to dive right in and start building. Unfortunately, as an attendee stated that it’s easy to start building and realize that you’re struggling, wasting time and money, and need to look at other options.

We already knew that B2B eCommerce is challenging, but the B2B Online conference was all about solutions and it was good to see that Slatwall Commerce is well positioned as an enterprise platform.

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