maximizing online b2b sales by delivering

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maximizing online B2B sales by deliveringA S M A R T E R O N L I N E B U Y I N G E X P E R I E N C E

Mercado bSMART© Whitepaper


ContentsIntroduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1

Emerging Challenges for B2B Businesses1st Challenge: Exceeding Customer Expectations for Fast,

Easy, and Highly Efficient Online Searching and Purchasing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .22nd Challenge: Assessing and Implementing the Right B2B Search and Storefront Management Solution . . . . . .3

Recommendation #1: Take your Cue from B2C . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3Recommendation #2: Seek a Search Solution that Supports Your Business Goals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3Recommendation #3: Seek a Solution that Meets Purchasers’ Real Business Needs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4Recommendation #4: Look for more than Just Great Search Algorithms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5Recommendation #5: Select a Solution from a Vendor that Understands E-Commerce and B2B . . . . . . . . . . .5

Introducing Mercado bSMART© Search and Storefront Management Solution for B2B-Focused Online Businesses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6Rich, Robust Catalogs Make Products Easy to Find . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6Product Relationships Create More Selling Opportunities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7Industry-Specific Knowledge “Out of the Box” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7Custom Catalogs Support Business “Power Buyers” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7Bundles and Kits Maximize Order Size . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8SMART Architecture Refines Sales Strategies Automatically . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8Best Practices for Active Selling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9Summary of Features and Benefits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .10

Mercado is the Pioneer in E-Commerce Search Solutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11


Maximizing Online B2B Sales by Delivering a Smarter Online Buying Experience – page 1 –

Through the dynamic shifts and changes that have taken place in B2B e-commerce over the past several years, thosecompanies that have continued to understand the value of conducting business online have prospered significantlyby implementing enabling technologies to automate manual processes — creating efficiencies and eliminating costin terms of time, money and resources.

Over the years, there’s been confusion throughout the world of online commerce over what the ‘right path’ is forstepped revenue and sales growth. During this time however, companies conducting online B2B e-commerce havethrived. They’ve done so by implementing technologies that enable sales & promotion strategies to be executed,tested and measured—to ensure methodical, quantifiable and sustainable growth.

There’s now a firm understanding in the market as to what is considered business critical for saving costs andmaximizing efficiencies throughout the supply chain.

Significant revenue growth is expected to continue throughoutthe next several years; and looks especially promising over thenext year —as a recent Industrial Distribution Association (IDA)study, indicates that while 24 per cent of IDA members currentlyhave product catalogs on the Internet, this proportion is set toincrease to 69 per cent in 2006.

While the opportunities in B2B are substantial and growing,there are also risks and challenges.

In this paper, we identify and analyze what can be consideredto be the most critical new challenges facing B2B vendors.B2B companies wishing to lead the competition must accountfor a multitude of heightened customer expectations created bythe growing use of the Internet for e-commerce.

We further discuss the unique complexities brought-on by theincreasingly dynamic nature of online B2B sales—as it’s, morphedinto an arena where your customers have instantaneous, transparent,access to similar or substitute products & services— offered byyour competitors.

We go on to outline a strategy for success in B2B e-commerceby using site search, navigation and merchandising technologyto help companies maximize sales and revenue opportunitieswhile minimizing risks.

Emerging Challenges for Companies that Sell B2B:

Maintaining a competitive advantage asthe Internet makes all vendors & distributorsequally accessible to purchasers.Retail E-commerce shopping experienceshave raised user expectations for all onlinetransactions, including B2B.B2B purchasers are typically “power users”who demand flawless service & performancewhen purchasing online.B2B purchasing and selling is increasinglycomplex and can’t be modeled from retailconsumer standards for factors such as reliability, ease of use, speed, etc.Any viable B2B solution must be interoperablewith back office systems, CRM, and othercontracted or outsourced service-providers.

Success will depend on B2B business’s ability to meet and exceed these expectationsmore effectively than the competition.

Introduction



Emerging Challenges for B2B Online Commerce:

1st Challenge: Exceeding Customer Expectations for Fast, Easy, and HighlyEfficient Online Searching and PurchasingSuccessful companies that have a B2B online sales operations are faced with several of the same challenges thatconfront most multi-channel retailers that conduct business online. In both worlds, search & merchandising technologiesplay a business critical role — because they are seen as sales enablers.

Both Retail and Corporate buyers must both search for, quickly find, and buy business critical products & services in order to keep operations moving forward. Often, these unique buyers make purchasing decisions according totheir specific roles and areas of responsibility. This rapidly growing market need is fueling demand for companieswith online catalog, line card and inventory data, to deploy solutions that convert their data into highly relevant,highly actionable information.

Thus, both Multi-Channel Retailers and B2B organizations that sell to these buyers must ensure that they implementsite search & merchandising technologies that will help them deliver a consistent, customized buying experience inorder to increase sales, and preserve customer loyalty.

These deployed technologies must also help reclaim & refocus skilled IT resources — as availability is increasinglyscarce. Although the Internet allows customers to easily access vendors through Web portals, gaining a competitiveadvantage when all the players are a mouse-click away is no easy task. As with B2C basic search and e-commercefunctionality delivers basic value.

Moreover, B2B organizations must solve for additional challenges:

They must ensure that online buyers are able to locate products based on non-standard product-search methodand terms. Every product search must deliver results — even if there’s a mistake or typo.Buyers expect personalization and customization according to their company’s unique vendor agreements.

Multi-Channel Retailers have raised the bar by creating this demand for a highly targeted online buying experience,and the expectation is becoming a categorical necessity across all industries.

Such heightened expectations have caused manufacturers, suppliers, and distributors to find search solutions thatcan help them replicate the ease of the retail e-commerce experience, and to do so more quickly and effectivelythan their competition.

But several factors unique to B2B make meeting this challenge more difficult:

B2B sales environments are much more complex than online the retail environments.Unlike retail customers, corporate buyers are typically employees who occupy specific roles in their organizations;and purchasing managers expect the ability to restrict purchasing privileges according to organizational rolesand other business needs. In contrast to retail customers, corporate purchasers are typically power users working to meet tight deadlines,and who therefore demand near real time product info, presentation and quotes when dealing with vendor sites.Such users expect search, navigation, and purchasing overall to be super efficient and simple — expecting ahigh degree of automatic refining & streamlining to of the buying experience that improves with repeated use. Purchasers expect vendor Web sites to ‘remember’ them, including activities such as past purchases — and makereplication of repeat purchases quick and easy through the use of some shortcut such as a custom catalog. Purchasers also want to be able to customize and organize those shortcuts themselves and share them withpeers within their organizations.

In addition to the challenge of meeting these heightened customer expectations when selling to other business,given the central role of search, B2B organizations are also interested in learning how search technology can beused to maximize online sales.



Increasingly common search technologies can deliver simple merchandising tools to online retail storefronts toimprove sales. We’re all familiar with retail Web sites that tempt us with “related products,” items that we “mightalso be interested in,” or “that other people also bought.”

Even if some forms of B2C merchandising may appear inappropriate for B2B purposes (for example, corporatepurchasing agents might not care what other agents bought), B2B businesses would do well to consider whetherother types of online sales strategies — based on the right search solution — could help them maximize their salesto other businesses.

To be successful in an environment that has been leveled by Internet accessibility, online B2B operations have nochoice but to meet these challenges in ways that set them apart from the competition — who are always just amouse-click away.

2nd Challenge: Assessing and Implementing the Right B2B E-Commerce Searchand Storefront Management SolutionGiven the competitive landscape, satisfying heightened buyer expectations depends on selecting a catalog search& merchandising solution that can solve the problems and meet the needs described previously. In this section, wemake five recommendations on how to maximize B2B sales revenues while minimizing risks.

Recommendation #1: Take your Cue from B2CAccording to Forrester Research, B2B storefront operators should look for solutions that allow them to replicate, asmuch as possible, the ease with which retail searches and transactions are commonly conducted. Of course, as weshall see, to be successful an online B2B storefront will require features and capabilities not yet or seldom seen inretail e-commerce. However, the usability of successful retail operations should be considered an approximatelyachievable benchmark or standard by which to assess B2B search solutions.

Recommendation #2: Seek a Search Solution that Supports Your Business GoalsCreating a successful B2B storefront requires more than powerful search algorithms. It should be able to support realbusiness goals — both your goals as a seller hoping to sell to other businesses, and those of your customers. Let’s dealwith the B2B seller’s goals first.

While every business is different, there are several central requirements relevant to all B2B efforts. At the very least,to be worthy of assessment, a candidate B2B e-commerce search solution must be designed to:

Maximize average order sizeMaximize conversion ratesEncourage online (as opposed to, say, telephone) purchasingEnsure that customers and partners can find the right productsEnable cross-selling, up-selling, down-selling, and complementary/compatible product recommendationsHelp promote targeted sales of selected items based on business factors such as profit marginsHelp promote sales of newly introduced productsManage customer expectations through recommended substitutions for unavailable productsFacilitate ongoing, continuous improvement of your sales strategy in light of actual purchasing behavior

Recommendation #3: Seek a Solution that Meets Purchasers’ Real Business NeedsAchieving B2C levels of usability in a B2B storefront means more than simply taking a successful B2C storefront modeland asking business purchasers to depend on the same functionality. What’s highly usable to the retail customer forbuying products won’t necessarily meet the needs of the business buyer. Meeting those needs requires a clear ideaof exactly who is making the purchase, the type of organization on whose behalf they make their purchases, therole they occupy within their organization, and many other factors.



Organizational NeedsB2B transactions are typically based on contracts between the selling organization and the buying organization,which specify exactly what the individual purchasing agent can and cannot buy on behalf of their organization.And larger organizations must typically distribute purchasing responsibility and workloads across many individualsand groups. In these cases, allocating purchasing rights to employees can become a complex matter of assigningpermissions based on their membership in many different groups, teams, divisions, or departments. A viable B2Be-commerce solution must be able to accommodate the special roles assigned to the actual purchasers in B2Btransactions by their employers — by recognizing individuals and assigning permissions to them based on theirroles within their organizations.

Industry KnowledgewareCorporate transactions normally operate within the context of specific industries, each with its own unique terminology,abbreviations, and acronyms. Many industries practically have their own language. A B2B e-commerce solution mustbe capable of dealing with industry-specific terminology and jargon by disambiguating and interpreting a customerquery. There is no reason to start from scratch. A complete B2B e-commerce search solution should provide strongindustry taxonomy and dictionary support — preferably without requiring extensive customization. Deploying ready-madelibraries makes life easier for an online B2B operation, as it removes much of the lexical customization that mustotherwise occur before a search and navigation can be effectively deployed.

End-User Catalog CustomizationIn contrast with the retail customers, corporate buyers are frequently sophisticated or “power” users. They will oftenexpect a storefront to allow them to modify their personal catalog view. For example, they want to be able to createshortcuts to frequently purchased items, and to be able to classify items in various ways. An effective B2B solutionwould acknowledge the prevalence of power users by allowing end users to modify catalogs instead of dependingon the manufacturer, or supplier (sell-side organization) to make these modifications for them. This type of solutionhas benefits for both end users and site operators. It satisfies the expectation of end users that they be allowed toperform such customizations on their own when navigating B2B storefronts, while freeing site operators from thesubstantial burden of having to maintain shortcuts and classification schemes for each purchaser.

Recommendation #4: Look for More than Just Great Search AlgorithmsKeep in mind that effective B2B requires a targeted approach. Consider how today’s most commonly-used searchengines fail to meet the unique demands of B2B:

Generic search engines rank query results in order of “relevancy,” but in B2B, query results either meet the purchaser’s needs or do not — there’s no middle ground; if a product is not relevant, it’s irrelevantGeneric search engines do not allow seller’s to fine-tune their sales strategies for optimum salesGeneric search engines do not meet any of the needs of corporate power buyers as detailed in recommendation #3

Recommendation #5: Select a Solution from a Vendor that Understands and HasExperience in E-Commerce and B2BSelecting the right B2B e-commerce solution provider is critical. To take full advantage of the best new innovations insearch, navigation, and storefront management, B2B operators should select a solution from a vendor with as muchexpertise as possible with e-commerce applications and a solid understanding of the unique challenges involvedwith operating a successful B2B storefront. A solution provider must understand your business goals and know howto help you achieve them — both through great technology and with the assistance of experienced professionals whoknow to leverage technology for maximum revenue gain. And of course, as a B2B e-commerce site scales, it mustbe supported by an architecture designed with e-commerce needs in mind: will the solution allow you to supportmillions of SKUs or tens of millions of records?



Mercado bSMART is specifically designed to meet theneeds of manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers, andtheir customers, and includes support for selling to manytypes of businesses and industries — right out of the box.

Mercado bSMART enables businesses to sell more toother businesses by providing e-commerce professionalsand product line managers with the tools to effectivelymanage and optimize product catalogs.

Built on Mercado’s industry-leading Commerce Search &Navigation (CSN) platform, Mercado bSMART providesonline businesses with accurate product search andcatalog navigation — enabling their customers andpartners to easily locate and purchase the productsthat best suit their needs.

Mercado bSMART’s enhanced storefront managementsolution includes unique support for the needs of powerbuyers — those who know specifically what they wantand make many repeat purchases in accordance withcompany contracts, and/or with their specific rolewithin the company. Mercado bSMART allows powerbuyers to tailor the storefront experience for maximumease and efficiency, encouraging them to return forfuture purchases.

And best of all, Mercado bSMART allows online B2Borganizations to take control of the entire sales process, to fine-tune their selling strategies through bundling, kittingand creating persistent product relationships — to sell more and sell smarter.

Rich, Robust Catalogs Make Products Easy to Find — Easier to SellIn B2B e-commerce, effective search is critical. Nothing drives away sales faster than making products difficult orimpossible to find. But effective search requires effective catalogs. And many businesses must manage extremelylarge product lists from diverse suppliers, each with its own catalog, where each catalog has its own system forclassifying and describing products, and each product possesses a complex set of attributes that must exploitedproperly to maximize ‘findabilty’ through precise classification. This makes adding effective search to a B2B store-front a real challenge for some businesses.

Fortunately, Mercado bSMART makes it easy to create and maintain the robust, rich catalogs on which effectivesearch depends. It allows you to create a rich catalog platform on which businesses can execute their unique sell-ing strategies. Mercado bSMART is the only available e-commerce search solution that can take full advantage ofUniClass Auto-Extractor©, Mercado’s attribute extraction and categorization solution for product catalogs.Mercado’s Uniclass technology standardizes data from all sources in a uniform XML format to deliver consistentand accurate retrieval in the right context.

By rendering the search attributes for thousands of products more uniform, the Mercado bSMART solution allowsyou to extract information from multiple sources (product catalogs, spec sheets, and so on) and build rich, dynamic“super” catalogs. You can then use these super catalogs to add powerful search capabilities to your storefront —empowering your customers to find exactly what they need, while at the same time maximizing sales.

Introducing the Mercado bSMART© Search and StorefrontManagement Solution for B2B-Focused Online Businesses

Key Advantages of the Mercado bSMART Solution:

Allows you to create rich, dynamic “super catalogs”for more powerful search and consistent results —allowing your customers to find what they needquickly and easilyEmpowers product line and channel managers to‘actively sell’ by executing cross-sell, up-sell, down-sell, and promotional strategiesEnables your business customers to modify catalogson their own —freeing up IT resources and empower-ing your customers to find products, and make fasterrepeat purchasesAllows you to group products into bundles and kits tomaximize average order sizeAllows you to define smart product relationships andembed them in your catalog to create even more sell-ing opportunitiesAllows you to automatically refine your search resultsin light of both Web site activity (gleaned through andbusiness analytics), as well as factors such as inventorylevels, profit margins per product, and so onRobust industry-specific thesauri and taxonomies “outof the box” make it easy to create a storefront foryour type of business



Product Relationships Create More Selling OpportunitiesMercado bSMART augments sales even further by allowing you to augment raw catalog data with unique and persistentproduct relationships defined by concepts like “complementary”, “substitution”, or “replacement”. By infusing catalogswith these and other possible product relationships, you can take full advantage of additional selling opportunities ascustomers search and navigate through your catalog. For example, imagine being able to always offer your businesscustomer two additional choices when they make a request: a generic or no-name alternative, and a premium brandalternative. You can make these options persistent concepts that make your catalog smarter and more helpful — anda revenue-generating feature on your e-commerce site. The ability to create product relationships within your catalogis a key way in which Mercado bSMART helps you turn every search query into an additional selling opportunity.

Industry-Specific Knowledge “Out of the Box”Most businesses operate in complex, highly technical domains, in which product descriptions and classificationschemas are expressed in terms that are unique to specific industries. This makes creating the rich catalogs thatenable businesses to add powerful sales-promoting searches to their storefronts all the more challenging.

Fortunately, the Mercado bSMART solution offers support for most industry applications to further enhance the powerand accuracy of your online catalog. In fact, Mercado bSMART’s libraries include more than 30 industry-specificthesauri, categories, and taxonomies for domains such as: agriculture; forestry; automotive; building and construction;office products; consumer electronics; packaging; security and safety; and computer and information technology — aswell as a number of horizontal and general commerce-related domains such as shipping and logistics. MercadobSMART even supports common misspellings, synonyms, and industry jargon.

This out-of-the-box knowledge-ware enables businesses to quickly augment existing online catalogs, and be up andrunning with an e-commerce site that will facilitate more efficient product-finding — and as a result, general moresales — in no time.

Custom Catalogs Support Business “Power Buyers”Unlike other consumer-oriented e-commerce search solutions, Mercado bSMART allows manufacturers, distributors, andwholesalers to support the unique needs of their corporate purchasers by enabling them to work more productively —keeping them focused on the task of procuring the right products every time, and more important, keeping thempurchasing from you.

In contrast to the individual retail consumers, business buyers are often “power buyers” who look for the same thingsover and over again and are not interested in the entire catalog. Business buyers are frequently limited in what theycan buy by the terms of their company’s contract with the vendor. Their employers may also to choose to restrict theirbuying privileges based on their role within the company, or their membership in a particular subset of the company,such as a division, group, team or department. Finally, business purchasers may want to collaborate with co-workersin the procurement effort— and one way to do this is to share useful product location shortcuts, as well as employthe same terminology and product classification scheme.

Mercado bSMART’s Custom Catalog feature lets employers restrict the types of purchases their employees can makeusing common business criteria such as the terms of a contract, or the employee’s role within their organization. At thesame time, it lets purchasers create and organize shortcuts to most frequently used search and browse results, and toshare catalogs with co-workers in the same department or group. By allowing the buyers to customize their own catalogs,Mercado bSMART makes the buying process faster and more efficient for the buyer — driving sales — without addingto the storefront operator’s workload. And by making the purchasing experience more efficient and satisfying for thebusiness buyer, Mercado bSMART helps to build loyalty to your site and promote the use of online purchasing insteadof expensive telephone orders.

Mercado bSMART’s Custom Catalogs thus meet real business needs of all of the key players in B2B e-commerce —employers, buyers, and sellers.



Bundles and Kits Maximize Order SizeIs your current B2B online storefront helping to increase the average size of your orders, or does it represent a quagmireof lost selling opportunities? If the only thing your storefront delivers to your business buyers in response to their searchqueries is a list of individual products, then you’re probably losing sales. While some of your customers will visit yourstorefront to look for an individual item, and know exactly what they need, many others are there to find a solution toa problem — and may not be aware of exactly what the solution requires. Whenever customers are unable to findwhat they need, don’t know that you have what they need, or are unaware of all of the purchases required to realizea solution, you lose potential sales. And this is exactly what happens with the conventional e-commerce storefrontsthat present single-item product lists alone in response to searches.

With Mercado bSMART, instead of simply presenting the customer with a list of individual items in response to theirsearch queries, you can bundle multiple products together as “solutions” and present them to your customers. Yourbusiness buyers will get everything they need (but may not realize they need) while you fill larger orders and capturethose lost sales. Mercado bSMART is the only product in the industry to support automatic promotional bundles andfunctional kitting — making it easy for businesses to drive revenue by increasing average order size.

For example, businesses that need to source complex products and their constituent components would benefittremendously from being presented with a kit that includes all the necessary parts and even tools they need to getthe product working optimally. This not only makes it convenient for customers, potentially saving them the headacheand frustration of not having all the requisite parts, but raises the customer service bar on the part of the seller —which translates to repeat business and competitive advantage.

SMART Architecture — Refines Sales Strategies Automatically In B2B e-commerce, it’s important to know the details about how your business is running. This means knowing bothwhat’s happening at the storefront (such as what customers are searching for, what they’re buying, and so on) andwhat’s happening to inventory levels, profit margins, return rates, and other key business factors that are relevant toyour sales strategy. For example, in B2B ‘quality’ is one of those critical business factors. Business buyers are oftenless concerned with purchasing the newest, unproven product; rather, they are keen to acquire products or parts thathave good customer satisfaction ratings, few customer returns, and no recalls. Because all of these factors can bemeasured, captured, and stored in some form of data repository — however dynamic it may be — the MercadobSMART solution can take advantage of it to make search on your e-commerce site more insightful and therefore,more valuable. Mercado calls this “closed-loop selling”. It’s a self-tuning process, in which Mercado bSMART’sunderlying search technology learns and adapts according to triggers related to customer behavior on your site andyour changing inventory levels, among other factors. For example, a business may prefer to expose or promotehigh-margin products before trying to sell similar ones that are more expensive for them to source, and thereforerepresent less profit.

Mercado bSMART allows you to pull all this knowledge together and use it to continuously refine and improve the wayyou sell. Mercado bSMART’s native Web Services architecture is designed to easily integrate with your back-endcommerce platform, allowing you to act on insight gained from third-party analytics, product information management(PIM), and inventory systems. And, Mercado bSMART’s dynamic indexing ensures that your online catalog is currentand reflects your inventory accurately.



Best Practices for Active SellingMercado bSMART allows vendors to optimize every component of the web storefront for active selling. ThroughMercado bSMART’s intuitive commerce management interface, manufacturers, distributors, and other online B2Borganizations can create, schedule, and maintain programs to up-sell, cross-sell, and even down-sell if appropriate.The following table highlights how Mercado bSMART can make your online sales strategy more responsive andflexible, and allow you to continuously refine it over time to maximize sales.

PROBLEM

Purchasers are searching your store-front for a competitor’s products.

A part is out of stock.

Inventory level for an item is low.

Profit margins for a certain item arehigh compared to equivalent prod-ucts you offer, but customers arebuying the less profitable products.

CONVENTIONAL STOREFRONT

Purchasers do not find the productand leave your storefront withoutpurchasing anything.

Users see that the part is out ofstock and visit a competitor’s store-front to find the item.

Users continue to purchase itemuntil it is out of stock.

Users continue to buy less profitableproducts.

MERC ADO BSMART -POWERED STOREFRONT

Show purchaser a list of alternative products, high-lighting favorable price or quality comparisonbetween your product and the competing one.

Present purchaser with a less expensive, or morereliable, alternative to the part they searched for.

When inventories drop to a specified threshold,present users with alternatives to desired item.

Present high inventory items higher in search results list.

Present most profitable items higher in search resultslist, bundle profitable items, present list of moreprofitable items in a list of alternative productswhen customers search for less profitable items.



Summary of Features and BenefitsThe following table lists the features and benefits of Mercado bSMART.

FEATURE BENEFITS

Attribute Normalization

Custom Catalogs

Bundles and Kits

Related Products

Industry Domain Support

SMART Architecture

Extract product data from diverse sources and normalize attribute information.

Create bookmarks/shortcuts to frequently-used sec-tions of your catalog, and organize in easy-to-navi-gate categories.

Limit search and navigation to “interesting” areasonly, and name those the way you want.

Share bookmarks/categories with peers in samedepartment having same role.

Search, navigation and purchasing can be constrainedby the contract between the purchasing company andthe selling company.

Purchasing organizations can create roles whichdetermine what employees in various departmentscan buy.

Grouping of products as “solutions.”

Functional kits.

Define relations between products.

Supports various relation types such as: accessoriesand other complementary items, substitutes for old,discontinued parts, cheaper alternatives (down sell)and more.

Industry-specific taxonomies and thesauri.

Compatibility with business analytics tools such asthird-party analytics, product information management(PIM), and inventory systems.

Create rich “super” catalogs to describe productsfrom diverse suppliers in uniform terms, and create amore powerful search capability—allows customersto find the products they need quickly and easily.

Increases productivity, especially for B2B power users(such as purchasing agents).

Improves user experience, making it friendlier.

Seller just needs to enable the functionality, not manage the data.

Increase productivity and knowledge transfer throughthat form of collaboration.

Sellers can easily enforce contract restrictions.

Employers at the purchasing organization can controlpurchasing work and decision making, and associatedexpenses.

Buyers get everything they need.

Sellers can maximize order size, and create sophisticatedstrategies for increasing sales and conversion rates.

Buyers get everything they need (complete Bill of Materials—important if they weren’t aware of required parts)

Sellers can maximize order size, and create sophisticatedstrategies for increasing sales and conversion rates.

Drives additional sales—by anticipating what a customermight need.

Can be used to manage inventory, introduce new products.

Data driven: no need for huge number of business rules;easy integration with existing systems where data may reside.

Can be overridden by business rules.

Increases conversion rates.

Allows for creation of rich catalogs for most industryapplications.

Accommodates industry-specific terminology, abbreviations,acronyms, jargon, etc.

Allows sellers to have comprehensive insight into theirsales performance for specific products, and allowsthem to refine sales strategies in light of informationgained from existing analytics tools.



Mercado’s domain expertise in e-commerce means they are able to leverage the innovations, knowledge, andadvanced-methodologies of online commerce leaders and apply this experience to the B2B market. In fact,Mercado understands e-commerce and sourcing requirements better than any other search vendor. Mercado hasdeveloped technology and best practices in several areas of operational e-commerce that are uniquely transferableand interoperable within B2C, B2B and hybrid environments.

And Mercado continues to lead the way in B2B with Mercado bSMART— the only solution specifically designedto effectively support the specialized and unique needs of complex, dynamic B2B e-commerce environments. Withthe Mercado bSMART solution, businesses selling online to other businesses can do more than just increase salesand maximize conversions when selling to other businesses— they can take control of the entire sales process, fine-tuning it to achieve their business goals, and those of their customers.

Our solid record of customer success stories includes these great names:Caterpillar • Jamestown Distributors • GE Power Systems • OfficeMax Commercial • OfficeMax.com

MSN Shopping • Sears • Christie’s Auction House • Tower Records • JCPenney • Target • Williams-SonomaMacy’s • Guess? • JDV Online • Delightful Deliveries

State-of-the-Art E-Commerce Search and Merchandising Solutions

For more information about Mercado bSMART:

5000 Hopyard Road, Suite 480Pleasanton, CA 94588

T 888 376 1400F 925 401 9399

[email protected]

maximizing online b2b sales by delivering

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