How SAP S/4 HANA Benefits the E-Commerce Industry

One of the recent launches of SAP- the S/4 HANA remains at the forefront of disrupting a wide range of industries. The advanced ERP-based Business Suite has accelerated the business process in the retail, manufacturing, logistics, and healthcare sectors. Now, it is the turn for the e-commerce industry to reap the benefits of SAP S/4 HANA.

The e-commerce industry has witnessed a massive growth of 107% in recent past years. The various digital transformation trends such as the Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, and Blockchain technology has played a significant role in initiating this escalation. But you cannot strike out the important contribution of SAP S/4 HANA in taking the e-commerce forward.

SAP S/4 HANA has extended its offering to diverse industry verticals and is now focusing on upscaling the prospects of e-commerce. Let ’s discuss how the E-Commerce Industry will get the boost from SAP S/4 HANA.

Offering a Comprehensive Shopping Experience to Customers

SAP S/4 HANA is an ERP Business Suite that will empower your e-commerce platform from every prospect. This starts with a scalable, powerful and dynamic e-commerce site to suit the needs of the end users. SAP S/4 HANA will enable business enterprises to opt for platform customization, which is important to drive sales.

Adding an element of personalization will offer a bonus while pitching for cross-selling and encouraging appropriate delivery of the product. According to the State of Personalization Report, 22% of online shoppers say that they are satisfied with the level of personalization they are currently receiving. Furthermore, data-based personalization will offer an additional set of advantages such as-

• Automated segregation of customers to get specific user-centric information to target individual customers
• Personal recommendations of products and services based on real-time learning will become easier.
• Easier to compress large data sets into compact mode
• Improved Search Optimization Activities.

What’s interesting to note is that SAP S/4 HANA can seamlessly handle even the huge base of customers due to its integration with the on-premise and cloud deployment. This makes e-commerce business more efficient and enhances the shopping experience of the customers with proper offers displayed at the right time.

Streamline the Content Management System

SAP S/4 HANA helps e-commerce leverage the benefits of digital transformation with a powerful web content management system. Users can access high-quality content and product information. It allows you to develop multi-faceted websites with the advantage of SmartEdit for real-time page development and editing.

• The quick development of template-based sites and pages
• Creation of custom-based components.
• Having control over the content both offline and online. It enables the developers to update or edit the content, which is not visible to the customers or site visitors. They can even post it on the website once the update has been made.
• Create a user-friendly site with simple navigation and page previews.
• Provides an Innovative Inventory Management

The e-commerce business has already made a smart move to SAP S/4 HANA to maximize the benefits of inventory management. The on-premise and cloud migration have eliminated the traditional setup for stocking quantities, which was based on manual activity. S/4 HANA has introduced innovations along with the usage of new inventory data models that instigate improved performance and evaluating the appropriate data stock without making any error.

SAP Inventory Management

Moreover, e-commerce sites can also integrate and embed artificial intelligence to monitor the supply chain process. This allows the monitoring of the digital supply chain across various e-commerce sites using a single source of live information. Innovative techniques in inventory management have also paved the way for enhancement in personalized user experience, increase in the efficiency of employees, and reduction of operational cost. According to a Study, 66% of the online stores are looking forward to investing in warehouse and inventory management.

S/4 HANA Could Act as a Marketing or Promotional Tool

Marketing and promotional campaigns constitute an important wheel of an e-commerce business. So far, e-commerce entrepreneurs have been employing social media marketing tools and adopting digital marketing trends to promote the e-commerce platform. But in addition to these marketing tools, the SAP S/4 is also proving to be a big promotional asset allowing it to reach more shoppers and target customers.

The SAP S/4 HANA provides you with a potent scope to plan and manage the sales promotion effectively. It automates the process of marketing that lets you develop multi-channel offers and target new customers on the board. Furthermore, it will allow you to optimize the competitive pricing and estimate the offer profits.

SAP S/4 HANA further helps in-

• Development of multiple variants of marketing and merchandising to target particular stores
• Managing advertising campaigns based on the response of the customers
• Predict the performance of e-commerce site and analyze the financial status.
• Accelerate the promotional and planning strategy by establishing improved coordination between the marketing, advertising, and financial team.

Get the Advantages of Both B2B and B2C Markets

So far, the e-commerce platform has developed a robust system enabling it to enjoy the benefits of powerful B2B capabilities. However, with SAP S/4 HANA coming into the picture, the facility has extended to leverage the opportunities of the B2C market. S/4 HANA in combination with the SAP Commerce Cloud offers both the experiences in the all-in-one platform.

Content Marketer Alex Charalambous is of the view that Business to Consumer (B2C) websites can play a significant role in guiding customers to buy the product. Business to Business (B2B) helps in lead generation. Moreover, a Hybris survey says that 94% of the B2B buyers want the suppliers to develop their websites similar to B2C sites.

Offering a Seamless Integration

The fact that the SAP Commerce Cloud can be easily integrated with the other SAP services, offers an advantageous position to the e-commerce platform. The framework of SAP S/4 HANA allows seamless integration with the e-commerce platform makes information exchange easier between the systems and web services.

The SAP-integrated e-commerce platform helps to simplify the complex ERP system. The ERP system contains huge data and information such as details about the specifications of products, inventory levels, tax calculations, shipping charges, customer agreements, and more. You want all this information to reflect correctly on your web store without compromising the performance of the site. For example, a payment gateway is one of the popular integration trends followed in the e-commerce industry. If we talk about its global market, it is expected to grow up to $86.9 by 2025 from $30.6 billion in 2016.

So, how does an SAP S/4 HANA integrated e-commerce platform has an upper hand over its competitors?

• Easy to Navigate Online Product Catalog

If your website is offering an easy to navigate, you can increase traffic to the site. The users like e-commerce websites where they can find a specific product amid the other several categories. The e-commerce website makes use of the product data stored in ERP to provide the fastest route to reach the product.

• Simplification of the Complex Pricing

This is one of the other major challenges faced by the web store. But with the help of a robust S/4 HANA ERP module, you can simplify the complex pricing rule and ensure that the prices displayed on the website are always accurate. Customers will see the correct pricing, whether you are offering tier pricing or discount offers.

• Online Order Processing

The integration of SAP S/4 HANA also helps to streamline the processing of the online orders. It provides a convenient sales channel that can save time for you as well as your clients. The exchange of information in real-time allows the customers to get instant insight into the product data and have quick access into their accounts. SAP also lets customers quickly edit their orders that have not been processed directly into the web store.

S/4 HANA Can Fulfil Out of Stock Products

At times, when the customer wants to place an order for a product that is not available in the stock of the e-commerce platform. As a result, he has to move to some other site and you lose a valuable client. But the good news is that you don’t have to return your customer empty-handed as the SAP S/4 HANA has found a viable solution to the problem. It gets connected with Point of Sale (POS) allowing e-commerce system to fulfill an order.that is out of stock product with inventory visibility. The product is brought from another location where the item is still available in the stock.

This e-commerce functionality is used across all sales channels where online web store owners can maintain adequate in-stock quantities and remove duplicate safety stock.

SAP S/4 HANA a Boon for E-Commerce

We are aware that SAP S/4 HANA has fueled a plethora of industries and the e-commerce business is also following in the same footsteps in this regard. In fact, it has already started walking on that road to reap the various benefits that come its way. Thus, if you are planning to maximize the pros, then get in touch with the experts today!