B2B and B2C are dead – the future of retail is P2C

The rise of ecom­merce over the past two decades has been as for­mi­da­ble as it has been rapid, with glob­al online sales set to hit $4.2tn this year, accord­ing to Adobe. Dig­i­tal com­merce now pow­ers much of the retail world, enabling con­sumers to tap into glob­al sup­ply and receive items in their homes in days or even hours. The user expe­ri­ence, in the­o­ry, is total­ly seam­less.

Yet while the vast major­i­ty of retail busi­ness­es have expand­ed online, many are strug­gling to live up to that user expe­ri­ence and max­imise the poten­tial of their ecom­merce plat­forms. The growth of dig­i­tal com­merce has not only brought with it high­er cus­tomer expec­ta­tions, but also ever-grow­ing com­plex­i­ties and over­heads to ensure the many mov­ing parts of the ecom­merce ecosys­tem, includ­ing sys­tems, feeds, chan­nels and mar­ket­places, can work togeth­er effec­tive­ly.

As dig­i­tal busi­ness­es have acquired tools, solu­tions, and data to help deal with these chal­lenges and serve dif­fer­ent dig­i­tal chan­nels, new prob­lems have emerged through the many silos which have formed. Despite their inten­tions for a seam­less cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, in the dai­ly grap­ple to man­age the vast array of tasks and com­plex omnichan­nel process­es between providers and con­sumers, organ­i­sa­tions are see­ing their con­sumer rela­tion­ships become divid­ed and divert­ed.

As a result, com­pa­nies are “los­ing the con­nec­tion” with their con­sumers, notes Dion Hinch­cliffe, vice-pres­i­dent and prin­ci­pal ana­lyst at Con­stel­la­tion Research, in a recent report by the com­pa­ny. “One pri­ma­ry issue is that these organ­i­sa­tions are not tak­ing a sys­tem-lev­el view or look­ing at the prob­lem holis­ti­cal­ly,” he adds. “What we most­ly find is a series of tac­ti­cal respons­es, one oper­a­tional silo or issue at a time. The rea­sons are clear: it’s eas­i­er to seek to address pain points or shifts one at a time, try­ing to piece togeth­er busi­ness respons­es by using tra­di­tion­al IT solu­tions, lega­cy infor­ma­tion feeds, and automa­tion that is more task-focused than out­come-focused.”

Amid these issues, it is becom­ing increas­ing­ly clear that the tra­di­tion­al B2B, B2C and even D2C mod­els of the past are not work­ing in the dig­i­tal age. In a recent For­rester report, 62% of com­pa­nies said they are plan­ning to update or entire­ly replace their com­merce plat­form sys­tem, show­ing many cur­rent solu­tions aren’t solv­ing today’s com­merce prob­lems. This calls for a new prod­uct cat­e­go­ry alto­geth­er – a new high-lev­el abstrac­tion for how a dig­i­tal com­merce ecosys­tem func­tions – called prod­uct-to-con­sumer (P2C), accord­ing to Con­stel­la­tion Research.

A P2C plat­form enables com­pa­nies to stream­line the path their prod­ucts or ser­vices take to reach con­sumers. This path is known as the prod­uct infor­ma­tion val­ue chain, and P2C helps com­pa­nies man­age the flow of dig­i­tal infor­ma­tion with­in it.

For instance, prod­uct data – such as the price of a jack­et – typ­i­cal­ly starts with a sup­pli­er and is rout­ed through var­i­ous chan­nels – like Google Shop­ping or Pin­ter­est – before it reach­es the con­sumer. With­in the prod­uct infor­ma­tion val­ue chain, the jacket’s prod­uct data needs to be adjust­ed to meet the require­ments and spec­i­fi­ca­tions for each chan­nel. Instead of man­u­al­ly man­ag­ing the flow of prod­uct data across hun­dreds of chan­nels, a P2C plat­form allows com­pa­nies to man­age the entire life­cy­cle of prod­uct data in one plat­form.

“Tech­nol­o­gy is sup­posed to make our lives eas­i­er but when com­pa­nies adapt­ed their tech stack for the evolv­ing ecom­merce land­scape, they end­ed up with a Franken­stein mod­el of solu­tions, cre­at­ing a tech stack that isn’t scal­able on a glob­al lev­el,” says Vin­cent Peters, CEO of Prod­uct­sup. “How and where you reach your cus­tomers changes every day, and it’s become a lost cause for mar­keters to keep up man­u­al­ly. With a P2C plat­form, com­pa­nies can elim­i­nate 50 dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories of appli­ca­tions inside their organ­i­sa­tion and gain con­trol over the expe­ri­ence they deliv­er to cus­tomers.”

Look­ing at P2C man­age­ment as a whole, it offers sev­er­al key strate­gic func­tions: expand­ed con­sumer reach through real-time syn­di­ca­tion to thou­sands of mar­ket­ing and sell­ing chan­nels; cross-plat­form oper­a­tions across a wide range of providers; and final­ly, a holis­tic prod­uct data ecosys­tem through large-scale inte­gra­tions of var­i­ous sources. Through these func­tions, a P2C plat­form has enor­mous poten­tial to trans­form busi­ness effi­cien­cy, accel­er­ate go-to-mar­ket strat­e­gy, and build cus­tomer loy­al­ty.

The Prod­uct­sup P2C plat­form is the only glob­al, strate­gic, scal­able plat­form man­ag­ing all P2C infor­ma­tion val­ue chains across any plat­form, chan­nel and tech­nol­o­gy, and process­es over two tril­lion prod­ucts a month. The plat­form auto­mates man­u­al­ly inten­sive labour through advanced AI and ML capa­bil­i­ties, offers per­son­al­i­sa­tion to adapt to the indi­vid­ual needs of each com­merce busi­ness, elim­i­nates the need for IT sup­port through an easy-to-learn inter­face, and improves vis­i­bil­i­ty of the prod­uct infor­ma­tion val­ue chain with a 360-degree view man­age­ment sys­tem. Productsup’s mar­ket-lead­ing posi­tion in the new P2C cat­e­go­ry helps free brands, retail­ers, ser­vice providers and mar­ket­places from their dig­i­tal com­merce anar­chy.

“P2C is an oppor­tu­ni­ty to erase the patch­work of solu­tions cre­at­ed over the last few decades since the birth of ecom­merce, and it all starts with fol­low­ing con­sumers’ expe­ri­ences” adds Peters. “Shop­pers don’t care what chan­nels you’re in; they care about what chan­nels you’re not in. If you don’t have a con­sis­tent pres­ence at every cus­tomer touch­point, you’ve already failed to meet the bare min­i­mum expec­ta­tions. P2C man­age­ment empow­ers com­pa­nies to antic­i­pate those expe­ri­ences and react in real-time.”

For more infor­ma­tion, down­load Con­stel­la­tion Research’s P2C Man­age­ment Mar­ket Overview: productsup.com/guides/constellation-p2c-product-to-consumer-overview

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