Buehler

The future is now! ... The challenges are enormous, and so is the potential of new technologies. As an industry, we have a responsibility to respond to these pressing threats with new solutions and concepts. Therefore, we have applied the credo “The future is now” to our 2019 Annual Report. Our key factors for success − now and in the future − are people, innovation, and collaboration. – Calvin Grieder, Chairman of the Board, Bühler & Stefan Schieber, CEO, Bühler

Dear Bühler team,

We're thrilled to present the services and capabilities of Spryker, and how we plan to become your strategic partner for innovating with a B2B Marketplace to

Increase efficiency
Grow revenue
Improve customer experience

Your scaleable marketplace solution with Spryker will create a completely new digital customer experience and enhance the existing sales approach.

We are empowering complex use cases worldwide, helping companies reduce their time to value, TCO, operational & system landscape complexity by leveraging the same tech stack and being fully integrated.

We are confident that we can do the same for you!

Best Regards,
Anh Thi Dong & Niklas Steinebach

#1 Increase Efficiency

A B2B Marketplace on Spryker will help you outsource the fulfillment and logistics, such as keeping stock, to suppliers as well as reduce business risks while maintaining control over this additional revenue stream. Further advantages include:

Ownership of the entire platform:
Merchants take over a variety of operational
tasks thus freeing up resources for the
marketplace operator. However, the operator stays in control of merchant activities within the marketplace. Businesses operating a marketplace can maintain full ownership of the platform. This includes regulating products and price levels offered by the merchants.
24/7 operation: With a marketplace, you no longer have to worry about fulfilling orders and offering product availability around the clock on your own. Share this responsibility with local merchants and open your marketplace beyond your borders and time zones.
Foster customer loyalty: Creating a well-
rounded and optimized product and service
portfolio unifies your customers’ needs and
turns them into returning customers. A marketplace could help you foster customer
loyalty by being the primary shopping platform with an answer to every demand, thereby keeping your customers from switching to a competitor.

#2 Grow Revenue

A new Marketplace Business Model will help you disrupt the market with a marketplace solution for your & your suppliers' products in the first step and with complementary products in the second step. Advantages include:

Scale your business effortlessly:
It's no secret that with a marketplace, businesses can scale easily. Any type of e-commerce project can be a huge undertaking, especially for companies new to the digital ecosystem. By investing in a marketplace, you can reduce the risk of spending millions of dollars sourcing large amounts of inventory and managing the entire distribution process. Having merchants onboard can enrich your product portfolio and help you grow your customer base.
Increase your profit margin:
Implementing a marketplace model introduces new revenue streams to your business. Adding merchants to your existing platform requires fewer resources than stocking and managing your products would take. Redistributing the financial risks while receiving commissions on successful sales automatically increases your profit margin.
Actively incorporate merchants in your growth strategy: With the marketplace model, you can grow your business in areas you are yet to branch out to. Relying on the expertise of your merchants and leaving the majority of purchases to them, could give you room to focus strategically on products with high margins, up-sales, and services.

Learn more on why a B2B Marketplace on Spryker is your next 10x initiative by clicking on the button below.

10x initiative B2B Marketplace on Spryker

#3 Improve Customer Experience

B2B customers these days expect a B2C customer experience. The advantages of a B2B marketplace for your customers include:

Increased shopping convenience for end customers: Your customers can conveniently shop on your online marketplace and have a greater variety of products and services at their disposal. International customers have the chance to buy products from local merchants thereby lessening the delivery time.
Saving costs by using price transparency:
Customers have the chance to compare prices and services by different merchants within the marketplace and find the best service for the cheapest available price. They can purchase their desired items while benefiting from the price transparency that a marketplace offers.
Benefiting from highly stocked products:
Marketplaces have numerous merchants that all carry products and can make offers on existing products if they have them in stock. This means that stock levels will remain relatively high, and customers wouldn't experience difficulty sourcing products – as one product could be stocked by several different merchants.
Marketplaces are a trusted platform: Once vetted by the customer, a marketplace can be considered a trusted platform that provides a sense of safety. In case of conflicts, marketplace operators are available to guarantee customer safety, whether it's with their payment information or ensuring the order fulfillment process runs smoothly. This means that customers have continuous access to a variety of products without needing to change shops and vetting each new shop on their own.

7 Success Factors of B2B Marketplaces

Marketplace technology can help Bühler to extend their reach, without taking on additional inventory risk. Therefore, it’s the perfect complimentary revenue channel to test new products or services – helping you to keep up and stay ahead of the competition.

One key factor is to use service as a driving force by offering the most compelling B2B service features. Click on the button below to learn more about the roadmap to B2B marketplace success.

7 success factors of B2B marketplaces

How Spryker can help to make your B2B Marketplace a success

Best-of-Breed

Spryker’s best-of-breed approach allows you to build a customized tech stack that meets Bühler's unique business requirements and offers the necessary flexibility for Bühler to succeed. We enable you to integrate only the specific features needed in order to best serve your market.

Adapt Quickly

High flexibility in choosing the best suited vendors and scaling your business any time enable you to adapt fast to market changes. In this way, Bühler can be agile and effective.

Spryker Marketplace Capabilities for Bühler

Marketplace functionality is based on Spryker and thus extends your commerce landscape's capabilities by critical marketplace-specific capabilities.

Back Office for Marketplace Operator: The Marketplace Operator can ensure compliance with the Marketplace guidelines by managing Merchants with their products and offers and reviewing Marketplace performance in the Back Office.
Data exchange: To ensure the smooth Merchant onboarding process and the overall Marketplace setup, marketplace-specific Data Importers and Exporters have been implemented to exchange relevant information between Merchants and the Operator.
Search & Filter: Features include Full-Site Search, Multi-Language Search, Textual Search, Standard Filters. Search and filter functions allow customers to seamlessly browse and find exactly what they’re looking for, while keeping them in control of their commerce experience.
Merchants: Each Merchant has its own Merchant Users, Profile on the Storefront, Products and/or Product Offers.
Marketplace & Merchant orders: Customers can easily place Marketplace Orders within the Marketplace, which can contain Offers and Products from different merchants. The part of the order that belongs to a certain Merchant is referred to as Merchant Order and it can have a custom order management process mapped with the Spryker State Machine.
Digital Self-Service:Solve the issue of fragmented buyer experience with a B2B customer portal that enables a smooth after-sale process. Digital Self-Service is a portal that manages the after-sale process by consolidating all information and services related to the customer. It supports the full customer lifecycle by providing complete visibility into the business relationship.

Customer Highlight: Sourceability

Sourceability transforms a traditional B2B business model with the Spryker Commerce OS into a user-friendly e-commerce marketplace that brings buyers and sellers together in one place.Solution: An industry's leading marketplace built with SprykerWith Spryker, Sourceability was able to build the industry’s leading electronic components marketplace, Sourcengine.com. This was a disrupting transformation of an industry that has traditionally operated as brick and mortar businesses. And Sourceability decided not to build a simple online shop but an entire platform ecosystem. Today, customers can buy from over 2,600 traceable merchants in one easy transaction, and Sourceability can not only act as a merchant themselves but manage the other merchants efficiently.

The company: Sourceability
Sourceability, with its marketplace “Sourcengine”, is more than an electronics distributor, offering digital products and services around the needs of the electronic industry’s supply chain. Sourceability is headquartered in Miami, Florida, but runs a total of 19 locations across 12 countries, and has over 300 employees, generating sales of about 160 million USD in 2019.

Challenge: Creating a new type of marketplace
Sourcengine.com aims to turn a classic B2B business model into a user-friendly online platform to connect buyers and merchants in one place. The backbone of Sourcengine is quality and logistics. Operating on three different continents with 19 strategic locations around the globe, the business wanted to provide an international, unique user experience, which mimics the ease of use mainly seen on B2C platforms.

Results: Sourceability Opens New Doors for Electronic Component Trade

Taking an analog business model online is not an easy venture. Sourceability has applied the right mix of deep industry knowledge with a technology-driven customer-centric approach to help digitize an entire sector. Their innovative enterprise marketplace opened new doors for electronic component trade and won the 2020 Global Electronics Distributor Award. Sourceability Opens New Doors for Electronic Component Trade Results Sourcengine creates an industry-wide product transparency and enables customers to buy and sell digitally, all around the world, and without any middleman. Also, Shahabi revealed that despite the size of the platform, Sourcengine was implemented smoothly and experienced no hickups during the launch. The Spryker Cloud Commerce OS has helped Sourceability to achieve three objectives that are crucial to a marketplace model:

Big data handling
Fast implementation speed
Customization

See more customers

Key Arguments for your Management Board

We found that the success of a complex commerce project like a B2B Marketplace depends on the overall buy-in of the organization. Accordingly, based on our experience with customers, we have collected key arguments for different stakeholders in your business in order for you to provide them with a relevant briefing:

Finance

Marketplaces are a great opportunity for us to grow our business as we can focus on owning the platform while letting the merchants operate and run the business.
Other than contractual or project orders we can forecast a recurring revenue stream which grants us a consistent cashflow.

Sales

Instead of starting to compete with our contractors and partners in our ecosystem, building a centralized marketplace puts us in a unique position to combine forces and create a new sales stream that we were notable to build yet.

Marketing

With each additional marketplace merchant our overall marketplace awareness will rise, as it’s in our common interest to grow the marketplace business.
Secondly, we can lower the customer acquisition cost while increasing their customer lifetime value.

Operation

As the main operator we can run and scale the marketplace with a small and dedicated internal team, supported by our vendor and partner, while specializing on the overall marketplace experience.

IT

Running the marketplace on a Platform-as- a-Service such as Spryker will grant us access to the modern standard of software such as headless, API, and Packaged Business Capabilities, out-of- the-box features and integrations to best-of-breed technologies and platforms.

About Spryker

Spryker is the leading global composable commerce platform for enterprises with sophisticated business models to enable growth, innovation, and differentiation. Designed specifically for sophisticated transactional businesses, Spryker’s easy-to-use, headless, API-first model offers a best-of-breed approach that provides businesses the flexibility to adapt, scale, and quickly go to market while facilitating faster time-to-value throughout their digital transformation journey. As a global platform leader for B2B and B2C Enterprise Marketplaces, IoT Commerce, and Unified Commerce, Spryker has empowered 150+ global enterprise customers worldwide and is trusted by brands such as ALDI, Siemens, ZF Friedrichshafen, and Ricoh. Spryker is a privately held technology company headquartered in Berlin and New York backed by world class investors such as TCV, One Peak, Project A, Cherry Ventures, and Maverick Capital. Learn more at spryker.com.

Spryker Website

Your Marketplace Solution to Increase Efficiency & Grow Revenue

Top 3 Business Benefits of a B2B Marketplace for Bühler