If you’re an ecommerce expert, you understand the importance of matching your products and services to the wants and needs of your customers.
You sell flowers and heart-shaped boxes of candy around February 14th, shaving kits to men (mostly), everything under the sun to everyone on Earth from Black Friday through Christmas Eve. You configure your online offerings as best you can to meet the ever-changing buying behaviors of your customers.
To be honest, though… there’s still a fair amount of guesswork involved. Yes, you can usually segment your audience based on interests they drag along in cookies, past buying behaviors, demographic data, geography, and the other standard metrics, and then present more targeted offers and increase conversion rates by 0.5% (2% if you’re lucky).
But, in the end, you’re often still presenting the equivalent of a fixed-price full-meal to a customer who more often would be happier (and spend even more) if they could offer a la carte. With a product configurator for ecommerce like IQX eCOM, they can.
What’s the difference between a product configurator and a CPQ solution?
That’s a great question, and we’re glad we asked it. Snarky self-congrats aside, the difference is, let’s say, in the bells and whistles more than the nuts and bolts. CPQ is, as most folks know (and as EVERYONE who’s read this blog before knows), an acronym for Configure, Price, Quote. And it’s that first word where most of the similar nuts and bolts reside: configuration… of products, services, and more.
Many CPQ companies grew out of (or are still entirely in) the B2B space, offering the tool as a solution for sales proposal automation, which it absolutely is: drag-and-drop proposal templates, quote tracking, sales rep management tools, and more. It empowers any sales rep to make a professional sales quote in just a couple of minutes. But those features just listed are, for an ecommerce company, more bells and whistles than nuts and bolts.
However, some CPQ companies have recognized the value of the “C” for ecommerce, and stripped out some of the B2B-centric pieces to create an interactive product configuration tool for ecommerce sites, allowing customers to configure (the “C” in CPQ) the products they need in the way they need them. (NOTE: it’s highly doubtful any ecommerce sites are extending that level of customer-facing flexibility to the “P” part of CPQ.)
The difference between a full-featured CPQ solution and a product configurator for ecommerce is, essentially, that it moves from being a sales proposal generator used by a sales rep (with a custom quote, for a specific customer, with specific product configurations and pricing) to a “product generator” for the customer themselves. They use it to create the a la carte products their hearts truly desire. A win-win in the truest sense.
A new trend? From B2B to B2E?
A phrase bopping around the tech space a few years ago was “the consumerization of IT.” As tech consumers grew more sophisticated outside the office — becoming experts in getting, using, and customizing apps, for example — that sophistication rolled into the office, too, with more self-service mechanisms, less reliance on the help desk, etc.
With product configuration for ecommerce, however, we see a move in the other direction.
Rather than B2B watching what consumers and ecommerce sites are doing and following suit, we have ecommerce companies looking at B2B companies, and the CPQ tools they’re using. By empowering their customers with CPQ-like product configuration, ecommerce companies are reducing the need for customer service by providing better customer self-service… and driving more revenue in the process.
The best news? The configurator is only one way in which CPQ tools are helping change the face of ecommerce. Stay tuned to our blog to see what’s coming next.
