Custom eCommerce Checkout Development Scenarios

Enterprise eCommerce, B2B auction eCommerce, marketplace eCommerce, buying group eCommerce, auction eCommerce, and HIPAA eCommerce. These are just a few examples of some of the eCommerce business models Clarity work with to customize eCommerce frameworks to cater to a client’s specific industry. Each of these has specific needs when it comes to their website’s checkout feature. 

Many businesses need the most basic functions that would suit most small online eCommerce sites. These standard functions include product thumbnails, shipping calculations, tax calculations, and shopping cart security.

But some enterprise businesses, often those that employ a B2B eCommerce business model, need very specialized workflows at specific steps in the process, because checkout is such a key aspect of automating the workflow and enabling true self-service for customers. This is probably one of the most important areas to be able to optimize and customize to match each business’ specific workflow. 

What ends up happening most of the time with off-the-shelf and SaaS-based eCommerce systems is that the software simply does not — and often can not — offer the level of customizability and workflow tuning to enable a business to use their optimal workflow during checkout. As a result, the business ends up suffering financially. They may even eventually lose out to their competitors over time because their process is more manual and less intuitive than their competitors’ sites. Let’s take a look at some of the most common specialties our clients need during their eCommerce checkout integration. 

Buying Groups 

Some of our buying group clients require certain capabilities regarding “hard” and “soft” stops. Hard and soft stops can get very complicated, especially with the algorithms that are needed to present this accurately to the end-user. In general, when buying groups offer their products and they are purchasing the products on behalf of a group at large, there need to be thresholds of quantity and other timeline-related purchasing details. If the buying group collectively meets these minimums, then there's a capability to get a significant discount. 

There needs to be a way to visually communicate this, but also to allow the buying group to make the commitment and have a clear set of terms that they're agreeing to whenever they are committing to make a purchase. They may be committing to making a purchase where they say “look, I'm going to buy this at the typical price for a quantity of 100, but I'm willing to buy 200 if the discount can be this much.” This is often an impossible task for off-the-shelf or SaaS-based eCommerce solutions to perform. 

A common situation in this scenario is to simply present the different options for the quantity discount to show to the user. How many more of an item needs to go into this collective-buying group’s purchase of this particular item? It can be incredibly complex to offer the ability to show the collective group the data that is part of this bigger buying group, coordinating them so that no single individual business is responsible for purchasing all the quantity that's necessary to get the discount. 

There needs to be some ability to integrate all the different purchasers in a reasonable way and coordinate email notifications that provide the ability to click on a link and go to a cart that already has the items in it. Processes like these can dramatically streamline the process for the customer and make the eCommerce checkout UI — and therefore your business — significantly more competitive in that space.  This works out well for the suppliers as well, because they want more orders, and they want more consistent orders. When it goes well, it turns into an upward spiral of capability for everyone involved. 

Ultimately this kind of integration and customization that Clarity is capable of has no limits because we literally have access to all the source code, something that doesn’t happen with SaaS or off-the-shelf eCommerce checkout offerings. We have the ability to extend and modify the source in a way that doesn't affect the base code, allowing us to build a powerful, upgradable, and flexible checkout for your company (whether it’s C2C, B2C, or B2B eCommerce platform). Even better, security patches are much easier and stronger when such an approach is taken. 

Using a platform such as Clarity’s CEF is often seen as the best of both worlds, allowing constant updates while still having the benefit of being able to fully customize everything. If you have a specific need for your eCommerce platform, let’s talk.