Typical B2B:
Large Catalogues

When it comes to developing and implementing B2B commerce environments, Madia can call itself a true specialist. Over the last 17+ years, we’ve seen many B2B commerce cases, each with its own unique use cases and requirements.

My name is Falco van der Maden, and I am the founder and CEO of Madia (LinkedIn). With nearly two decades of hands-on experience in the B2B commerce industry, I have worked with a diverse range of businesses, from small enterprises to multinational corporations. My journey in this field has equipped me with an in-depth understanding of the challenges and opportunities that businesses face when making choices in the complex world of B2B commerce.

Throughout my career, I have been dedicated to helping businesses optimize their B2B platforms to drive growth, improve efficiency, and enhance customer satisfaction. I am passionate about sharing my knowledge and insights to help others succeed in B2B Commerce.

In this series of blogs, we will highlight the most common B2B commerce features—the features that you could call, ‘typical B2B‘.

In this first blog, we’ll start with, “Large Catalogues”.

In contradiction to B2C, where a catalogue size is on average somewhere between 100’s and 1000’s of products, B2B catalogue sizes can easily extent above 100K products. In our practice we have even seen extreem cases of more than 10M products.

Specially in selling parts and building materials for example catalogue sizes can grow enormously.

To handle these large catalogues brings their own challenges like controlling the overall performance of the platform, update all product information including price and inventory changes, but also the way these products are presented to the customer. A customer should be able to easily find and quickly buy the correct product.

Performance

Let’s start with a simple calculation. Let’s assume we have a catalogue of 1 million products that need to be updated daily (within 24 hours). If we divide 1 million products by 24 hours, we have a little more then 41,5K products to update each hour. If this is divided by 3600 sec/hour we see that we need to update a little less then 12 products each second to make sure that we will reach our goal.

This is just a simple example to illustrate how large catalogues impact performance challenges.

In practice there are many more processes that influence the performance challenges when dealing with large catalogues. Customers would like to use a platform that is responsive and present the products the customer is looking for fast. No customer wants to wait many seconds before a catalogue page is shown, a product filter is applied or search results are presented.

Solution

Performance challenges are always a combination of many things including some that we don’t controle like the customers internet connection or third party systems. But within the things we can controle fortunately we have a toolbox full of solutions to tackle performance challenges. Let’s dive into some of them.

Full updates vs Delta updates

Product information in a B2B commerce environment almost always comes from one or more other systems, such as ERP, PIM (Product Information Management), and WMS (Warehouse Management Systems). When this product information needs to be synchronized, it is advisable to update a product only when necessary, a so-called delta update. Although this sounds logical, it is not always easy to do. For example, you need a label (often a date) that indicates whether a product has changed and needs to be updated. A solution must also be implemented for deleted products. “How do you know when a product is deleted if the product no longer exists in a system?”

Loadbalance

During a day there are always moments the load on a server is higher than on other moments. The last thing you want is that the load of the server is impacting the experience of the customer in their ordering process.

Balancing the load on the server during the day will help to allocate server resources to tasks that suits best to its priority.

Tech stack

Over the years, technology (both software and hardware) has developed tremendously. Modern technology will make a significant contribution to the performance of the platform. Therefore, it is essential to use a modern platform that is (and remains) up-to-date.

Scalability

Sometimes you simply can’t solve the performance challenges with efficient integrations, load balancing and a modern tech stack. When everything is optimized and you still have performance issues, the last thing to do is scale the platform.

“Even when you have the fastest car with all the bells and whistles and the best driver, you could still endup in a traffic jam because there are simply not enough lanes to handle the traffic.”

Then there is no other way then to scale the platform, increase the capacity of your server, add additional servers to your platform, divide tasks between servers, etc This off course comes with costs but remember there is probably a good reason you need these additional resources.

Product accessibility

When dealing with large catalogues it becomes challenging the make sure the products your customers are looking for are easily findable.

With a small catalogue, a simple navigation in the form of a menu would be sufficient, but that will become an impossible mission with large catalogues.

Typically in B2B, customers, often know exactly what they need. So the question is how are we going to present the exact product to match that need.

To a certain catalogue size a navigation can work, but it doesn’t make sense to have extensive layers in a menu structure. Research tells us that about 4 levels is the maximum of levels, which probably will result in many products per category even on the deepest menu level.

At this point smart searchable filters and a sophisticated search will become essential.

Product filters

Product filters will allow customers to filter down larger sets of products to the exact product they need. Looking for a certain machine replacement part? A filter with the machine model will direct the customer quickly to the correct part.

With large product catalogues the amount of filter options can easily grow and make it hard for a customer to find the correct filter option. In these cases searchable filters will be helpful. A searchable filter will allow the customer to search for a certain option within a filter type. For example search for a machine model in a list of thousands of machine models. When finding the correct option selecting it will filter the catalogue and show the relevant results. An interesting study about searchable filter options can be read on the Baymard website.

Product search

Correctly setup, search is probably the best way to make a large product catalogue accessible. But as we all know it’s not that simple to present the relevant products based on the search criteria.

What is the customer looking for, how is this formulated in the search query. How can the content of that query be interpreted and matched against the product content. And when all these elements have been optimized, how fast is the respons shown on the screen?

There are many studies and reports on the internet explaining how to setup a good search feature. Therefore I will not repeat how to handle all the aspects of searching in large catalogues. But make sure you implement it correctly and improve based on learnings. If a search query does not show the results a customer is expecting, chances are he will abandon your site.

Madia

Madia is a commerce solution provider for more than 17 years. Our experience in B2B commerce implementations is extensive. We’ve seen many different use cases and with that, a broad verity of requirements. Our team of experts always, in collaboration with our customer will find the best solution to each of customers needs.

Madia works with the best B2B commerce tools available on the market. Tools that from within the core have been developed to fulfill all the typical B2B needs in commerce.

As a Gold partner of Orocommerce we have, in addition to our experience, one of the best B2B commerce solutions for successfully developing and implementing your B2B commerce platform.

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