No, I’m not talking about the big fight from a fortnight ago, or the Nintendo game from the 80’s (though I did find an online version of the Mike Tyson version if you want to take a trip down memory lane).
I’m talking about PunchOut as it relates to eCommerce. Oh yes, it’s another cool tool in the CV arsenal just waiting for you.
For those who don’t know what it is, PunchOut is a method of digital purchasing that allows a customer to buy from your website while effectively staying within their own procurement system. That means you still reap all the benefits of your website, like complex pricing and stock rules, but the end user does not need to enter their order in both your system and their own.
It also works well where your customers extend out their procurement processes to requisitioners in their business. Think government, health and education as well as big mining and industrial companies.
PunchOut acts as the middle-man, going back and forth between you and your customer to provide accurate data like pricing, while still providing the rich website experience you’ve worked so hard on.
To give you “PunchOut in 60 seconds or less”, I’ll use SAP as an example. It would work something like this:
- An employee of your customer, Penny the Purchasing Officer, logs in to SAP
- She selects the option to PunchOut based on the supplier catalogue she’s buying from (that’s you)
- A slightly modified version of your site is available to her
- She shops the site viewing only her debtor’s products and pricing
- Instead of checking out, she’s given the option to return to SAP
- Her cart is passed back into SAP with the correct pricing/SKUs etc
- She then completes her order and sends it through to you to fulfil.
It’s important to note that PunchOut orders aren’t processed via the web. The customer’s final purchase order would likely come to you via PDF, though that depends on your customer and their internal business systems.
(If you want a solution that takes the order from here, talk to me about TPN or Lucy!)
Tangible PunchOut benefits, like real-time pricing, mean fewer incorrect orders. Fewer incorrect orders mean less time spent per order. Less time per order means lower cost to serve for you. And everyone loves a lower cost to serve!
PunchOut has been a real boon for some of our customers looking to attract clients on the larger end of the B2B scale. I’ve even witnessed customers winning significant contracts because they could offer PunchOut functionality where their competitors couldn’t.
You’ve got to love a little competitive advantage, right?
Do you have customers asking about PunchOut already, or think it might be worth investigating further? Let’s chat to see if it could help your customers and their eCommerce experience.
