Minneapolis—Nov. 10, 2015—Four51, which powers business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce for over 3,000 customers and nearly 20 million users, announced that it opened its OrderCloud™ platform along with the simultaneous launching of its OrderCloud™ Dev Center. The all-new development center empowers businesses to create custom e-commerce solutions faster and easier, while enabling them to deliver the straightforward online and mobile buying experiences their customers demand.
OrderCloud is a cloud-based B2B e-commerce platform live in general release and was built on 16 years of e-commerce intelligence gathered across thousands of complex business solutions. The OrderCloud Dev Center is a comprehensive online resource and toolset dedicated to helping developers get up and running quickly with building and deploying apps on top of the OrderCloud platform.
In the report, The Forrester Wave™: B2B Commerce Suites, Q2 2015, published in June 2015, Forrester stated, “The number of B2B buyers expected to complete at least half of their work purchases online will nearly double from 30 percent today to 56 percent by 2017. B2B companies must, therefore, move quickly to build a world-class digital buying experience. The business case is clear—moving offline-only customers into a partially or fully digital environment reduces cost to serve and increases customer spending.”
OrderCloud empowers businesses to deliver on customers’ omnichannel demands, and changes the way businesses buy and sell online by providing a better way to manage B2B e-commerce through:
- A flexible platform. Every business is different, with unique processes and commerce challenges, yet some B2B e-commerce providers rely on inflexible packaged and on-premise solutions. OrderCloud was architected from the first line of code to be quick to implement, fast and flexible.
- Speed to deployment. OrderCloud’s multi-tenant architecture, extendable data model, representational state transfer (REST) application program interface (API), rapid development tools, seeds, software development kits (SDKs) and components allow partners and customers to quickly test and deploy B2B e-commerce solutions. Since the API exposes OrderCloud’s functionality, developers can actually build their own fully custom e-commerce solutions or even complete software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions with the OrderCloud Dev Center.
- Domain expertise and experience. Four51 can solve business ordering and B2B e-commerce challenges—40,000 commerce sites were created with the platform, many of which solve the complex needs of manufacturers, distributors, retail operations and third-party logistics providers.
“Businesses in the past—and many still today—have either propped up expensive in-house systems or adapted to inflexible e-commerce platforms, but there’s a better way,” said Mark Johnson, Four51 CEO. “We’re at a tipping point; cloud-based platforms and APIs are enabling companies to get to market much faster, and integrate all of their internal systems—enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), analytics, tax systems and more. This is the way forward for B2B e-commerce and we believe that, in the next five years, every business will be doing it this way.”
"With the implementation of OrderCloud, TurtleWax, Inc. completely eliminated fax and manual order entry by the customer service team," said Laurie King, vice president of supply chain and operations for TurtleWax. "This contributed to significant cost savings and ease of use for many individuals across the organization, for our sales reps and, ultimately, for our customers.”
