Collaborative Partner Attraction

A strong supply chain partner network is important to your consumer eCommerce site and these partners also require their own attraction and retention program.  You cannot hope to achieve the sales and consumer retention objectives without a strong supply chain partner network made up of suppliers, carriers and logistics providers.  In addition, the development and maintenance of this partner network requires a strategy that includes many of the same actions and objectives as the strategy to attract and retain consumers to the eCommerce site.  Whether attracting a consumer to a web site or developing a partnership with a supplier, carrier or logistics provider, the objectives are similar; provide a value as a reason for starting and maintaining the relationship.

The supply chain partner network requires values in their reasons to participation focusing on the values and potential delivered by the network to the partner members.  The key to developing a strong supply chain partner network is delivering a value to belonging and participating in the network.  Your partners in the network must commit to participation based on their own values and objectives.  The network of supply chain partners must be viewed and developed as a community of partner members with the same objectives to achieve their own value from the community.  Partners join the community because they believe they will achieve a value from the relationship and not because they are compelled to provide a value to others with no return.  From this perspective, the supply chain partner members are no different that consumer shoppers; there must be a reason to begin the relationship and there must be a continued reason or reasons to continue the relationship.

These partner values and return can be based on both monetary and guarantee of business values; either a direct return or a soft return in other words.  The of the partner network is to work together to define a strategy and then define the actions to meet that strategy.  The incentive of the partners is the same for all supply chain partners; a stable and robust eCommerce community will provide strong and robust return on investment of the supply chain partners through both a stable demand channel and also increasing sales due to the growth of the eCommerce and an omni-channel retail community.  Your partner members in the community will understand these objectives and will see that it is in their own self interest to participate and grow the sales of the omni-channel retail environment.

And now for the audience participation portion of the show…

ECommerce will have wide ranging impacts on both the retail and manufacturing sectors.  How can you focus these abilities to improve the consumer's experience?  Improving the consumer’s experience will require a re-evaluation of the sales channels, the manufacturing channels and practices and the supply chain channels and practices from the raw materials to the consumers’ homes.  In order to ensure and maintain success in this new reality you must harness the tools and capabilities in many new areas.  How can you support these continuously changing requirements?