The way most companies sell has been transformed by the Internet, which has greatly expanded the reach of B2B and B2C businesses alike.

In today’s brutally competitive retail environment, it’s more critical than ever you have true end-to-end control and visualization across your entire operation.

Not only is the third quarter the start of the fiscal year for many US companies, it also heralds the arrival of the Microsoft Inspire worldwide partner event.

Due to disparate legacy backend systems, such as ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) an eCommerce business’s critical data can be spread across many unconnected platforms.

To engage today’s connected consumers effectively across a wide variety of touchpoints, you must create the unified experience sophisticated shoppers have come to expect.

eCommerce never stops growing. Over 20 years into the online shopping revolution, year on year growth in the United States remains at 23% and nearly 51% of Americans consider online shopping to be better than physical retail.

Did you know that eCommerce sales reached $2.3 trillion in total revenue in 2017? In the US alone, over 10% of total retail sales were through eCommerce websites and the percentage was close in the rest of the world.

Earlier it was just the Internet, fast forward now, we have a convergence of big data, cloud, and the Internet of things ( IoT ) that is creating possibly new highways to making sense of the large data available, throwing in new challenges and business opportunities at the same time.

Chatbots, which are computer programs that simulate conversations with human users, are on the rise in eCommerce.

If you’re trying to maximize revenue in the world of B2B eCommerce – an industry Forrester predicts will top $1.2 trillion in the United States by 2021 – it’s important to stay on top of some key trends having significant impact on the industry.