The most common concerns voiced by clients who are considering taking orders electronically from customers are:

“What if my smaller customers can’t send the orders electronically?”
“What if my customers can’t send the data items needed by my system?”
“Won’t it take years to get all my customers on board?”

An F4F Trading Site provides a ready answer to all those concerns, and offers the chance to provide those customers with all the information they need to buy from you.

A Trading Site is an extension of your existing website, which captures customers’ orders, converts them into F4F XML and delivers them into your back-office system in exactly the same format as orders from your other B2B trading partners.

Using the F4F B2B Platform, we help you to design a series of web pages with exactly the same look and feel as your existing website and a workflow which captures the data necessary for the order to be accepted by your back-office system. Then we help you to populate the Trading Site with the necessary data from your back-office system: products, prices, delivery addresses and customer account details. The result is that you can offer your customers a fast, easy way to get orders to you at a time which suits them, and without them having to wrestle with fax machines or telephones. You can even allow your customers to create new orders based on previous ones to minimise the amount of data they have to key in.

The advantages for your sales admin team are significant too. Validation on the site ensures that all orders arrive with all the necessary data on them, with the correct codes, descriptions and prices…and of course legible quantities! You can control the selection of delivery or collection dates to prevent demands which are incompatible with your production and delivery timescales.

And why stop there? If you have the capability to send out confirmations or invoices across the F4F B2B Platform, then you can send those documents to your Trading Site as well and allow your customers to view and print them from there. This not only minimises the amount of paper, expensive stationery and postage costs for you, but provides your customer with a one-stop shop to view all of his purchase history and relevant documentation from your company. Perhaps a level of service that your competitors do not offer yet?

There is even icing on the cake for any of your customers who keep farm accounts on Farmplan software: we can help you extend your Trading Site so that they can import invoices from directly into their Farmplan accounts, just by clicking on a “Download” button!