Building materials B2B, is the Chinese building materials B2B spring coming?

B2B spring is coming in China. The building materials industry also emerged a lot of electricity business platform. But the current situation is that those business platforms seem to have not found a better business model, they still match or straight between the swings. The main reason is that building materials is different from steel, plastics and other raw materials industries. The products of those industries are basic materials or standard products, the supply chain finance is relatively possible for them, and match or self-operation is operational too. But the products of decorative building materials industry are non-standard products. Most of the processes such as design, selection, etc. need to be achieved under the line. Moreover, the building materials industry is the need for local service support, completely out of the agents is impassable, so the spring of this industry is still not coming yet.

First, the agent's function can not be replaced

1. Agents have a strong deep regional sales function.

Well-known brands need their agents more requirements. Agents should take charge of the regional sales function, the local resources integration capabilities. The financial strength determines an agent’s regional sales capacity and size. Their marketing plan needs to be achieved by its agents and distributors.

2. The agent has a strong reservoir function.

The core requirement of a brand agent is to store goods. In fact, the goal of annual meeting is to order next year's goods. By using promotion methods to attract agents order more goods.

First, digest the production capacity of the plant to solve the storage, to avoid the production season is not balanced, but also to solve the product storage pressure. In addition the manufacturers can quickly realize the cash flow recovery, to achieve high-speed flow of funds, and now manufacturers have to take channels flattening measures, a brand of hundreds of thousands of agents is very normal, how much you can calculate the reservoir.

3. The agent of the pool function. 

Money pool is a very important part of each business, agents get agent, to the manufacturers to submit the initial fee or margin, especially the more well-known brands, get the basic right is to get the money bag. Some of the building materials brand, each agent to pay at least a few hundred thousand or one million of the deposit, thousands of agents to form a huge pool of funds, manufacturers can use this dealer to take a lot of money to do the money. And B2B business, playing the amount of volume, thousands of brands on the platform, how much money can let enterprises take it?

Second, some of the B2B model is conflict with manufacturers

1. B2B e-platform break the regional restrictions, which is conflict with the factory's regional protection policy. The original regional management of the enterprise has been done for many years, through the channels of flat, deep distribution, direct marketing and distribution and other management measures, the protection of the project, to prevent fleeing goods, re-award heavy penalties, and B2B platform properties is no regional restrictions, and basically speaking, it is fleeing goods, which disrupts the original management of the enterprise. They can not change for you. But this is every B2B e-platform wants to do, which forms competitive relationship with enterprise’s original channels.

2. The goods prices on B2B e-platform are transparent, which is conflict with manufacturer's pricing system.

3. The profit model of B2B e-platform is conflict with manufacturers. B2B e-platform has two profit models: service and price differences. The price model of service includes information docking, advertising, finance, etc. The information and advertising model is the 1.0 model. Supply chain finance is the model used in recent years. The price differences model is to earn commissions by providing products matching services. But the downstream service and cost control are more difficult to control. Operation and profit margins are not large. Direct cooperation with the manufacturers is a good way, but cooperating with the agent will not have any advantage, and fix it will put themselves in the opposite of the traditional channels of competition.

4. Will the zero effect appear in B2B business and traditional channels? Through years of development, many well-known brands have been had a great marketplace, platform sales for a project to achieve sales, may also follow the traditional channels of follow-up and services, but in the end did not reach a deal, and result in zero effect situation.

5. Big data. B2B are always talking about big data. They hope that the product, price, trading volume and other data retained in their own platform, and use them to achieve other goals I the future.

The road of building materials B2B

What will lead to a real closed-loop of supply chain system are information flow, business flow, logistics, and capital flow. But to achieve this goal is very difficult. The original B2B 1.0 era called the information platform, the various procurement, supply information aggregated on the platform for the relevant users to use and access, the platform only as a connector exists, through membership fees and advertising to achieve profitability, which is the most easy to achieve mode.

B2B 2.0 era is to match the transaction or self-employed. Should we set up warehousing, as there are so many kinds of categories, brands in building materials? Manufacturers treated B2B e-platform as an agent too, and gave no more support than other channels. If there is no breakthrough in sales, there will be no deep cooperation. Of course, manufacturers may also have a blank market, and you can use B2B to penetrate.

B2B 3.0 era should be the supply chain and financial overlay, where the core is the wind control. A good product designed according to the wind control is the key to the key. Many B2B make the match into free after superimposed finance, this should be considered a big competitive barrier.

In short, we are groping trial and error. Each company has different resources, the entry point will be different too. Copy is not a good way. Light operation should be the only choice. If the upstream and downstream users recognize the model, they are willing to participate, there will be no competition in the process, and there will be a huge room for development of building materials B2B.