By
Jyoti Tejpal
eCommerce platform helping small to large businesses in retail & wholesale, manage orders, website content, customers inventories, to increase merchandise sales
WooCommerce store owners, designers, developers & freelancers have Plugin that builds wholesale sales into existing flexible pricing, payment and tax control
Designed for all businesses in online retail industry to manage Sales Product Payments Inventories reports as reliable solution and Multi-channel collaboration
As eCommerce has emerged as a big brand playfield, B2B eCommerce is still a less forayed field. Recently, Amazon has made starting investigations into the B2B arena. However, it is still a divided place with no transparent, diversified platform.
It should not mean that there are not many B2B eCommerce platforms available to stand on and sell. The industry’s divided characteristics have expected that there is a diaspora of the open B2B eCommerce market. With a widely available variety of software solutions choosing the right one for the requirements can be very difficult.
Amazon Business is taking its way into the B2B area in a very same strategy they successfully utilized for B2C: working as a field for buyers and sellers to learn, compare, and sell/buy. Amazon takes a cut/commission, and sellers have very restricted control with the buyer journey, which means decreased sales.
B2B marketing has its conditions and challenges that are different from B2C companies. It is here fully-dedicated B2B eCommerce platforms come into play as many companies understand the necessity of setting up their online infrastructure to start and upgrade their services. The extra marketing expenditure is stating to be worthwhile to project a direct way out with customers, increase conversion rates, and enhance brand quality and customer lifetime cost.
Choices are the best thing but can also start (functional) problems. When standing in front of the sea of solutions in your hands, it is essential to ask yourself if they have the following:
Mobile Compatibility – More and more B2B managers are using mobile devices to search for solutions. So being mobile-friendly can prove happier today.
Compliance – The platform should be able to accommodate mandatory user privacy guidelines that are in effect by law.
B2B Functionality – B2B eCommerce platform should ideally have all the eCommerce features directed at B2B buyers such as bulk ordering and pricing, account management, and multiple shipping with online payment capabilities.
Optimal User Experience – The user should have marketplace templates which can be customized to choose from to make a user-friendly experience for the buyer.
24/7 Availability – B2B eCommerce platforms should always be open, round the clock for accessibility and business.
Marketing functionality – SEO optimized eCommerce platforms should be created to boost visibility in the e-World.
Staging environment – There is no way to explain better the fact that humans are always error-prone. But these automated platforms offer an ever-flowing sales solution.
Journey Templates – Selling cumbersome solutions can be very difficult. But in such a scenario implementing a digital helper makes work easier for all the stakeholders.
Customer Communications – With digitalization, the customer gets an instant response and can also select the required product/s with just a few clicks of the mouse.
The advantages of eCommerce is not always for consumers. B2B businesses with eCommerce capabilities compete with their peers in every sphere. In a world where the sales cycles relationships are longer than B2C, eCommerce frameworks and digital technologies allow wholesale businesses to be more efficient, offer personalized customer service, and generate analytical data to change business decisions.
This is far better from the physical ledgers writing and order forms to deliver goods used by traditional wholesalers.
Integration is the boss when it is dealing with B2B eCommerce, and eCommerce platforms have been proven to be inadequate if they are standalone types. many performance aspects, such as on-time delivery, order accuracy, inventory visibility, and time to process orders, have significantly impacted on third-party services:
Readiness for B2B eCommerce market
The B2B buying cycle can be enormously long and complicated, increasing the inertia added by the average cost of implementation and argument between direct and online business for other organizations. The stakes are very high, but so are the future rewards. Average value order increases by 44% when B2B customers are migrated online as they have so many things to see and understand, with their specifications and related goods.
In a time when companies are finding it difficult to survive and see growth in traditional channels, the online way may be the best way to figure out the upcoming competition and increase sales opportunities. Now that you know that it is almost time for a serious business decision to start B2B eCommerce, there are a few fundamental requirements of features and key points to consider.
With the increasing trend of wholesale dealers looking for online solutions to increase the business distribution channels, B2B eCommerce stores are becoming more well-known places to sell goods. However, not talking about B2C counterparts, B2B stores very rarely have the same design branding that retail channels have at their service.
How does a B2C eCommerce website differ to the design of a B2B website? When thinking about B2B eCommerce website design, it should be utmost experience-driven. The website looks and development should be focussed on ease-of-business, efficiency, and clarity of the items on sale. Special attention should also be paid to the bulk ordering of multiple product variants so that they feel as preferred buyers, as well as simplified re-ordering processes so that the old customers will feel pampered.
Without branding or customizations, B2B website quickly becomes misled from the business as a whole. If yours is a hybrid business, standardization must be done for branding across B2B and B2C channels to give buyers a visual preview into what the site sells.
Customizing the login page. This is an essential step when aligning retail and wholesale branding. Buyers who go to the wholesale store should instantly understand the brand connection between the B2B and B2C stores.
High-quality product imagery. When you are selling commonplace items, it can be difficult to distinguish the products with words or expressions. Buyers must have a feel of what to expect before entering the e-store.
You are creating detailed product descriptions with a good product catalogue. When you want to emphasis prospective customers, you must check on this question… what will you show them? Go thoroughly inside the product catalogue and make sure the products are demonstrated in a way that put them in their best form.
And when a buyer decides to buy, make it easy for the party with a transparent, simple ordering system.
The process of selling and ordering online is essential to provide a smooth purchase experience for prospective customers. It’s also necessary to have significant operations in place to manage transactions easy for the support staff.
Adjusting pricing levels of products requirements to be easy, and functions to track orders and inventory are essentials. The trick to being successful at selling wholesale is not essential to sell at the lowest price. If the site offers high-quality goods, try selling on the service value rather than price.
The focus on the quality of the products should be visible and well explained from the time a buyer clicks on the e-store.
They were enabling straightforward content and product management on the eCommerce platform from the beginning. This will not only save money but also add profit. It is very well understood that the more channels customers can purchase from, the more they spend and the more loyal they become.
Opening a new channel for acquisition and retention makes new ways to market and reach customers. You must try to optimize the organic and paid search on the Internet, as well as email campaigns and use social media platforms too.
They are enabling customer self-service. Providing the customers with the capability to control access, manage an order, track order status, and edit/make changes on the move eliminates phone calls and frees the staff and salespeople for more productive purposes. Self-care portals should also enable the team with opportunities to interact with customers for that extra “human touch.” Over time, your customers will become more eased up with the online ordering process, making it easier for self-ordering without any assistance on company’s end.
Optimizing search with better visibility: The best back- and front-end increases the e-store’s search engine optimization as it provides Google index pages. By offering the ability to create custom content, the pages have an upper hand chance of being ranked better.
As a pro tip, ongoing maintenance and refinement of the site is always needed to keep up with customer requirements. At the start, as well as the design phase of the site, analytics should be used to set to track and measure success. Utilizing big data analytics to increase customer experience for the buyers continually. Find suitable apps or tools to fix optimal pricing for the products, identify sorted customer segments, target customer touchpoints, understand little known insights, and more.
Growth and marketing for B2B eCommerce
We’ve already covered the big area of reasons to convert to online. Now, let’s get some details about the marketing areas where the business can grow and upgrade if you start using wholesaling software.
In a non-digital B2B world… When a customer places an order, a shop needs to create a sales order to be used by many stakeholders from accounting to fulfilment. When you purchase products or supplies, you create a purchase order. All these orders, along with their status, need to be invoiced and sent on to the departments to keep track of that vital information, including finance, warehouses, and shipping. But in case of an Online e-store, everything is integrated and send to the various stakeholders without creating so many forms.
Order fulfilment
If you fulfil in the house, you can be sure your warehouse is using updated inventory information and sales orders. Coordinating with a third-party provider, you’ll quickly see the advantage of real-time updates: improved communication, more transparency, and a reduction in processing errors.
Moving online empowers your sales reps out on the road and their workflows:
If you wholesale from multiple vendors or sites, several sales reps, a warehouse, and online, then you must be able to integrate all this data, and quickly communicate amongst all areas, rather than waiting for manual updates and meetings. This simplifies workflows by making them more accurate, eliminating what used to be lots of errors in overselling, understocking and selling stock that was already accounted for.
With all the information now stored in one place, employees don’t have to wait for a handover from other departments to get the data they need to do their job right. Instead, having all your information on an online platform means warehouse managers can get the report they require, without having to wait for the other data to come along. With that autonomy comes more knowledge about the state of the business, and it gets better, faster and more accurate decisions taken.
Expansion
Whether it’s adding an international warehouse or just adding more sales teams, development thru online means is very simple and can be efficiently handled by the system. Without great effort at all, you can:
Growing the B2B eCommerce business ids not complicated or take years to do only thing needed to know is knowing the most efficient and cost-effective ways to do it, along with the accurate metrics and KPIs one should pay attention to.
