The world of B2B eCommerce is swiftly evolving, and businesses realize the need to invest in digital solutions to stay competitive. With the rise of online marketplaces, businesses must adapt to the changing landscape to stay ahead of the curve. This blog will cover a guide on developing a B2B eCommerce Solution for Your Enterprise.
Building a B2B eCommerce solution for your enterprise can be a daunting task, but it can also be a game-changer for your business.
This blog will explore the steps in building a successful B2B eCommerce solution that can help your business increase sales, improve customer experience, and drive revenue growth. So, let’s get started without any further ado.
Benefits of B2B eCommerce
The worldwide B2B eCommerce market will expand at a CAGR of 20.2% from 2023 to 2030.
Benefit 1: Tap into More Business Possibilities
Today, B2B buyers buy 67% of their goods online. A web shop can strengthen your brand visibility, positioning you ahead of potential resellers and clients via search engines.
This is particularly compelling if you want to make your catalogs public. Nevertheless, even if you choose to hold your catalog private, it’s possible to use targeted advertising content on your website to catch the concentration of new customers.
Benefit 2: Enhance your B2B eCommerce Sales
Tempting more clients can aid in increasing your sales. However, that’s not the only method a B2B eCommerce solution can help boost your business performance.
Selecting the apt B2B eCommerce solution allows you to display appropriate and precise product suggestions for your visitors. You can ensure your clients view associated products and items with more features, unlocking the up-selling probabilities.
Benefit 3: Get Customer Feedback
A fantastic online shopping experience keeps your customers returning for more, helping drive sales. After all, what would drive your attention: obvious advertising from a wholesaler or manufacturer or a positive review from another buyer?
You can turn your customers into evangelists by providing an outstanding B2B web store. A study shows that customers spend 31% more when a company has positive reviews.
Buyers sharing their faith by simply giving a review can influence your business and boost its sales.
Benefit 4: Lower Your Costs
Increasing your profit while undervaluing your costs may look unbelievable, but it’s an advantage of B2B eCommerce.
Contemporary technology enables you to take nearly every facet of your enterprise online. This contains order entry, customer service, and client information provision. Your business can reduce high costs by automating and simplifying these different processes.
The outcome? Efficient business operations. This is specifically true with ERP-incorporated B2B e-commerce.
Benefit 5: Improve Your Scalability
An effective B2B e-commerce solution allows your company to expand and scale quickly to fulfil customer needs and market demand by unlocking new sales pipelines and constantly reaching new market segments.
By developing and testing persuasive content for your targeted B2B customers, you can provide value and quickly reply to shifts in the market. Moreover, deploying B2B eCommerce cloud platforms can redraft your present technology and boost your marketing and merchandizing abilities.
Benefits 6: Get Data-Centricity with ERP
The most effective advantage of a B2B eCommerce platform is that it allows you to facilitate and automate time-consuming procedures. Besides, it grants remarkable insights into the data crucial for your sales and marketing functions.
This is particularly valid if you incorporate your B2B eCommerce software with your ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system. If you hold an integrated eCommerce structure, your ERP can estimate precise sales statistics for each client.
Features Needed for B2B eCommerce Solutions
Here are 9 core features that a B2B eCommerce platform should have:
- Segmentation with User Profiles and Groups
In B2C, customers are handled equally. However, wholesalers trade in bigger orders that differ from buyer to buyer. As a consequence, these companies require rigid group designations for segregating clients.
B2B organizations should organize users into groups. This lets businesses set pricing, group-specific content (shipping, payment options, and promotions), and minimum order needs for each component.
You should group your B2B consumers based on their profiles, including
- Reorder frequency
- Order volume
- Geographical location
- Catalog selection
- Quantity of products ordered
And by dividing them into distinct customer groups, their shopping cart experience should be personalized according to their profile selections.
- Customer-Specific Catalog and Pricing
B2B companies can sell at various costs based on the consumer type or, as stated above, the consumer group. And while you just divide the customers to customize the shopping venture, you’ll usually discover the need to provide “special” product costing to your more selective clients.
This should be distinct from competitive pricing. That’s a totally different approach. The capacity to set diverse base costs for any good in your catalog and allocate these to distinct customer groups is the essence of a B2B eCommerce platform.
It will distinguish between your clients meeting their orders online or persisting to reach out through email or phone to get their orders fulfilled.
For B2B customers requiring an unusual product setup or a unique costing structure that cannot be developed into the current products, you’ll wish your eCommerce platform to let creating products only available to specific customers.
- Volume Buy and Bulk Discounts
B2B shoppers generally purchase goods in bulk. While your items can be listed as pallets, packs, or cases, you can even offer an extra discount based on the entire purchase quantity. Your eCommerce solution must contain a method to adjust quantity thresholds permitting bulk discounts.
- Restricted Access
You’ll usually like to limit access to your site, letting only pre-registered clients access content and products. Search for a built-in feature in your eCommerce software to establish a complete password-protected or encrypted website, needing buyers to register before using it.
More granularly, traders can regulate their site’s visibility with functionality that authorizes them to hide products and costs or block buys for unlisted visitors.
- Minimum Order Quantity
A Minimum Order Quantity (MOQ) is the smallest quantity of goods you have to buy in a single order from a supplier. The trader must reach the MOQ necessary to place the order. This is standard on wholesale websites, where getting a specific quantity per good is generally needed to place an order.
The eCommerce platform should permit B2B dealers to impose minimum order quantities per good. Besides, your business might also need identical features, like:
- Minimum Order Amount for completing an order.
- Maximum Order Quantity per product.
- Particular quantity multiples for products traded in packs, cases, etc.
- Wholesale Bulk Order Form
It’s a commendable feature for B2B clients placing huge orders, particularly for products order or catalog orders by Part Number or SKU. Rather than having them browse products individually, a bulk order structure can improve the shopping experience by counting an easy, intuitive method to place big orders in your portal.
A bulk order form lets your website input part numbers or SKUs and specify the quantity they’re searching for each product.
- Flexible Payments Choices
For B2B clients, getting paid for consumers’ orders is necessary. But in the B2B world, a current association is in position with the customer, and only some companies’ orders can or should include payment processed digitally.
To adapt to the requirements of your B2B customers, you should incorporate offline payment modes like:
- Checks
- Purchase Orders
- NET 30 (60 or 90)
- Credit Card On File
- Corporate Accounts
How to Develop a B2B eCommerce Platform for Your Enterprise?
1. Begin by Determining Your eCommerce Objectives.
Before starting your eCommerce project, evaluate why you wish to initiate a website store. One of the best ways to begin your eCommerce project is to define your business goals and requirements.
You can ask yourself: Why do I wish to begin an eCommerce site now? What do I need to achieve by starting an online shop? What would be the business benefits? Here are some examples of eCommerce objectives:
- Improving revenue and the number of users
- Lowering overhead prices
- Boosting the efficiency of the ordering technique and reducing order mistakes
- Enhancing your customer experience
Now, after understanding what you wish to accomplish, determine your e-commerce approach. Consider who you desire to sell to, what you wish to sell online, whether you like to extend to new markets (e.g., B2B2C), and more.
Eventually, set precise e-commerce KPIs that align with your objectives and approach. Having explicit KPIs guarantees that you can calculate the success of your eCommerce project and find any gaps that need your concentration — while also guaranteeing a constant emphasis on your eCommerce goals.
2. Concentrate on Your B2B Consumers’ Requirements.
The victory of your online shop depends on your consumer’s shopping requirements and experience. Your users will only use your web store if it fits them. It’s thus crucial to create your eCommerce strategies around your users. This implies understanding what they seek and desire and providing against these needs.
Put yourself in customers’ shoes. Find out what they want. How do they purchase products? What experience do they desire? Their preferences could differ broadly from accessing instant information 24/7 to the power of choosing present payment deals in the web store or even clarity on order status and delivery updates.
3. Create a Winning eCommerce Project Team.
Before you begin your eCommerce execution, you must appoint an eCommerce manager. You can hire a trusted eCommerce app development company to control your eCommerce project, team, and strategy.
However, since eCommerce touches several parts of your company, you must include people from every unit to bring the essential knowledge and proficiency.
Every member should understand how eCommerce can aid their divisions and how they can contribute to accomplishing e-commerce victory.
4. Tell Your eCommerce Plans and Align Internally.
Internal support and alignment are essential to ensure your eCommerce project’s success. Ensure your company understands your eCommerce strategies and comprehends the benefits.
Change usually generates doubt and resistance. So, it’s your commitment to educating each unit on the benefits of eCommerce, highlighting advantages appropriate to each stakeholder.
Will it improve your revenue? Will it assist you in reaching new markets? Will it aid IT operations to run smoother? In short, tell what’s in it and set common goals. Even if you hire developers in India, ensure they know what you want to achieve with your eCommerce platform.
5. Preparing Your eCommerce Website Data and Content
Organizations beginning with their first eCommerce site usually undervalue content. Content is required before releasing your eCommerce website, from product and firm descriptions and pictures to web store look-and-feel, categories, and structure.
Hence, you must be trained to structure and load your website store. Choose what the structure, key categories & subcategories will be. Examine that you have a good-quality picture for each product. You can also create a few technical materials.
6. Set Up a Timeline for the Project
It includes setting a precise plan for the different project stages, from beginning to release and allocating particular timelines for every stage. This assists in keeping the project on track and guarantees that all duties are finished within the specified timeframes.
To form a clear timeline for your eCommerce project, follow these steps:
- Determine the Project’s Scope: Before you can start constructing a timeline, you must have a precise scope understanding of your eCommerce project. This comprises specifying the detailed tasks involved, the resources needed, and the critical milestones you must accomplish.
- Discover the Key Phases of the Project: As soon as you have established the project’s scope, divide it into core stages. These may involve strategizing, designing, developing, testing, and launching.
- Decide Timelines for Each Phase: Assign particular timelines for each task after discovering the core phases. This should include commence and end dates for each step and any crucial milestones you want to achieve.
7. Set the Right Budget for Your B2B eCommerce Platform.
There is no pre-defined cost for an eCommerce website. A few basic platforms are absolutely free, while others can range into millions of dollars. Therefore it totally depends on your business requirements. But whatever you pick, you should consider your total cost of ownership (TCO).
Ensure you look forward to forming a natural eCommerce budget for the future. Undoubtedly, consider the cost of initial eCommerce platform implementation. But you must concentrate on any licensing and maintenance costs.
8. Launch your B2B eCommerce Website.
Nevertheless, you can never foresee how much you are ready for your eCommerce implementation. As with a lot of things in life, there is no ideal way to do so. Hence, pick a trusted software provider. Prepare well.
And then decide to go live with your eCommerce implementation. After you launch it, you can learn, test and constantly optimize your web store with your enhanced knowledge.
How Do You Onboard Channel Partners?
- First-Time Registration Discount Voucher: A first-time registration discount voucher is offered to channel partners who register for the first time on your app.
By offering a percentage off their first purchase or a fixed amount off their entire purchase, you can incentivize new partners to sign up and try out your platform. Also, it can encourage repeat business by creating a positive first impression.
- Loyalty Rewards Whenever They Use the App: Providing loyalty rewards to channel partners to use your mobile app is another strategy to incentivize them to utilize your platform frequently.
You offer them reward points that they can redeem for freebies or discounts on future buys. By providing these rewards, you can build loyalty among your channel associates and inspire them to use your platform frequently.
- Referral Reward: This technique rewards current channel associates for referring new associates to your platform. It is a powerful technique to create new leads and develop your channel partners’ network.
You can reward the current partner who refers a fresh member and the new partner who signs up via the referral link. It can be done in different ways, like discount vouchers, cash incentives, or reward points.
- App Only Offers: This method offers exclusive offers and discounts on your app. Doing this builds a feeling of urgency and promotes channel associates to use your application to take benefit of these offers. Besides, this can drive application downloads and usage.
By combining these techniques, you can adequately onboard channel associates and facilitate them to use your mobile app regularly. Tailoring your strategy to your target audience’s precise needs and preferences ensures the best possible outcomes.
Some Popular B2B eCommerce Platforms
Rubik’s.
Rubik’s Cube is the #1 selling puzzle game. Hence when Rubik’s determined to bring their business online, they understood that they could widen their reach and grow their revenue.
HP
HP manufactures computers, printers, and workstations for companies and consumers alike. When they chose to raise their Asia-Pacific unit, they discovered they were required to operate on a B2B eCommerce business strategy that was future-ready, though it had a “local feel.”
Selco
It is a British brand that links developing tradespeople and contractors with creating material products.
As a B2B sales organization that values digital growth and innovative advertising, Selco used the Adobe platform to connect with businesses online and entrepreneurs.
Parting Thoughts
That’s all for today. We hope this blog has resolved most of your B2B eCommerce solutions queries. The market is changing, and to get ahead of the competition, you must build state-of-the-art B2B eCommerce software solutions. You can hire a development company or create your own in-house team. If you still have any doubts, mention them in the comment section below.
FAQs
What is a B2B eCommerce solution?
It’s a digital platform that allows businesses to buy and sell goods and services online.
How do you choose the right B2B eCommerce solution for your enterprise?
Consider your business needs, budget, scalability, integration requirements, and vendor support when evaluating different solutions.
What challenges may businesses face when implementing a B2B eCommerce solution?
Some challenges businesses may encounter when executing a B2B eCommerce solution include complex product catalogs, integration with backend systems, data security, etc.
