Over the past few years, the online shopping trend has quickly extended from the business-to-customers (B2C) model to the business-to-business (B2B) model. Businesses are now showing a budding interest in ordering and managing their online purchases and launching eCommerce as a purchasing channel for buyers. Some of the most notable reasons B2B businesses choose to move to online selling include:
The current pandemic has brought about many changes for businesses. Many businesses were forced to take their operations remotely. This has caused countless businesses to close their physical stores and change the way their sales agents operate. B2B businesses, specifically, have had to turn to remote marketing and selling.
With an established eCommerce website, you can offer your existing and potential clients valuable information about the products and services you offer at the touch of a button. This allows them to make the best purchasing decision for their needs.
With an eCommerce platform, you can free up your sales team’s time from fielding inbound emails and calls. This can eventually result in no need for a sales team at all. With the complex nature of hiring and retention of staff, this can be a major benefit for many businesses.
B2B clients often select a preferred supplier if they are satisfied with the products, services and customer support. With repeat customers, the opportunity to offer ongoing subscription-like services become a reality. With an eCommerce platform, B2B can enable repeat clients to automatically purchase their favored products or services efficiently without the need of getting a representative involved.
With eCommerce, you can decrease operating costs and remove the need for long and complex sales processes by integrating seamlessly with enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) platforms.
By listing and selling products or services online, you’re giving visitors to your site an entire catalog of your offerings. The main advantage of this is that the full catalog is available 24/7 for anyone to access at any time and from anywhere.
With the global B2B eCommerce market expected to reach $6.6 trillion in sales in the next few years, it’s important for businesses to not only survive but prosper. To do so, they must be willing and ready to meet the needs of their customers and match their competitors’ offerings.
Adjusting your business for eCommerce offers a good opportunity to gain significant benefits that can help you to streamline operations and generate new business opportunities. Some of these include:
When implemented correctly, an eCommerce platform can lead to valuable savings. An effective platform can automate processes like invoicing, stock management and order processing that speed up tasks and reduce the number of staff involved in their delivery.
In traditional B2B commerce, administrative staff are often overwhelmed with a growing client base and tons of complex paperwork. These processes can be timeous, expensive and lead to an advanced threat for human error. eCommerce digital processing can dramatically reduce errors and can be done more efficiently as orders made are instantly processed for shipping.
eCommerce platforms offer built-in personalization options where visitors can experience customized recommendations. Presenting your customers with products or services that offer better specifications for their needs improves cross-selling and stimulates higher value deals.
If you do not have an ERP but you are a B2B business, you can implement eCommerce built-in functionality so it works as your inventory management system. Thereby, it supports you in tracking inventory and automatically updates it with every order. Many suppliers find this feature very helpful as it leads to effective inventory monitoring. This also eases the laborious process of manual inventory count.
Traditional B2B payment processes can decelerate transactions. Many customers typically don’t make payments upfront and invoices are subject to multiple approval stages before being processed. Some additional fees and taxes also form part of cross-border sales. But with B2B eCommerce, you can develop a seamless journey through payment processes. It includes a shorter wait time and fewer additional fees.
B2B businesses also opt for eCommerce websites to automate their sales processes through seamless integration with ERP and CRM platforms. This enables them to spend less time doing paperwork and more time selling.
One of the most significant reasons B2B retailers have an eCommerce website is that it conveniently expands their reach to new markets. For businesses that have traditionally relied on their reputation to drive sales, an eCommerce site opens new doors for digital advertising and organic search to reach new clients in other parts of the world.
Because the eCommerce industry is continually evolving, it can be difficult for any business that wants to go digital to transition without facing challenges. Of course, as with any big business transition, some risks must be considered too before starting the process of going digital. Some of these include:
Every B2B business has something unique about its workflow. The traditional buying process of B2B typically has many people involved with separate responsibilities. This often delays the process of delivery. Moving this intricacy to online processes demands strong knowledge of B2B businesses and every stakeholders’ tasks.
B2B development and the languages used are vastly different from conventional B2C eCommerce terminology. Therefore, B2B implementations require the development team to speak the merchant language and know exactly how to translate and lock together several structures and processes.
Every B2B business is different and, as a result, requires its eCommerce site to be innovatively customized to suit its unique elements. This requires the developers of the eCommerce website to have strong business analysis skills and diligent planning abilities. Few agencies have the capacity to offer this.
To help your business overcome or completely avoid these challenges, you want to work with an experienced eCommerce partner that can find solutions fast. Codifi specializes in custom eCommerce web development projects and assists businesses in transforming digitally in the most effective way possible. What sets us apart is our experience in developing sound practices to help our clients effortlessly augment development teams with highly skilled resources.
eCommerce is a major trend that has shifted how businesses sell, regardless of the market. It also brings about many advantages to B2B businesses. But to truly perform, your eCommerce site must be developed on a scalable platform ideal for B2B. With the right tools, you can manage products and services, integrate with third-party applications, offer better customer service, reach new markets and boost sales.