Introduction:
Forrester reports, “B2B eCommerce will cross $1.1 trillion and account for 12.1% of all B2B sales in the US by 2020.” With Business-to-Business (B2B) online sales continuing to skyrocket, manufacturers, distributors and wholesalers must upscale or risk being left behind. According to facts, 93 percent of business-to-business buyers shop online. Hence, if you are seeking to take your business to the next level, you must find a way to establish your brand online.
However, diving into B2B market isn’t as easy as riding a bicycle. When it comes to developing a robust B2B ecommerce solution, there are ample of things you should consider and also a few tips on to scale online before making a plunge.
In this comprehensive blog post we will discuss everything you need to know in order to start your own thriving B2B business. We will uncover all the features that your ecommerce store must have, followed by choosing the best platform for your ecommerce store, it’s benefits and how you can find an ideal company to help you with your next giant project.
Features Your eCommerce Store Must Have:
When it comes to a giant eCommerce store, there are certain features your store cannot survive without. In order to run it efficiently and produce desired results, your store must be equipped with the following features.
Multiple Payment Gateways:
Credit cards are the typical payment method for B2C customers, but the same cannot be said for B2B. Business buyers like to pay against a line of credit, cash on delivery, cheque and through a variety of currencies. Hence, the platform you choose must offer you the flexibility to adapt your customers’ needs by presenting them with payment options they require.
Mobile-Friendly:
With mobile on the rise as the quickest growing device for placing orders, it is an obvious feature that should not be ignored. Mobile hasn’t always been as friendly for making purchases, let alone for viewing websites. Ensuring that customers have no reason to abandon their carts will increase sales and incrementally grow your business. It is imperative to have a mobile-friendly site and experience; Google punishes company site rankings that do not have a fully responsive website.
Scalability:
The B2B buying process is extremely complex and creating an order can be manual and tedious. As your eCommerce revenues grow, so does the labor hours that maintain great customer service. Working with an eCommerce platform capable of streamlining these back office processes as you grow will inevitably save time and money. Try to look past initial company needs and visualize the future growth potential and the features you will be need for long-term success.
Do those features include a growing product portfolio that incurs higher site traffic? Or perhaps advanced reporting, and a customer service feature? The important question you should ask before making the investment is how scalable the solution would be? This will save a good deal of your resources beforehand.
Effortless Management & Integration:
This is a very important area to inquire when it comes to developing a giant eCommerce store. As your customer base increases, you are definitely going to require more resources and software systems to manage your giant customer base. At that time, your platform should be capable enough to seamlessly integrate your back-end systems with robust APIs and off-the-shelf extensions that speed your time to market.
Finding an ideal platform that can accommodate multiple payment gateways, is mobile friendly, can seamlessly integrate third party extensions, and delivers consistent experience across all devices – is not an easy job. Thanks to Magento for compiling all the essential features into one pack, Magento B2B solution.
Why Magento’s B2B Solution is Ideal for B2B eCommerce Businesses?
Nowadays, B2B buyers are increasingly demanding the same quality of experience and sophistication as enjoyed by B2C consumers. Like their B2C counterparts, B2B consumers are also demanding intuitive and user-friendly interfaces across multiple touch points.
This is where Magento B2B solution plays a vital role. It is a robust solution offering personalized customer experience, friction-free ordering and a lot more exciting features that B2B buyers want. In short, it is a solution that offers everything that you need to start a thriving B2B business. To support my claim, here I have shared some significant features that comes with Magento 2:
Friction-free ordering:
With Magento, the order management becomes much easier. Buyers can quickly place orders online by entering SKUs, uploading CSV files, or choosing items from pre-set requisition lists. Not just that, your sales team can efficiently respond to online quote requests and help customers by creating orders on their behalf.
Seamless Experience Universally:
With increasing number of mobile users, it is needless to say your store must be optimized enough to deliver engaging shopping experience for mobile users. When it comes to Magento B2B solution, it delivers exceptional shopping experience across all devices.
This mobile-optimized experience empowers customers and sales representatives to place orders on any device, at any time. Ultimately, this helps in maximizing sales and promotional capabilities that differentiate your brand and make products stand out.
Easy & Hassle-Free Integration:
Worried about integrating your existing back-end systems? Magento delivers reliable, high-performance experiences without expensive capital costs and maintenance fees. And, integrating it with your existing backend systems is super easy with robust APIs and off-the-shelf extensions that speed your time to market.
Smart Order & Inventory Management:
Manage orders from all the sales channels with a single solution. Provide customers with accurate, real-time inventory from across your supply chain and use automated business rules to optimize your fulfilment costs and delivery times.
Advanced Account Management Tools:
Managing accounts has been greatly improved with the release of Magento 2. Other eCommerce platforms allow for some user management, such as basic restrictions and applying prices based on user groups, but Magento has beefed up traditional options specifically with B2B in mind.
This includes a self-service tool for B2B customers providing more control over their own company accounts and associated users.
Likewise, the web store administrator has more control over categorizing and organizing customer information, importing and exporting customer data, and even assigning sales representatives to individual customer accounts.
Personalized Customer Experience:
Personalization is the key for the success of any ecommerce business. Magento is fully customizable and has bundle of extensions to deliver a personalized buying experience to the customers.
Above were some significant features that come out-of-the-box with Magento’s B2B solution. Everything that your B2B store needs is covered by this solution. Now once you know what features your store needs and the best platform for your store, the next thing you should be thinking of is an ideal company who is reliable for your next ecommerce project.
Finding an ideal company…
When it comes to developing a thriving B2B solution by leveraging Magento’s cutting-edge technology – it is very crucial to choose the right digital commerce agency for your project. You should make sure that the agency you are working with knows Magento very well. While there are many agencies working with eCommerce, you need a one who not only knows eCommerce well, but also specializes in Magento.
Businesses were finding it very hard to find an ideal company who can build a robust B2B solution by leveraging Magento’s superpowers optimally. Understanding the challenge that most businesses were facing, we decided to be one of the Magento’s leading partner for creating unique digital commerce experiences across the globe. Today, we are Enterprise Magento Solution Partner.
The best part about us? We have been working with Magento since its inception in 2007. We’re official Magento Partner with a strong team of, 150+ Magento technocrats, 74+ Magento 2 trained solution partners, 35+ Magento Certified developers who have accomplished more than 300 small/large eCommerce projects with Magento. From the year we started, we feel extremely proud to have the privilege of serving the giants across the industry.
If you are passionate about the idea of creating your thriving B2B commerce business, we would be more than happy to help you create exceptional eCommerce experience that drives growth, more business and maximizes conversions.
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Shivi Rao is a content marketer with Krish. She has worked in various industries spanning technology, science, rural marketing, startups & unicorns, eCommerce business, and digital marketing, believing that content is the foundation to facilitate the visibility of any organization and ensuring her words do the same. In her free time, you can either find her lifting weights in the gym or feeding the strays.
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