It is a well-known fact that running a B2B sales company is not an easy task… but then, selling has never been easy. The key is to let your customers be in charge – this is a powerful strategy that is used by most companies in recent times. Study shows that only 29% of people bother with salespeople, the rest would rather conduct their own research to learn more about a product in order to make a final decision. However, this doesn’t stop a company from reaching its sales range. There is a large amount of essential components that can take a B2B ecommerce company to extraordinary new heights.
First, B2B(business-to-business) involves selling products and services to other companies/businesses. A B2B sales company focuses on developing products that are relevant to the success of another company, products that are used in the daily activity of their targeted customers and products that consumers have no use for. The B2B market is a vast one and is larger than most, it outshines the consumer market in dollars worth. B2B ecommerce offers a wide range of benefits to both the seller and buyer. One important benefit is convenience and it is why there are so many online stores in recent times. E Commerce is the preferred choice for most people in the world because of its convenience. Although, B2B selling is more complex and requires more than the regular business-to-consumer approach to buy online. Here are some essential components for improving or making a website.
1. PERSONALIZATION
It is vital to ensure your customers have a personalized front-end experience rather than a flat and generic experience, just as it is vital to have a tailored backend. Presenting visitors with a customized index and ordering options is advantageous and would make the shopping experience a notable and enjoyable one. Personalization lets you inform your buyers of what you’re offering, predict their needs and point out products that match their needs. The key steps to take when personalizing your platform include;
· Streamline the shopping experience for every business that shops with you.
· Assume a perfect customer for your brand in order to understand what your buyers want.
· Situate your products to according to your buyer sections.
· Decide the perfect recommendation strategy for your buyers.
2. REFINED WORKFLOWS
A B2B website must be capable of providing prompt product and order information. Put your customers at ease by providing insights into every detail of an order from the delivery dates of products and services to information about the order status.
3. MOBILE-FRIENDLY
Majority access the internet on mobile phones. Hence, it is advisable to make your site mobile ready in order to appear in the search engines. There are ways you can easily build a beautiful mobile-friendly site in order to improve your customer’s buying experience.
4. ENGAGING WEB CONTENT
Identifying your buyer’s pain points and specifications will guide you keeping them engaged with your content while offering ideal solutions. Make your B2B website stand out by creating quality content that puts your buyers at ease, improves loyalty and drives them to buy your products. You could employ the following tips:
- Introduce the use of helpful tools like Grammarly to enhance legibility.
- Use professional image retouching on images on your website to elicit that professional feel
- Write content in a conversational tone that makes the writer feel at ease and answers all their possible questions or queries
- Customer Satisfaction Metrics are very important, if you want to know how the customers are feeling about your product or website.
- Ensure your content is captivating right from the homepage to product descriptions.
5. EFFICIENT AND RELIABLE SHIPPING SERVICES
It is essential to provide straightforward, swift, consistent and authentic shipping services to your customers in order to avoid revenue loss and customer turnover. The main faults to avoid in this case are;
· Expensive shipping costs
· Delivering a large number of damaged goods
· Complicated shipping and checkout process.
· Hidden delivery charges
6. BULK ORDER CHOICES AND DISCOUNTS
Two particular things you need to include to your B2B ecommerce website are: bulk order discounts and minimum order quantity. Minimum order quantity helps with inventory and bulk order discounts are appealing to customers. It brings in more customers, increases your list of regular customers and helps you make room for new products.
7. CONSTANT UPDATES
It is important to update your products according to upcoming trends and designs that will interest your customers. No-one likes the same old. To keep a comprehensive list of regular customers, it is advisable to conduct ample research in order to stay updated. Regularly updating your website – whether to upgrade to a new version specifically if you are using wordpress, upload new products, services or discounts – is vital for the growth of your company and keeps your customers informed.
8. ADVANCED B2B ECOMMERCE ANALYTICS
Every buyer is unique even when they buy the same products. It is important to pay attention to the requirements of each customer, they all have different contracts or arrangements, shipping needs and specifications. The best way to properly do this is to have a business analytics solution that lets you modify your KPI (key performance indicators) tracking to every buyer.
9. CUSTOMER DATA PROTECTION
This is a very important aspect of any sales website. It is getting more difficult to maintain customer privacy, especially with the increase in cyber-crime. Cyber-criminals are coming up with more intelligent ways to execute their plans and it is the responsibility of the website owner to protect his/her customers. Here are a few ways to protect customer information;
- Follow all privacy procedures required by law
- Establish a privacy policy
- Request for prior consent from your customers
- Administer a web monitoring program to protect your website
10. SELF-SERVICE OPTIONS
This is one of the most reliable and verified ways to enhance the experience customers get on your e-commerce website.
Implementing self-services such as the chatbots, not too technical knowledge based articles features helps to increase brand touch points with the customer.
11. SCHEDULED ORDERING FOR REGULAR CUSTOMERS
As stated earlier, B2B selling is a difficult task and it involves more complex processes than that
of the regular B2C selling. It involves processes like bulk shipments, editable product offerings and advanced pricing. When developing a B2B ecommerce website, it is vital to ensure that it can support the given components and that the shopping experience matches the B2C shopping experience. Tweaking a website to suit customer preferences also improves sales and general productivity. In the world of today, every business or organization whether B2B or B2C has a competition and in order to rise above your competition, steady improvement is key.
