The secret sauce of eCommerce success for B2B wholesale and distribution
Self-service is essential for a B2B website. Most of your customers are looking for advanced capabilities like negotiated prices, bulk ordering, reordering, role-based permission for order approvals, differentiated pricing, and more.
Providing a DIY (Do-it-yourself) experience along with personalization can help your B2B eCommerce store win, engage, and retain more customers.
When it boils down to choosing the right platform for building your B2B eCommerce, sophisticated B2B-centric features are outside of the scope of platforms like Shopify or BigCommerce, which are meant for B2C.
Magento Commerce could be a worthy option. Our latest eBook discusses Magento’s B2B capabilities that can enable wholesalers and distributors to build great website experiences.
Preview the first 3 chapters of the book
Which platform best suits B2B?
Is your wholesale or distribution business considering building a new site? If yes, you need to look for an eCommerce platform that has been designed to address the specific needs of a B2B relationship. Many platforms have been built around the B2C model, where metrics like time-on-page or number of page views are a high indication of purchase. But that’s not at all appropriate for a B2B site visitor.
Unlike the B2C world, wholesale and distribution businesses begin their relationships with customers offline. Most don’t even access the wholesaler or distributor’s website until they’ve agreed to do business, negotiated prices and agreed to terms, and have established a payment method.
B2B eCommerce essentials
Differentiated Pricing
Because your customers will begin using your site after you’ve signed a contract with them and have negotiated prices, they expect to see every order they place to reflect their volume discounts or price breaks agreed to beforehand. The ecommerce platform you select must support differentiated pricing based on the customer.
Custom Catalogs
It’s highly unlikely that your customers will want access to your entire product catalog. Your eCommerce platform should allow you to create custom catalogs your customers can easily sort.
Role-based Permissions
All companies place spending limits on their employees, requiring additional authority and approval for high ticket items. Your customers are no different. Your website needs to support your customers’ internal procedures with role-based permission functionality.
How can Magento help?
Magento Commerce includes everything you need to build and manage your eCommerce site. The platform allows your customers to manage their company accounts (e.g., set up multiple tiers of buyers with specific roles and permissions). They can also track quotes, view detailed order histories, and manage their credit online, rather than calling you with their questions and requests.
Magento also has staying power. More than 250,000 eCommerce sites use Magento, and it adds new businesses to its rolls every quarter (in Q1 2020, Magento Commerce experienced 40% growth).
Check out our eBook
While planning to build a B2B eCommerce store, the platform of choice is the most crucial decision. Your store’s technical strength, marketing capabilities, flexibility to customize and accommodate 3rd-party extensions depend on the platform you prefer. This eBook highlights why Magento is a choice worth considering.
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