It’s said that B2B customers move through more than 70% of their way through their buying journeys before engaging with a salesperson. This highlights how difficult it is to get one-on-one time with today’s customers and how important your choice of B2B e-commerce solution is.
Let’s discuss how the right B2B e-commerce solution can drive ROI for your business.
Gain revenue from new customers
The right B2B e-commerce solution can help you attract new customers and sales in a number of ways:
- Quickly create, publish and edit the content that’s optimised for mobile to meet your customers’ ever-changing needs
- Streamline the B2B buying process, thanks to functionalities such as quick reordering capabilities based on order history, bundle pricing, an online credit application and more
- Support cross-border commerce to help you reach customers. Features could include local languages, tax rates, payment options and self-service for smaller customers
Increase sales from existing customers
As well as acquiring new customer sales, a B2B e-commerce solution will also help you boost sales from your existing customer base.
- An integration with your CRM will allow your e-commerce solution to offer personalised recommendations to customers. Using data such as their order history, browsing behaviour, any interactions with customer service and sales, the solution can use AI to intuitively personalise experiences to the individual customer
- Integrations with your other key business systems (e.g. your CRM, ERP etc) also means you can provide your customers with a consistent experience across all your channels
- E-commerce platform features like advanced search capabilities and personalised product recommendations can help your customers gain more visibility into your complete product catalogue. This gives you a chance to up and cross-sell
Boost efficiency
Your e-commerce solution can help you become more efficient thanks to:
- An automated price quoting functionality (that’s also available online) can save both your employees and customers time. For starters, it means customers won’t need your salespeople’s help in generating pricing quotes
- If your commerce and ERP systems are integrated, it can streamline the pricing quote process even further. For example, you could automate the task of entering web sales order details into the ERP. Now your back-office team can quickly start with their processing and sales approval activities. This not only reduces the order fulfilment cycle (which we’ll get onto in our next point), but it also helps you save time and improve cost-efficiency
- As mentioned briefly above, a commerce-ERP integration can shorten your overall order fulfilment cycle. The right B2B e-commerce solution can even help you improve it. Smart fulfilment technology can help you identify the best way to source each order - based on your goals.
Consolidated data will improve business intelligence
To make well-informed business decisions, you need access to the right data at the right time. Trying to consolidate data from multiple systems will only make it harder for you to make timely decisions.
An integrated e-commerce solution will automatically pull data from multiple sources, whether it’s from various systems or imported documents. It can then analyse and present this data in a digestible format - such as a dashboard or customisable reports. Now you can quickly gain a snapshot of the information you need.
Improve margins
A main reason is that customers can buy online. You’re less likely to arrange an in-person sales meeting (where costs can rack up due to travel, meals etc). Phone and video conference calls are less costly but they’re still time-consuming. Your sales team will need to prepare for the calls and then, of course, there’s the call itself.
And as we all know, time is money.
When your customers can browse your catalogue, read about your products and buy online, that can improve profit margins.
Reduce overheads
Today’s customers want convenience and that often means the ability to do things themselves. They want to find answers to their questions and solutions to their problems without speaking to a customer service or sales representative. So again, we’re circling back to self-service sales.
The right B2B e-commerce solution will support this. As we mentioned earlier, your customers will be able to:
- Access your complete product catalogue
- Access accurate product information (e.g. stock levels, descriptions)
- Configure products to their needs
- Customise pricing based on their situation and needs (e.g. bundle pricing, legacy customer pricing)
- View personalised product recommendations, bundles and promotions
- And more!
Want to make sure you’re choosing the right B2B e-commerce solution?
Your e-commerce technology investment matters. The right solution can help you achieve bigger business benefits in the long-run, from increased customer sales (new and existing) to improved efficiency. And then there’s the ability to make more informed business decisions on the spot.
We’ve created a checklist that covers the aspects you should consider when choosing a B2B e-commerce solution. From key features and functionalities to ensuring it meets your internal team’s needs, get started by clicking the button below.