For marketing professionals

The Benefits of B2B Ecommerce to Enter the Digital Marketplace.

What is B2B ecommerce?

B2B ecommerce refers to commerce between two businesses rather than to commerce between a business and an individual consumer. Transactions at the wholesale level are usually business-to-business while those at the retail level are most often business-to-consumer (B2C).

Because orders are processed digitally, buying efficiency is improved for wholesalers, manufacturers, distributors and other types of B2B sellers.

The B2B ecommerce space is growing rapidly.

Common B2B ecommerce misconceptions

It’s perfectly understandable why B2B merchants like manufacturers, distributors, hesitate to move their business online. It is like uprooting a business model that has worked for years, or decades. Therefore, it doesn’t seem like an attractive option. Moreover, loyal, long-standing customers have been purchasing goods the old-fashioned way for years. Getting those customers to purchase online may also present a challenge. Even if a B2B merchant wants to go digital, the task may seem inconceivable.

Another reason that B2B merchants may be reluctant to make the move is to protect themselves from pure online players. In addition, other countries/markets can present the largest threat. What merchants often don’t realise is that they can build the complexity they have offline into their online world. They lack the missing piece of information on how to move online. In the end, they will not do it at all. The complexity is pricing. B2B businesses usually offer individual pricing and merchants don’t want to lose that personal touch with their customers. At times, merchants don’t have anybody to drive this project. Moreover senior management is often not familiar with how to do business online.

Benefits for B2B to enter into ecommerce platform

It is important to understand the benefits of B2B ecommerce and how your business can flourish through ecommerce. Here are some benefits:

Get Ahead of the Competition

While the B2B online industry snowballs to overtake B2C ecommerce in just a few short years, B2B customers already expect to shop online. Frost and Sullivan reports that by 2020, B2B ecommerce sales will be worth around $6.7 trillion and account for over a quarter (27%) of all B2B sales. While half of B2B consumers are purchasing online today, only 22% of B2B merchants offer their goods online (source). This allows B2B merchants an incredibly simple way to get a leg up on competition which is to set up an ecommerce solution! It’s also important to note that while you may be reluctant to move online, your competitors aren’t. They may easily tempt your customers away with better way to order and purchase through online portal.

Increased Reach

The B2B portals of ecommerce offer a way to increase reach to customers. This will make your organization and products known by more potential customers. The presence of web pages show what the organization offers. When people browse in the search engine, they will see your pages and hence represent imminent sales and business opportunities.

When you set your pages as private, you may still expand reach by focusing your content on the web store to specific markets. It offers you the chance to be at various places at one time, which will boost the potential interactions of business to enjoy.

Reach New Markets

We already mentioned that a B2B ecommerce store can help you reach more clients. And those clients don’t necessarily have to be in your existing markets.

As your sales portal are online, your digital sales channel can be available 24/7, 365 days a year. By eliminating the challenge of time differences in the order process, B2B e-commerce makes it easier to serve a wider international market.

Lower Your Costs

Growing your revenue while minimizing your costs might sound impossible. However it is a very real benefit of B2B ecommerce.

Modern technology allows you take almost every aspect of your business online. This includes order entry, client information provision and customer service. By automating and streamlining these various processes, your company can cut down on unnecessary costs. In this way, you make your business processes more efficient.

More sales

Ecommerce will also allow you to quickly implement the automated up-sell and cross-sell program of recommendation. This provides suggestions to clients on your site and making them buy related products or products containing more functionality and features.

The web-based portal is similar to a marketplace where your products and services are available. This saves a lot of overheads of the physical storefront or the physical trade show stall. Hence with the reducing overheads, the bottom line grows.

Streamlining, transparency and efficiency

The B2B ecommerce will streamline your customer interactions by enabling the process of ordering to be reliable and efficient. This is vital in the current climate of commerce where there are high demand and short time.

Through operation out of the web portal, all ordering may be merged so that the delay time between dispatch and ordering is negligible.

Mistakes in the ordering process or order fulfilment can prevented as up-to-date inventory count from your warehouse is integrated into your website. This allows sales agents and customers to always know what is available.

Customers can order online while the client service can focus on real client service duties.

Better management of suppliers and customers

The concept of B2B ecommerce offers better management of both the suppliers and customers. Essentially, the whole initiative is a win-win for both parties.

Your clients will have a custom-made portal that show their browsing history, personal details, shipping, the tracking data as well as a wish or shopping list. They will have more control of the entire process that not only enables efficiency and transparency but also eliminates the need of calling to talk to someone just to ask for an update of an order. Moreover, you will have better management of the suppliers since you can view what raw inventory is on hand and when, also, you will see the progress of the orders.

Analytics

The B2B ecommerce offers the ideal platform for the business to launch an analytics campaign. With the help of ecommerce, business is able to easily evaluate and measure sales effectiveness, product mix, marketing campaigns, inventory turns, client engagement, and client sales effectiveness.

Better sales engagement

The physical sales team will as well merit from the launch of the ecommerce effort. The B2B ecommerce site will boost the sales teams’ visibility towards the client orders, history and pricing on the road or working from remote locations. The traveling sales agent show a lot of carbon mile on the road, this can be reduced via the web portals and the web-based sites of communication.

Now you have got the benefits of B2B ecommerce covered, hence, it is time to embark onto the new journey for a scalable online success.