We analyzed hundreds of small to mid-sized ($1-$50M in online revenue) businesses and prepared the list of features B2B buyers want from a supplier.
This list serves as a handy guide to the things that should be on top of your mind as you push your e-commerce portal towards the next level of growth.
Here’s the brutal truth about B2B eCommerce:
Most online eCommerce platforms are designed for retailers, and they leave wholesalers and B2B sellers behind. To succeed, you actually have to stand out… which is hard when your system doesn’t have all the required features, and paying $150,000 to develop and $35,000/year for the license to NetSuite or Magento Enterprise are not the funds you want to waste.
Some owners invest a fortune into customizing their store… they think, “If I change it enough, then I’ll be able to make it work for my B2B customers,” but it only gets you so far. There’s a limit to how much you can actually get with B2C systems before it becomes very hard and expensive to maintain, let alone get ahead… plus, by the time you are done, it’s already old news, and it’s time to re-platform.
So what’s the alternative?
A different kind of B2B eCommerce Platform! An eCommerce set up that specializes in wholesale and B2B businesses … and gives you all the features you need to scale your B2B sales online without wasting a fortune.
We collected the pieces of the winning formula of a successful setup from the hundreds of B2B online stores and portals we set up for our clients over the years.
ERP, PIM, EDI Integration
An essential function of any successful set up is full integration with your ERP, PIM, EDI, and other systems for automated information exchange for products, customers, and orders. With such integration, you will greatly reduce the load on your staff, avoid duplicate data entry and human mistakes, as well as provide customers and partners with real-time inventory information and order status.
Business Customer Groups
Onboarding Process Optimization
To streamline the onboarding process - automate and optimize buyer's registration and approval.
Ordering Process Optimization
The wholesale module we offer and easy to manage wholesale pricing across multiple buyer's groups with many pricing options; optimized wholesale ordering process with one-page product catalog; supports minimum product quantity and step quantity to sell items by the boxes and etc.
Offer a secure way to save credit cards
Optimized Mobile Experience
Setup Customer Self-service Area
Implement Advanced Product Search
The perfect search engine in the store helps customers to find and buy the right products quickly. Your customers will love your store because it makes getting to the products they want to buy easier than ever. Live filters take care of showing updated results on the shop page while your customers search by keyword, price range, use categories, tags or any product attributes to narrow down the results.
Detailed Product Information
More than 94% of buyers do research online before placing an order so it's critical to present detailed product information for pre-purchase research and after-purchase support. Every successful client we interviewed mentioned the ability to post detailed information for products was a major part of their success.
Photos, videos, specifications, schematics, compatibility, certification sheets, downloadable 3D models and drawings – every little piece of information you add to a product page will help to win more customers and score better with search engines.
The Flexible Product Finder module
If you have hundreds or thousands of products in your online catalog, a powerful product finder (for example Make, Model, Year finder for an auto-part store) will bring and keep buyers working with you because it will make their life easier. It takes time to set up and keeps it up-to-date with new products but this is well worth it because, in many stores, this is the main feature keeping buyers to come back and do business with you.
Alternative Products List
For many businesses a good section to have on the product page is the "Alternative products" list. For example, on a brand-name product page, you can show OEM product alternatives that do the same thing for the fraction of the price of the brand-name unit (and may even have a bigger profit margin for you 😉
Easy quotation requests
RFQs are essential parts of B2B functionality. Your online system will take quote requests 24/7/365 so your sales team can do the things that matter: reaching out to customers and growing the business instead of wasting time on data entry tasks. But take it to the next level and include the "Click here to pay" button on every approved quotation sent to a customer. So, instead of calling your sales, a customer simply clicks on the link and pay for the order in the store with a credit card, on a credit line, or any other payment method you offer. This little button will boost your conversion from quotes to orders.
Easy to Use and Fast Admin Area
You want a system where your staff can easily manage customers, orders, categories, products, promotions, and everything else in the store without having to contact an agency or web developer for every change.
For a larger store with hundreds or thousands of products, consider implementing Product Information Management (PIM) system to simplify the product management.
Online Credit Line Application and Management
Most eCommerce systems offer some kind of PO or check payment method but how do you track if this particular customer is way over his/her approved credit? Do you check every order manually against that customer’s account in your billing system?
Our online credit line module will allow a customer to apply for a credit line with you, track available credit, and accept the credit repayment automatically.
Allow Multiple Shipping Addresses
This simple feature is missing in many popular eCommerce platforms and I would consider it as an essential functionality for a B2B store where the head office can be placing orders for multiple locations or a contractor wants to ship orders to multiple job sites. This gives your customers the option to store multiple shipping addresses and retrieve them at checkout.
Allow customers to save product lists
Your customers will appreciate the ability to be able to save the shopping cart or a product list to be able to order right from that list.
Allow customers to share the shopping cart
Many buyers want to share the whole shopping cart or a product list with somebody else or keep the link to that list for future reference.
Allow customers to use their own reference numbers
Some buyers find it very convenient to be able to associate the products in your store with their own reference numbers which will be shown in the shopping cart and on the invoices.
Fill Shopping cart from CSV
Many large B2B suppliers offer multiple ways to make it easier to order a large number of products at once. One way is to allow your customers to use a simple CSV text file with 2 columns: SKU and Qty to upload products into the shopping cart.
Show multiple ways to contact you
We see some stores make it very hard for a customer to contact them if they have any questions. We went the other way and added a simple "Questions?" button on every product page which opens a form with pre-populated customer's information and the product name to make it as easy as possible to submit a quotion
Offer Live Chat
This feature alone can double your conversion rates in the store. Even if you can man the live chat only during business hours, it will show your customers they can count on you to be there for them. Adding a knowledge base with FAQ and a support board to manage communication is a huge plus as well and makes it easier for your team to provide outstanding customer service which is a foundation of any successful business.
Choose an Upgradable System
Super Fast Page Load
Fast and secure hosting with good speed index and Google score is essential for good conversion ratios and a higher position in the search engine results. Overwise, all your investments into the store development and marketing will be a waste. Make sure your IT guys run speed and security tests at least every month. You can do it here: http://ecommerce.fitness
Implement Performance Monitoring
Choose the Right Technology Partner
Your hosting and development team can make or break your e-commerce initiative. A quality and reasonably priced partner can keep making your business better by constant and never-ending improvements requested by your staff and customers. Be careful with low-cost developers – usually, they greatly inflate required hours to compensate for low hourly rates so you are getting a low-quality development for the same price.
Consider the duration of the post-development warranty and support. Do you know anybody offering a life-time warranty on custom development? Crazy, right? Or is it … because we do.
If you want to see any of the above features in action, just let us know.
At FinestShops we help growing wholesale distributors, suppliers & manufacturers to set up and run a successful future-proof B2B eCommerce system for the price of an office chair. Would you like to try our cloud-based platform, which is built on an eCommerce system used by over 3.8 million active stores?
Schedule a call today to see if we will be a good fit for your business.
