B2B ecommerce is valuable in describing transactions which happen between the online businesses. Notably, this refers to the B2B portals which allow advertising and buying of services and inventory amongst businesses in the same industry.
The merits of doing business in this manner are a lot, for instance, increased reach and sales, transparency and a lot more. Wayfair is an example of the ecommerce business. It has over 8 million products from 10,000 various suppliers. It offers coupons for discount.
B2B organizations currently think of ecommerce differently. Electronic selling is a way to boost revenue and drive customer acquisitions. It is a manner of differentiating from the competition.
Increased Reach
The B2B portals of ecommerce offer a way of increasing reach to customers and making your organization and products known by more potential customers. There are a lot of business directories all around the world, Yelp in the US, Akama in Canada or SavvySME in Australia.
The presence of web pages which show what the organization involves, people browsing in the search engine will see your pages and hence represent imminent business opportunities as well as sales.
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 various places at once, this will boost the potential interactions of business to enjoy.
Containing public-facing catalogs is the best way to get to new B2B clients.
Streamlining, transparency and efficiency
The B2B ecommerce will streamline your customer interactions by enabling the process of ordering 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 with the ERP (enterprise resource planning) software so that the delay time between dispatch and ordering is negligible.
Mistakes in the ordering process or order fulfillment regarding stock counts that are inaccurate may be prevented since up-to-date counts from your warehouse is integrated into your website, this allows sales agents and customers to always know what is available.
Through the ERP, customers can order online when they want to and the client service can focus on real client service duties instead of being just order takers and the necessity of relay information in independent systems is removed.
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 for them that shows their browsing history, all personal details, shipping, and 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.
More sales
You will not only reach new clients, but ecommerce will also allow you to quickly implement the automated up-sell and cross-sell program of recommendation, providing suggestions to clients on your site and making them buy related products or products containing more functionality and features.
The web-based portal, similar to a marketplace, that shows your products and services, saves a lot of overheads which are a characteristic of the physical storefront or the physical trade show stall and hence with the reducing overheads, the bottom line grows.
Analytics
The B2B ecommerce offers the ideal platform for the business to launch an analytics campaign.
Outsource2EU noted “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”.
Google analytics provides ecommerce tracking, however, integrating analytics with the ERP also offers much more important information with insights that are actionable.
Better sales engagement
The physical sales team will as well merit from the launch of the ecommerce effort. The B2B ecommerce portal or 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.
Rilind Elezaj is a Digital Marketing Specialist