Why B2B Marketers Should Embrace E-Commerce

Personal shopping experiences have shaped expectations for the B2B buying experiences. Consumers are used to consistent, Amazon-like shopping experiences in their personal lives. As per a study, B2B buyers’ hunger for digital ordering tools is expanding. Over 70% of B2B buyers discover buying from a website more advantageous than buying from a sales representative. Increased expectations for powerful digital experiences are causing alarm among some manufacturers and distributors. Many of them understand that to endure, they need to create a more robust digital commerce offering.

Even though B2B buyers’ expectations have been affected by the experiences they experience in their personal buying lives, B2B and B2C e-commerce have significant differences that companies should understand to succeed. B2C e-commerce is about boosting sales. Although B2B e-commerce drives revenue, it is about empowering your team and your customers to be more productive.

B2B e-commerce does more than create a path for your customers to buy your products online. It also provides a host of different advantages to your customer relationships. Here are some powerful potential benefits of deploying an e-commerce site with an engine constructed explicitly for B2B.

1. Scalability – A viable B2B e-commerce platform will empower your organization to develop and scale effectively to satisfy the market need and customer needs by opening new sales channels and continuously reaching new market segments.
2. Improved efficiencies – Through integration to the enterprise resource planning (ERP) and other back-end business systems, e-commerce gives checked efficiencies to B2B organizations. Customers can order online at their convenience, customer service can zero in on real customer service works instead of just being order takers, and the need to re-key data in independent systems is eliminated, in this manner eliminating the possibility of errors and improving shipping processes and increasing order throughput.
3. More customers – A B2B e-commerce site with public-facing catalog pages is a powerful method to arrive at new B2B customers. Your future buyers like to shop online and many will demand it. As B2B buyers head online to find the best prices, manufacturers and distributors can use the force of the search – and therefore, prepared to index – pages of their site to find new visitors and convert them into customers.
4. Improved brand awareness – Developing pages that can be indexed via search engine crawlers are a quick method to improve your site’s search engine optimization and improve the likelihood that your target audience will know what your identity is.
5. Increased sales – Not just will you arrive at new customers, e-commerce likewise permits you to effectively carry out an automated cross-sell and up-sell recommendation program, offering applicable suggestions to customers on the site and encouraging them to buy related items or items with more features and functionality.
6. Analytics – B2B e-commerce gives the ideal platform to an organization to dispatch a far-reaching analytics campaign. Through e-commerce, organizations can more effectively quantify and assess marketing campaigns, sales effectiveness, item mix, inventory turns, customer sales effectiveness and customer engagement. Google Analytics offers e-commerce tracking, yet integrating analytics with your ERP also gives you considerably more important data with actionable insights.
7. Customer-driven experience – Amazon.com sets the standard for providing an uncommon e-commerce experience and the present online shopper expects an Amazon-like experience whether they are shopping for business or joy. While there are certain contrasts in experiences for retail shoppers and B2B buyers, B2B organizations need to utilize intuitive design, rich content and interactive functionality on their websites.
8. Extraordinary customer service – E-commerce gives an outstanding opportunity to the B2B organization to improve its customer service initiatives. E-commerce sites can furnish admittance to self-serve portals with an account, order, history, and tracking information. Through integration with an organization’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) framework, a robust e-commerce site can show customer explicit products, services, and pricing dependent on customer login credentials.
9. Improved sales engagement – Your actual sales team will likewise profit by the dispatch of a complete e-commerce effort. A B2B e-commerce site or portal will improve your sales teams’ visibility into customer orders, pricing and history while out and about or working remotely.
10. Multi-site capability – Launching channel-explicit or co-branded e-commerce sites is simple with the privilege B2B e-commerce platform. This capability permits you to offer co-branded websites or microsites for every one of your distributors or key clients, too, take into consideration sites that oblige a particular international audience by presenting content in substitute languages or currencies.

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