B2B eCommerce Guide: 4 Strategies To Scale Your Business
We truly live in the golden age of online shopping. With B2B commerce site sales predicted to reach nearly $1.77 trillion in 2022, there’s no time better than the present to open an online store for your B2B business. However, while there are a lot of customers for this business model, the competition is also fierce. More and more people are getting into the B2B eCommerce platform and if you want to succeed and grow your business, you need to make some smart moves when choosing B2B ecommerce solutions.
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Here are some of the things you can do to ensure your business grows and reaches the top of the industry.
Work on conversion rates of B2B eCommerce
One of the biggest mistakes you can make is thinking that if you increase the number of people who visit your website, you will also increase your volume of sales. This is far from the truth. Conversion rates are very low across industries and the average eCommerce conversion rate in 2021 was just 2.9%.
But you shouldn’t let that discourage you as there are multiple methods you can use to increase your conversion rates.
- Create customer personas. Even though you’re working with businesses, the purchasing decisions are still made by people. But all people are different and they shop in different ways. You can create customer personas by using demographics and fine-tuning your marketing efforts to fit those personas better.
- Optimize for mobile. A lot of online shopping nowadays is done via mobile devices thanks to advanced smartphones. A poorly constructed or non-existent mobile website can hurt your business, so make sure you fully optimize it for mobile.
- Ensure your CTAs are consistent on B2B eCommerce. The color, copy, and placement of all of your CTAs should be consistent and appealing to your customer personas.
- Enable pre-ordering for items that are out of stock. It can be very frustrating for customers when they want to purchase an item which is out of stock. But if you allow them to pre-order this item and notify them as soon as it’s back in stock, their frustration will subside.
However, conversion optimization can be hard and demands a lot of work and attention. If you’re not willing to spend hours on end improving your conversion rates, you should find exceptional conversion rate optimization services and let them do the work for you.
Consider switching to Amazon FBA
For most people, when someone says eCommerce, they think of Amazon, and that’s not surprising. Amazon is the biggest B2B eCommerce platform in the world, attracting millions of people every day. If you want to grow your eCommerce business, you should use this to your advantage.
Amazon offers a service called Fulfillment by Amazon, or Amazon FBA or short. FBA allows third-party sellers to sell their products via Amazon which will handle all of the fulfillment and shipping services for B2B eCommerce. If you switch to FBA, you can also use Amazon’s warehouse to store your items.
Of course, you need to pay a fee to use FBA. But in most cases, it’s worth it because for that fee you get a lot of benefits.
Some of those benefits include:
- Simple shipping and logistics where Amazon does the work for you
- Amazing customer service management
- Smaller shipping rates than you would have to pay when working with a third-party shipping service
- Quick and prompt delivery which Amazon is known for
- Much more storage space than you would have in your home or a storage facility you would pay for separately
- Trust from your customers because you’re selling through an authorized and trustworthy eCommerce platform
And as an added bonus, if you decide to turn your business into an Amazon FBA business, you will be able to crush your competitors and grow your business through smart advertising.
Give eProcurement a thought
What kind of procurement system do you use? If you’re still sticking to a piece of paper that will ultimately end up in an old folder or a spreadsheet system that can easily be lost in sub-folders, you’re living in the old days. Since you’re in eCommerce, you should have a modern procurement system.
This is where eProcurement comes into play among B2B ecommerce solutions. Also known as electronic procurement, it’s the process of using a networked system such as a web interface to perform all of your procurement activities.
Some of the benefits of using an eProcurement system include:
- Centralized access to all of your data, which gives you complete visibility and allows you to locate areas where your process could be improved
- More control over every aspect of the procurement process and simple management of who can see what details of the process and when
- Eliminating human error thanks to automation in B2B eCommerce
- Easy and simple budgeting that will provide you with full visibility of your spending and allow you to make changes where necessary
- Simple vendor management that allows you to keep all of your vendor information in one place
Top-of-the-line eProcurement systems can make your job much easier for you thanks to end-to-end B2B automation that makes online selling easier and less of a hassle foe B2B ecommerce solutions. The right system will allow you to respond to your customers’ eProcurement initiatives faster and more accurately than ever.
Put an emphasis on customer experience
The point of a good B2B ecommerce platform is to help the customer find what they’re looking for with as little effort as possible. For your B2B eCommerce platform to be successful and have the potential to grow and scale, you need to focus on customer experience and ease of use.
In the world of B2B selling, if your customers are satisfied with what you offer, you can create long-lasting relationships. To succeed, you need to learn how to build a stellar customer experience strategy. Show you’re willing to get them the help they need, build a reputation of someone they can talk to easily, and success is guaranteed.
Final thoughts
The world of B2B eCommerce solutions are growing rapidly. Sometimes, it can be hard to find success and long-term growth when you’re dealing with so much competition. But if you’re willing to put in the effort and apply the strategies you read about here, you have nothing to worry about.
Adhar Dhaval is experienced portfolio, program and project leader with demonstrated leadership in all phases of sales and service delivery of diverse technology solutions. He is a speaker sharing advice and industry perspective on emerging best practices in project leadership, program management, leadership and strategy. He is working for the Chair Leadership Co.
