There are 7 key considerations you should take into account when determining what your B2B eCommerce platform needs to enable your customers to purchase from you simply and seamlessly.
- The B2B Customer Journey
The first and most important thing to consider is the B2B customer journey and how it has changed over the years.
As mentioned above, digital commerce has become even more important for B2B eCommerce than ever before. Along with that has come a preference for self-service models that allow B2B buyers to navigate the sales cycle on their own. A portion of this preference can be attributed to the fracturing of B2B buying journeys. While these customer journeys have often involved multiple stakeholders, as B2B sales moved online, they increasingly became non-linear. And when allowed to navigate these non-linear, self-serve purchase paths on their own, buyers are 147% more likely to buy more than initially planned.
These buyers are also willing to make large purchases online. And according to McKinsey, while 70% of those same buyers are willing to spend in excess of $50,000, 15% are willing to spend in excess of $1 million, making self-serve eCommerce options a highly lucrative option for B2B wholesalers and distributors.
As such, your B2B ecommerce platform needs to be able to meet your customers where they're at. It must provide B2B buyers with the ability to easily find the products they seek, and then purchase them online. While also providing the right product information for the customer to accurately assess if the product will fit their needs.
- Evolving Customer Expectations
Everyone is a consumer and they approach any B2B purchase the same as they would a B2C one. They know that they have a much more complex transaction when it comes to purchasing, but they want the experience to match, or at least come close to, their favorite B2C sites.
As such, expectations are rising when it comes to B2B eCommerce. Gen Z and Millennials combined make up 64% of B2B buyers, and these digital-savvy buyers have higher expectations than previous generations. They view This omnichannel experiences, multiple fulfillment methods, inventory visibility features, and personalization which are all standard parts of the B2C customer experience. They are the baseline against which all eCommerce experiences -- B2B or B2C are measured. And your B2B eCommerce platform should facilitate all of these.
Remember: user experience is as important as your product or service. This is just as true in B2B business as it is in B2C. And it's more important than ever for customer loyalty.
- Integrations
Monolithic tech stacks are a thing of the past. More and more retailers, B2B and B2C alike, are adopting a composable commerce approach and implementing MACH architectures. This is because not every B2B platform will be able to do everything excellently. And in a world where B2B eCommerce websites are measured against their B2C counterparts, it's vital that they be able to keep up.
This is why integrations are important. They allow you to choose the solutions that work best for your B2B business, yes. But any new eCommerce software solution you want to add to your tech stack needs to be able to integrate with your existing infrastructure. Otherwise the costs of a new solution may outweigh it's benefits.
With a composable commerce approach, you can select best-in-class B2B solutions that fit your needs and business objectives. Their API-first nature allows you to seamlessly and easily integrate the different pieces into one powerful eCommerce business solution. And since you're able to pick and choose the pieces you need, most composable commerce tech stacks do not incur any additional costs. In fact, they end up being more cost-effective than other eCommerce software solutions.
- Flexibility and Scalability
Online businesses need online solutions -- especially when they're looking to scale or generate more sales or revenue. This is one of the reasons why composable commerce has become so popular.
Composable commerce is inherently more flexible and scalable than other approaches to build an eCommerce platform. These architectures tend to be cloud-native, and are best suited for B2B businesses -- including eCommerce businesses. As such, they are far more scalable than the on-site solutions of the past.
Their modular nature also makes the a key fit for eCommerce sites. Depending on your retail niche, you may require essential features that only certain platforms provide. Or you may need to replace a feature of a monolithic platform as it is a key feature for your target audience. With a modular approach, this is easy to do.
- B2B Specific Features & Use Cases
The biggest problems B2B eCommerce retailers face is the fact that B2B buyers have unique pain points and use cases. With needs ranging from dynamic pricing to multiple product catalogs to customer-specific pricing to fitment and other complex search use cases, B2B eCommerce gets tricky.
B2B buyers, of course, only want to see relevant information when they log in to your eCommerce website. As such, the ability to handle unique B2B business use cases is paramount for your platform. Customer specific-pricing is a great example. If a customer cannot log in and see their specific price lists -- as set by a supply agreement their company has negotiated -- this will create friction in the sales process and likely lose you a customer. Or at least, end up in a call to customer service. B2B buyers want to get things done as quickly as possible. And your B2B platform should help them do that.
Key features to look for here would be the ability to handle dynamic pricing, multiple product catalogs, fitment applications, and more. What features do you need to provide your online business buyers with a stellar experience? Your platform for B2B eCommerce should provide all of those.
- Legacy Technology vs. Next-Generation
In terms of technology, while change can be hard, B2B is in an excellent spot: you can leapfrog ahead and reap the benefits of B2C's innovations today.
It's commonly known that B2B eCommerce typically lags up to 5 years behind B2C in technology. In the last five years several key breakthroughs have been made -- including AI-first eCommerce search and product discovery -- which deliver the exceptional experience B2B buyers are looking for. B2B businesses are in the unique place of being able to take advantage of this new technology as it's previously been implemented and tested on other eCommerce sites.
This means you can skip the growing pains that were the middle stages of legacy search solutions and transition directly into an AI-first platform that can handle all of your B2B eCommerce website's needs.
- The Challenge of Good Data
Good data is at the heart of every online business. Without data, attribution fails, customer retention suffers, customer service has more work to do, wholesale customers can't find what they want -- the additional costs of bad data just keep adding up.
That's because B2B businesses, like all other businesses, need quality data. Without good data, providing a good search experience is nearly impossible. Search is inherently a retrieval function, working to help the B2B eCommerce customer find what they're looking for. If the data does not exist, the search engine can't product google results. As such, the more in-depth and accurate your product data is, the faster the search and the more likely the user will make the purchase.
However, data is a challenge -- especially for online businesses who are often using multiple providers or B2B eCommerce software solutions to power their eCommerce sites. Wholesalers and distributors often struggle with data as the data provided by the manufacturer is not always complete or as fleshed out as they would like. A manufacturer may only provide data in imperial measurements for operational efficiency, or may not have processes set up to complete their B2B eCommerce product data, leaving wholesalers and distributors to pick up the slack.
As such, when picking a platform for B2B eCommerce, you should select a platform that lets you augment, normalize and curate your product data and product attributes. Services like a data pipeline can help with operational efficiency, when it comes to cleaning up your data, but you should have some way to mange your data and as it's the number one cause of poor search experiences.
The best B2B eCommerce software solution is no substitute for quality data, and like anything in life, you only get out what you put in. Get your product data right at the front-end and your conversion rates (and customer retention) will increase. If your customers can't find what they're looking for on your site quickly, they will go elsewhere with no guilty conscience.
