6 Best features and secrets of B2B eCommerce Website Implementation

   

          B2B eCommerce is simply a business to business commercial transactions that are conducted online. B2B customers come to your website because it is their job they do every day. They want their job to do easy. If B2B companies give their customers the tools that make their job easier, their customer will come back to the site again and again. Looking at your customers and how they do their job will help you implement the features on your website. The features and functions in B2B eCommerce like search, navigation, cross-sell, user administration and custom contracts will help them to do their job easiest. If you evaluate the questions of making your customer jobs more efficient will let the customers click to buy a product and have the order sent to their financial management system.

         B2B companies pride themselves on building personal relationships with the customer. The leadership teams recognize the opportunity to boost sales and cement customer relationships by better online and mobile experiences. An important step is to recognize the right eCommerce development platform. The most effective implementation follows six key principles,

  1. Company's Strategy: Every software implementation begins with a clear ambition of how it can enhance the company's strategy. An effective eCommerce implementation centers on assessment that how the system can improve or extend company's core business. It should support your delivery on that mission, not distract from it.
2. Make Long-term Plan with Clear Short-term Objective:  A long-term plan is essential for developing the right eCommerce solutions. Defining short-term objective that is both affordable and manageable allows the company to go live, demonstrate the success and payback early.
3. Interact with Customers: B2B transactions tend to be dominated by the process. If you are updating the old system, analyze user data and survey customer to find out what they like and don't like. If you are building from scratch, show the blueprint and wireframes to your customers. It not only improve the functionality but also speeds up implementations. Understanding what matters most to customers help companies identify and focus on right priorities.
4. Iterate Based on the Feedback: One of the benefits of implementing the eCommerce platform in manageable stages is that it allows the company to gather insights on the fly and use them to make better decisions. Understanding customer needs helps you to plan for better experience. Creating tight feedback loops and analyze sales data helps companies understand what's working or not, so features can be tweaked, built-up or abandoned.
5. Align your team and Deploy Fast: If the organization isn't aligned with the business case or strategy, the project can still in midstream. Smooth implementation is determining who has taken the right decision in  IT, marketing, finance etc and including them from the very beginning of the project. Cloud-based system allows you deploy a set of essential features now and add more as quickly as warranted.

6. Develop a Culture of Commerce: The sales culture for a typical B2B company focused on making calls filling quotas - not devising easier ways to interact with the company's brand. As more and more B2B buyers gravitate toward online and mobile solutions, the winning vendors will be those who can best meet the customers on their own terms.

B2B Companies demand more than a Shopping Cart: Digital businesses always looked to commerce suite vendors to support basic capabilities like running an online catalog, shopping cart, and promotions. Customers expecting deeper research experiences and richer purchase journeys. Vendors must deliver new capabilities both back-end around fulfilment and integration on the front-end around seamless and innovative customer experiences. Firms across these verticals are investing in sophisticated B2B commerce technology that supports the followings,

 * Full spectrum of Selling: B2B customers now migrate freely between self-service and full-service, online and offline buying. B2B sellers must deliver the solutions that meet the needs of the business customers who often preferred to buy without the help from sales reps.
* Personalized digital Commerce Experiences: Shoppers want a personalized experience. Personalization adds value and builds the relationship. It is an important to feature to implement. Personalization can be on the website or mobile app. It is also instrumental for B2B companies that use target promotions and fulfilment guarantees to drive sales volume and enhance the B2B shopping experience. Customer suites can provide B2B buyers with personalized buying experience by controlling the front-end experience or managing the customer data that fuels personalization.

     There are many ways to personalize B2B eCommerce website,

  a. Product Recommendations: Suggest the product to shoppers based on the products they indicated the interest in. This could be based on the product page they are reading or products they have added to the cart. For B2B, it is a powerful way to sell products that customers may not aware of,
 b. Tailored Content: B2B sales are often complex. To lessen this complexity by prioritizing the content buyers that are shown based on the role they serve internally, the type of equipment they have, the industry they are in. The resource pages in the sidebar such as how to articles, product specifications, maintenance tips, videos help the prospective customer may find interest in your product.
 c. Emails: Send personalized emails based on their interest and actions on your website. Mention the special offer based on the product page they have viewed. Share the whitepaper that written for the industry or the role.
*Data-driven merchant Tools: As customer expectations arise, firms are investing in merchant tools to make decisions about what experience to deliver to customers. Greater investment in analytics, and data-driven decision-making tools that further the support to merchant control over the experiences.
* Agility and faster time-to-market: Cloud-based and service-oriented architectures that implement commerce solutions in a more modern and modular fashion are now must-haves in the modern suite. Firms typically look to either platform-as-a-service(PaaS) deployments where the vendor manages the solution in a multitenant environment or Software-as-a-service(SaaS).

      Offering Compelling eCommerce experience to B2B buyers requires a process of continuous improvement. Even companies have invested heavily in getting commerce right, Still there is a value in learning from smaller, innovative companies. Here are the best features that could be implemented on your B2B website,

      * Curbell Plastics, a fabrication company helps narrow their choices by showing the shape of the product they are looking for. Using shapes in the reductive navigation is an interesting way to assist the user to find what they are looking for.
 

    *Warehouse-Lighting.com offers preferred contractor program, which helps the sales rep and dedicated rep to contractor sign up for the special discount pricing. The top navigation describes the company's products - "industrial and commercial lighting at wholesale prices" provides quick access to the live chat.

          



*Smalley, industrial manufacturer created the website that doesn't lead to the paid checkout, but to request a quote. The resources on the website such as videos, and how to guides help buyers select the correct products. Buyers can also search for different types of rings and springs before they request a quote.
     

   

  * The exit popup in a website solicit visitors email address. If done well, popups are highly effective, converting a visitor into a marketing contact. With the right message and persistent top banner are strong promoting tool - especially if it's tailored to a search ad or marketing campaign. The filtration products use a popup to help users to find the correct products which are extensive. Include the blog on company's website, it provides helpful content and the company can build a community with detail comments.
               B2B eCommerce Business case helps you to communicate and sell the value of your B2B eCommerce project internally. For the best in class companies, the business case is the central tool throughout the lifecycle of the project. By asking the strategic question, you can uncover the real challenges your organization is facing.

      Checklist for B2B eCommerce Best Practices:
    * Conduct regular product search and SEO audit on your website

    * Map your priority customer persona and track to landing page and product page most likely they want to visit. Create email newsletter groupings correspond to each of your customer persona profiles
   * Set up your email marketing data analytics so that you can review how many subscribers open and click through on your emails?
   * Make sure links for more information throughout your emails to engage with your readers
   * Include the testimonials on your website that shares customer experiences
   * Are you able to offer integrations so that business customer can order directly from the system?
   * Set up the systems to prompt so that business buyers ensure authorize policies that are automatically factored when ordering online.