B2B Commerce
What is B2B Commerce?
B2B commerce, also known as B2B e-commerce or business-to-business electronic commerce, encompasses all digital order transactions between companies, regardless of whether those orders are processed online or offline. Many organizations in the B2B segment are still struggling with digitizing their sales organization.
Only 30% of their orders are processed entirely online; the vast majority still go through remote sales or offline via the account manager. Simple orders, in particular, can be easily processed by the customer themselves via a self-service portal. However, for large and complex orders, the knowledge and experience of a sales professional is (still) often required.
Optimize your sales
While online orders often go smoothly – with a few mouse clicks the order ends up in your online shopping basket – the process with offline sales is often less smooth.
Sales teams still work in different systems (Excel, ERPs, CRMs, etc.) and quotations and adjustments are often emailed back and forth to customers several times. Errors – big or small – are constantly possible and the process is certainly not fast and transparent.
Moreover, data from different funnels does not come together, so no overall picture of the customer is available. The information obtained through the sales channel is recorded elsewhere than the information about online sales. This can – and must – be done differently.
With an integrated platform for all your channels, linked to all your relevant systems, you optimize your entire sales process.
Types of B2B e-commerce
There are different types of B2B e-commerce models.
B2B2C
Wholesale
Manufacturing
Distributors
Without intermediary
First of all, there is B2B2C. Business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C) Commerce removes the middleman between the B2B organization and the B2C, bringing businesses directly into contact with consumers.
The wholesaler or manufacturer sends goods to business customers, who then sell the goods to the end user, or by selling directly to the consumer. With B2B2C e-commerce this is done online, for example via a webshop, e-commerce website, app, or directly via social media.
Companies often buy goods in bulk directly from the manufacturer or distributor for a lower price and then sell them at retail value. This is wholesale, a popular type of B2B. This type occurs, for example, in retail, food service, construction and medical sectors.
Traditionally, B2B wholesale transactions took place over the phone, via email, or through spreadsheet order forms. Due to the rise of e-commerce, this is now also happening digitally with the help of a B2B e-commerce platform. The platform enables the wholesaler to list products more easily and creates a seamless buying experience.
With Headless Commerce you offer your customers the front-end experience they deserve. Experts agree: Headless is the future. With this e-commerce architecture, the front-end is decoupled from the back-end, which provides maximum freedom of choice.
The back-end can be linked to almost any CMS or other sales channel, so that B2B can finally offer a B2C experience to customers. Marketers happy, developers happy. The latter are in fact assured of the best-of-breed back-end platform for all B2B functionalities. Headless Commerce therefore offers the best of both worlds.
The advantages of a headless platform in a nutshell:
Ultimate flexibility
Maximum freedom of choice
Increased conversion rate
Differentiated shopping experience
Maximum freedom of choice
The biggest advantage of Headless Commerce? Ultimate flexibility. The Headless architecture provides greater freedom of choice and the ability to quickly test new technologies. This way you can quickly find the combination that creates the best possible user experience for every scenario.
To give an example, choose the best front-end solutions, which offers, for example, lightning-fast site speeds or advanced personalizations.
Increase conversion rate
Headless Commerce helps you increase your conversion in two ways:
Easily create a differentiated and more relevant user experience with your (potential) customers;
Developing strategies based on content and experience to attract organic traffic and repeating customers.
Differentiated shopping experience
A big advantage of Headless is also the possibility to choose different platforms and technologies that you can combine to merge content and your Commerce platform. This creates differentiated shopping experiences. You can use a CMS like Contentful, Storyblok or WordPress along with your Commerce platform to get the best of both worlds. Prefer a different CMS? No problem.
The headless architecture gives you complete freedom to connect any front-end you want. For example, you can choose to sell directly via Google Shopping, Instagram or Facebook, to apply augmented reality or to develop voice-controlled interfaces.
In this blog you can read when to choose which headless CMS.
How do you make your marketing and sales departments work together seamlessly?
Until now, your marketing and sales departments often work with their own favorite systems. As a result, customer data remains in silos and there is no overview. With the help of a platform that integrates all data from online and offline sales, supports your marketing and sales departments, and offers maximum flexibility on both the front and back-end, you ensure more turnover, a personalized offer, cross- and upsale and higher customer satisfaction.
And satisfied customers are loyal customers.
Marketing is happy
A platform in which data is central is great for your marketing: all transactions with your customer are centrally available. Ideal for your cross and upselling opportunities. You know when licenses expire and products need to be replaced. Moreover, each quotation can be supplemented with logical extras.
By using integrated email marketing module you automatically send emails with accessories, additional products or replacement options.
Management is happy
A platform in which data is central is also great for management. They can see at a glance whether more or less is being sold to regular customers and how long it takes on average before a quotation is received by the customer. But also how long it takes for this to be approved.
All information is available. By linking with a BI tool, you can compile any desired dashboard.
Sales is happy
When salespeople are processing orders, or answering questions about the sales, delivery, and invoicing process, they are unable to engage in conversations with customers and prospects. By automating such matters and making them available in a self-service portal to the customer, your sales department can focus more on advising, guiding in a purchase or acquiring.
By directly connecting the off- and online sales, you not only save time and reduce the chance of errors, but you also increase the possibility of revenue growth. In addition, employee satisfaction will increase, because adding value is why sales professionals chose the profession!
With less administrative work, they have more time to better serve customers and achieve their targets.
Conclusion
Now that you’ve embraced e-commerce as a B2B organization, it’s time to streamline your entire sales process. The advantages mentioned are obvious. With the Propeller Commerce platform we deliver the necessary functionalities out-of-the box and it is worth making the business case with us.
We would be happy to work with you to calculate what you will save, how much revenue growth you can achieve and what a connected off- and online sales process can mean for your customer satisfaction.
