8 B2B Ecommerce Solutions & Strategies
If you are searching for B2B ecommerce solutions and strategies to help you boost your digital performance and increase online sales, look no further. In this article, we examine eight essential and actionable B2B ecommerce strategies that will help your business take the next step in its digital transformation. Throughout the article, we also explore how you can use Ibexa DXP, our modular B2B Digital Experience Platform, to implement these strategies.
What is B2B e-commerce?
Put simply, B2B ecommerce is the process of businesses marketing, buying, and selling products to and from other businesses via digital channels. While the B2B sector may have been slower to adopt ecommerce models and initiate digital transformation strategies, it is catching up quickly.
In fact, a recent Gartner survey revealed that “83% of B2B buyers prefer ordering or paying through digital commerce.”[1] This is complemented by research from McKinsey that shows 65% of B2B organizations across industry sectors now offer e-commerce capabilities.
[1] Gartner Sales Survey Finds 83% of B2B Buyers Prefer Ordering or Paying Through Digital Commerce, Gartner Newsroom, June 2022
What are the main differences between B2B and B2C ecommerce?
Though it may seem like B2B and B2C ecommerce solutions fulfill a similar function, they do so in drastically divergent ways. This is due to significant differences between the B2B and B2C sectors. These differences include:
The Buyer - In B2C, buyers are usually individuals. In contrast, B2B buyers are groups, teams, or entire departments that make purchasing decisions collaboratively.
The Buyer Journey - In B2B, the buyer journey is much longer and far more complex. This is partly because there are more people involved in decision-making. But it also comes down to the amount of information B2B buyers need to make a purchase. When you consider that the typical buying group for a complex B2B solution involves six to 10 decision makers‚ each armed with four or five pieces of information, it becomes clear just how complicated B2B buying can be. B2B is also a continuous, repetetive cycle. Whereas B2C purchases are typically often one-off moments.
The Purchase Rationale - Traditionally, B2C buyers are perceived to be motivated by emotion and impulse, while B2B buyers are driven by logic and data. However, in recent years, there is greater recognition that emotion and impulse play small yet significant roles in B2B purchasing.
The Product and Process - Whereas B2C buyers focus primarily on product, B2B buyers are just as interested in the process of working with a supplier. They want to know that product support, ordering, and communication will all be seamless. Every B2B process has a cost. And buyers are aware that buying experiences that do not meet their needs can negate any benefits associated with an excellent product.
The Product Complexity - B2B products tend to be far more complex than in B2C. Typically, there are multiple variations due to diverse sizing specifications, dimensions, colors, and a range of other technical data and attributes. As a result, any high-quality e-commerce solution must account for product complexity.
The Pricing - B2B pricing is usually tailored to individual customers based on several factors, including the order size, the buyer-seller relationship, and the region. This contrasts with B2C, where the price are generally not adjusted according to a buyer group and typically only varies when there are promotions. B2B suppliers also work with much higher order values.
Key B2B ecommerce solutions and strategies
To boost online sales, you must implement effective B2B ecommerce strategies. Below, we examine nine essential strategies that will help you improve ecommerce performance.
1. Customize your product portfolio to individual customers
Not all your customers will be interested in every product you offer. Most will have unique needs and focus on a relatively small part of your product portfolio. To maximize ecommerce success, you must adjust and customize your portfolio to ensure you present customers with relevant products.
Ibexa DXP facilitates this by enabling you to create varied product catalogs you can utilize in different circumstances. You can target catalogs at specific customer groups, use them at certain times of the year or build them to appeal to regional markets. This feature ensures you advertise your products in the most effective way possible.
As you do so, be sure to design catalogs based on the data available to you. Analyze which products interest particular types of customers and whether certain products are regularly bought together. Modern analytics enable you to eliminate guesswork and make evidence-based decisions, so utilize that information to your advantage.
2. Break down customer data silos
Similarly, B2B organizations need a complete picture of the customer to ensure they are making considered, data-driven choices. The more holistic a view of customer behavior you have, the better you understand the customer and the more effectively you can refine your ecommerce operations.
A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is one of the best tools for eliminating data silos and ensuring you have a 360° view of the customer. In modern B2B organizations, customer data comes from diverse sources. McKinsey research shows that “B2B customers now regularly use ten or more channels to interact with suppliers (up from just five in 2016).” As a result, you must incorporate behavioral data from a wide array of channels if you are to truly understand the customer’s needs.
CDPs centralize customer data in a single repository, breaking down data silos and bringing all your information together. It is essential in an omnichannel system and improves your ecommerce operations by ensuring you can personalize offerings, campaigns, and content. This is invaluable in a market where personalization is increasingly important to the customer experience.
3. Recommend the right products
Upselling is a crucial aspect of B2B ecommerce. In the digital space, it is best achieved via intelligent product recommendations. Product recommendations make the most of customer data (collected and informed by your CDP) and algorithms to show customers relevant products they are more likely to need.
In Ibexa DXP, suppliers have two options. You can recommend products based on a Machine Learning-driven algorithm and your customer profiles. Or you can manually set the recommended products list for particular customer groups. This gives you complete control over what additional products your customers see as they progress through the buyer journey.
As a B2B company with a lot of product variety, it pays to ensure your products are well organized and specific products are visible to certain customers. In most cases, this occurs via customized product catalogs and data-driven product recommendations. Both are powerful ways of increasing online sales.
4. Create corporate portals
One of the key differentiating factors between B2B and B2C is the former’s focus on the buyer-seller relationship and business processes. To maximize online sales, you must implement features that streamline buyer-seller interactions and empower organizations to collaborate and communicate more effectively.
Corporate portals are an excellent example. They facilitate closer collaboration between team members by providing a space where all team members can work together on the purchase process. For instance, multi-level approval in the buying process presents many challenges. Getting the approvals required is often a slow and cumbersome process.
However, corporate portals can streamline and regulate this process by alerting individuals when they need to approve a purchase or resolve an action. They also benefit from access restrictions, ensuring only employees with authority to place an order can do so. Organizations can set order limits and budget restrictions too.
These portals are the foundations of one of the most exciting and promising trends in B2B ecommerce, the Digital Sales Room. The Digital Sales Room aims to provide B2B suppliers and buyers with an online environment that facilitates the entire sales process. From requesting product information and talking to sales reps to negotiating prices, placing orders, and signing contracts, everything can be conducted via a single dedicated digital portal.
5. Take advantage of custom pricing to deliver value
Custom pricing permits you to set prices for different customer groups depending on customer loyalty, order value, region, and any other defining segment feature. As noted in the B2B vs B2C ecommerce section, B2B pricing is often remarkably complex and tailored to individual customers.
Factors such as purchasing volume and pre-negotiated discounts, purchasing frequency, so B2B suppliers require an ecommerce solution that offers complete control and easy adjustments. Ibexa DXP features extensive price control and customization functionality, so your e-commerce store can provide all the flexibility you need.
6. Customize your content for unique customer experiences
In the B2B environment, it does not make sense to show different customers the same content. Personalized experiences ensure customers engage with your digital resources in ways that maintain interest, foster engagement, and deliver value.
As the buyer journey is long and complex, you will need to target customers multiple times with stage-specific content. Buyers who are still conducting research need to see different information than those close to purchasing. Though this type of content may not seem as though it is intrinsic to ecommerce operations, it plays a crucial role.
The fact that content and commerce are tied together is demonstrated by the way sales and marketing teams are combining and their responsibilities overlapping. Likewise, the rise of the Digital Sales Room shows that marketing and sales functions are taking place in the same space.
In Ibexa DXP, the Page Builder feature ensures you can customize content to specific audiences and guarantee content relevance. Via targeted content blocks, you create pages that adapt to different customer groups and display varied content depending on the audience's preferences, needs, and behaviors.
7. Adopt technology that permits easy integration
In the omnichannel business environment, facilitating integrations is vital. B2B business systems are complex, and data comes from various sources. Your CDP helps extract customer data from different solutions. But what about the other information?
In many instances, B2B organizations build native integrations to connect their ERP, CRM, or PIM solutions. For a streamlined customer journey, e-commerce must also be integrated into company processes. These include customer relationship management, customer service management, after-sales service, invoicing, inventory management and deliveries.
However, this is time-consuming and complicated and can lead to additional work in the future. Ideally, you need a solution that reduces the need for native integrations.
In Ibexa DXP, Ibexa Connect acts as our iPaaS solution. It facilitates quick and easy integration without extensive development or coding expertise. In doing so, it simplifies connections, enables you to map integrations, and streamlines workflows.
8. Guarantee your customers’ security
In the B2B sector, trust is everything. Historically, buyer-supplier relationships were defined by a close relationship between sales agents and customers. While the digitalization of the sector has changed the nature of these relationships (there is far less person-to-person communication), trust is still a key issue.
For instance, your customers need to know your ecommerce solutions are secure. A single data breach can be hugely detrimental, tarnishing your reputation and causing a significant drop in online sales. In a fiercely competitive business environment, this is a serious problem.
As a result, you must implement ecommerce solutions that emphasize digital security, keep your customers and their data safe, and provide reassurance. Ibexa DXP was designed with security at its heart. Combining security measures established by existing tools, such as Symfony and the LAMP stack, with our engineering team’s rigorous peer review process, we guarantee a secure ecommerce environment for all users.
Ibexa DXP - the leading ecommerce solution
Ibexa DXP is a unique Digital Experience Platform dedicated to the needs of B2B organizations. Capable of transforming traditional sales processes into seamless digital experiences, it enables you to bring together every aspect of your B2B ecommerce strategy and control marketing and sales operations via a single, intuitive platform.
A comprehensive B2B ecommerce solution, its modular design ensures you can scale the platform as your business grows, empowering you to add additional features and functionality when you require them.
Learn more
For more information on how Ibexa DXP can help your business, take a look at the Ibexa DXP product page, check out our success stories, or get in touch with our experienced and approachable team.
Learn more
For more information on how Ibexa DXP can help your business, take a look at the Ibexa DXP product page, check out our success stories, or get in touch with our experienced and approachable team.
