3 Fundamental E-Commerce Features that B2B Companies Must Adopt
E-commerce is ubiquitous in today’s age. With the phones in our pockets and the computers on our desks at work and home, all the products and goods one could want are always just a click away. Online shopping is an ordinary part of life for many people around the world. 76% of U.S. consumers shop online.1 And online retail sales are projected to pass $6.5 billion worldwide in 2023.2 Suffice to say, shopping of all sorts is increasingly happening online.
B2B Buyers Are Also B2C Shoppers
But this is all data about consumer sales. What does any of this have to do with business to business sales? The fact is, B2B and B2C are inexorably linked. The people shopping online for their clothes, books, and electronics are the same people who are making purchases on behalf of their business. The trends and changing realities of how people shop for consumer goods inevitably effect B2B companies. Everyone is now used to a certain level of convenience when it comes to getting the products they need. This expectation has been and will continue to expand into the purchases people make while working.
Lucrative Online Portals
The statistics play this out. B2B e-commerce sales on websites, login-portals and marketplaces is expected to grow past $1.2 trillion by 2021.3 For print service providers, web to print software has become more of a must-have than ever before. 43.24% of printers surveyed by the Printing Industries of America say they offer a web to print e-commerce storefront and most have noticed a significant increase in demand for such services in recent years.4
Not All Portals Are the Same
Having an online portal that allows print buyers to make orders 24/7 is a major draw for companies in a swath of industries, from finance, to health care, to franchise, and more. But as web to print continues to become more widespread and adopted by print service providers, there will continue to be a need to differentiate. In other words, as print buyers become accustomed to online portals for ordering, having a portal at all won’t be enough to stand out.
Becoming a competitive producer that can form long lasting partnerships with enterprise brands and businesses requires more than the baselevel of what a portal can be. It requires a high level of customer satisfaction, reduction of friction, and easy, intuitive user experience. That’s where lessons can be learned from B2C e-commerce. So, what are the commonplace trends and traits found in consumer-based online shopping sites that translate well into B2B online ordering?
Be Mobile Friendly
Is it really that important to care about the experience of a mobile website user as a B2B producer? Probably more than you think. Smartphones and other mobile devices are not siloed from the work environment. An increasingly large portion of the population integrates their phone into their working life to some degree. And that means B2B companies need to consider that when choosing or creating their ordering platform.
Even if purchases are ultimately made on a desktop, a seamless mobile experience is essential. Around 42% of B2B customers use their mobile devices as part of the purchasing process, according to a report by Google. Mobile optimization should be considered a component of a comprehensive effort to meet the varied needs of all types of customers and orders. A flexible platform is a powerful platform.
Self-Service Is the New Standard
One thing that the internet is spectacular at doing is providing people with tools to get tasks done on their own that would have required help from others in the past. Think of things like booking appointments, planning flights, and learning basic skills. This reality has resulted in people expecting information and services to be available with little to no communication needed.
This extends into shopping and ordering online. E-commerce sites give users the ability to do more than just order things. Updating account settings and profile information, checking on the status of orders, learning more about the products that are available; all of this and more is possible on the best B2C shopping sites. Users except to be able to do and access as many functionalities as they could want.
B2B sellers can learn from this. Give your users as much information and capability as possible on your platform. For print jobs, this can look like visibility into inventory levels, shipment options, and lead times.
On a site-level, make sure navigation is simple and clear. Give users immediate feedback when they place orders with confirmation emails. Whenever possible, lean on the side of self-service functionality. Search is a huge part of this. Make it as easy to find the products on your store as possible. A strong search function can do wonders for increasing user satisfaction. And greater user satisfaction leads to more orders.
Personalize the Experience
There are many features that fall under the umbrella of personalization, but all of them make the experience of shopping better and can facilitate increased order volume.
Let’s start with recommended items as an example. It’s a standard feature on some of the top B2C e-commerce sites these days to show users products they think they might like given what they’re looking at or what’s in their shopping cart. This isn’t a make-or-break feature, but small things like this can go a long way.
The real key to personalization is having a system that can use what it knows about each user to make the browsing and ordering experience smoother. For example, let users see their order history and make reorders with a few clicks. This is the kind of thing that B2B customers are perfect for, precisely because these types of buyers are used to logging into systems and keeping information up to date. Leveraging that information to make their buying experience better should be considered an easy way to improve your service.
Another way to personalize your storefront that is unique to the B2B world is customizing what users see based on what type of user they are. If your platform allows for it, user segmentation can be a powerful way to optimize the user experience of your site.
B2B Is the New B2C
The main takeaway from this discussion is that there are many aspects of B2C website optimization that carry over to B2B online sales. As shopping and just about every other part of life becomes more integrated with the internet, people become used to an ever-higher standard for user experience. This is a lesson worth taking seriously if you are a B2B company who currently sells products and services online or is thinking about doing so.
