My Cart
Filters
key your b2b

Solutions You Can Use to Improve B2B eCommerce Experience Quickly

Aheadworks examines B2B 2020 calls to action and accentuates their Magento solutions to key up your eCommerce capabilities.

Analyzing current trends in B2B eCommerce, the demands and challenges of the sector, it comes vividly that the consumerization of B2B is the reason for them all. Aheadworks acknowledge the phenomenon and stress out they have all the solutions for Magento B2B vendors to get consumerization right.

The present millennia dictates B2B experience to mirror that of B2C, and we happily fall into its charms of convenience and simplicity.

It takes careful examination of which familiar B2C features can be integrated into your eCommerce platform to target the consumerization call. Time and effort spent will pay off with dramatic enhancement of customer experience and, thereby, higher conversions. We have done a great deal of research in the field to come up with a variety of B2C eCommerce functions in particular that perfectly align with the B2B procurement process. Such a comprehensive approach allowed us to elaborate a unique strategy to produce B2B eCommerce solutions, extensions, and services, compatible with both sectors - B2B and B2C. We are now happy to reveal our findings and showcase how to respond to the present-day B2B calls to utterly improve your eCommerce experience with Magento 2. 

1. Consider pricing & payment customization

Views differ on whether prices should be fully visible on the stores supporting the B2B model. Advocates assert that price transparency builds trust and ensures a hassle-free sales process, while opponents spell out the tough competition in the sector and say that making prices available to the public makes way for competitors to underbid them. Let yourself out of the vicious circle of endless debate and have pricing visibility both ways. Get a tool to segment customers into groups to display individualized pricing against customizable conditions. Customer groups allow you to offer discounted pricing to shoppers for entire categories, specific products, or your entire store. Facilitate their choice with a wide range of secure payment options. For logged-out buyers, and we shall always consider them as prospective ones, you can have a contact form to enquire for pricing.  

HOW WE SOLVE IT:

  • Private catalogs extension allows merchants to create private catalogs with custom prices and products visible only to assigned customer groups. 
  • Company Accounts extension allows your partners to build hierarchical accounts with distinctive roles of members. Merchants get able to easier control company accounts and project more accurately on the volume of their purchasing potential.
  • Customer Segmentation extension enables segmenting customers into groups against a variety of configurable rules.

2. Look out for custom ordering tools

It is natural for B2B customers to negotiate special pricing terms with companies, therefore opt for a quoting tool to enable custom ordering. Make sure you can review and respond to a quote within regular business hours to let them know if the unique order can be fulfilled. Think how you can save your partner’s time when they shape a quote and check out in the future at their negotiated price point.

HOW WE SOLVE IT:

  • Cart to Quote extension facilitates converting carts into requests for quotes and then negotiated quotes into carts, no lengthy submission forms involved. The module features an adaptive discount calculator, negotiation chat-box, requote function, and more. 
  • Private catalogs extension creates perfect conditions for price differentiation for different customer groups. Furthermore, prices and Add to Cart button can be replaced with customized text messages, offering to contact the store for example.
  • Customer Attributes extension provides merchants with essential functionality to create new and alter existing customer and customer address attributes. Those may then be used to segment shoppers or make secret notes about their purchasing behavior.

3. Go for rich content only

To our data, about a third of customers report navigation to be the most important factor in the design of a web store. Understandably, they want to easily find what they’re looking for. This need is even more acute in B2B, where product catalogs are bursting with a seemingly endless number of items sorted by precise product specifications. And when they find the desired product, B2B buyers expect high-resolution images and highly detailed descriptions.Successful B2B eCommerce companies display products in ways that help and urge customers to make buying decisions. Optimize product descriptions for the search engines and provide personalized product recommendations for cross-selling and upsell opportunities. 

HOW WE SOLVE IT:

  • Product Labels extension helps guide customers’ attention and prompt response by marking selected products out with visually appealing labels signifying sale campaigns and special offers.
  • Related Products extensions prompt cross- and up-selling with easily configurable rules for related products to appear on various pages of the store.
  • Custom Stock Status extension places attractive custom stock statuses on category and product pages, as well as in a shopping cart.

4. Ensure personalized experience

Launch programs which foster loyalty, command bigger orders, and increase the regularity of purchasing. Look to tools that help your initiatives to continually turn the needle. It is highly likely in the B2B world that companies buy and procure consumable products or the ones which are subject to continuous maintenance and replacement. Subscriptions, membership plans alongside traditional one-off purchases can simplify trading business-to-business. Diversify your reward policy with various partnership programs, discounts, credit payments, bonus points, and other perks to further ease partners’ buying experience. Have it ‘one-click’ instead of routine negotiations.

HOW WE SOLVE IT:

  • Advanced Subscription Products extension adds various subscription options to products, allows for membership plans, and safely manages recurring payments.
  • Store Credit and Refund extension help to keep your instore currency for quick automatic refunds and further rewards for customers' loyalty to your brand.
  • Reward Points extension allows merchants to run a sustainable loyalty program rewarding customers with points beyond their purchasing experience. 

5. Be unique

The modern market is saturated to a sufficient extent with businesses of any type and direction. To stand out from the competitors try to find your highlight, whether it's your story, business purpose, or website functionality. So, don’t be afraid of experimenting with website design, navigation, or permissions. Find your uniqueness and share it with the audience.

HOW WE SOLVE IT:

  • Advanced Layered Navigation extension allows you to create distinctive and comprehensible navigation through the B2B online store. Enable expanding or collapsing of filters, add visually-informative images to the names and values of the attributes, decide on hiding unavailable filter values from view, and drive traffic with SEO improvements. Win buyer hearts with simple and stress-free navigation.
  • Buildify extension is a page-building tool for creating eye-catching designs without messing with the code. Use pre-arranged templates and drag-and-drop widgets to shape any page on your website.
  • B2B extension suite is the best solution to cater to customers' needs with a multifunctional design. Expand customer involvement in your store by enabling them to create corporate accounts, set permissions for specific company roles, negotiate prices, place bulk orders, create requisition lists, and more.

6. Optimize the buying process

The buying process is made up of multiple stages: problem identification, options, and solutions evaluation, requirements building, supplier selection, validation, and consensus creation. Going through these stages can take much time due to the number of decision-makers involved. However, when creating a smooth and problem-free purchasing route, you’ll discover buyers quickly overpassing through the stages, even skipping one or two stages on the way. So, we suggest optimizing every stage of the customer journey to make sure B2B buyers enjoy the purchasing process at your store.

HOW WE SOLVE IT:

  • Smart One Step Checkout extension simplifies the checkout process and increases conversion rates by eliminating the required additional steps of Magento's default checkout process. 
  • Quick Order by SKU extension helps your B2B buyers to make purchases in bulk, using only product SKUs. 
  • Easy Reorder extension streamlines reorder process by collecting previously-purchased products in a single grid with current prices and convenient Add to Cart buttons.

7. Integrate with 3rd parties

Finally, and most importantly, go omnichannel. Platform integration may well be the top need of B2B eCommerce, the real 2022 challenger. Increase business efficiency by integrating your ecommerce platform with existing critical systems like your ERP, CRM, and PIM. Synchronizing information manually (inventory, customers, orders, and pricing) may hold you back even if all the above suggestions have been implemented. An ecommerce platform could be a perfect hub where communication channels and their supporting resources are designed and orchestrated to cooperate. Your best bet is to choose an ecommerce platform that is perfectly suited to your business and easily integrates with existing systems to improve efficiency and profits. Magento 2, by far and large, stands out of the competition here. Primarily, because there is no need to buy a new ERP, redesign the current one, or change the whole R&D strategy to integrate with Magento. It just takes developing an extension, like the one we have described above. A fuss-free approach, always in parallel to the regular work of your company, it saves each day of your business operation.   

HOW WE SOLVE IT:

  • Custom Development - from analytics and consultation, technical support and performance optimization to full-fledged 3rd-party integration. 
  • B2B Implementation - customizing online stores to most peculiar e-biz needs and requirements.
  • Magento migration and replatforming - transferring your data seamlessly from Magento 1 or any other platform stopping your business not for a single day.
  • Magento maintenance - ensuring your store is always up to date, secure and fully optimized, whatever new versions or security patches are introduced.

Want all these features in one platform?

Aheadworks Commerce Cloud is an all-inclusive eCommerce platform for creating and running a successful B2B online store. The platform is designed to empower businesses to move forward quickly, without wasting time on development, searching for hosting providers or hiring agencies. It offers all necessary functionalities for B2B business management, including company accounts setting, price and quote configuration, credit, shipping and payment option implementation, etc. 

Discover the freedom of customization with our fully-managed, all-encompassing solution! Start a 14-day FREE trial to make sure that Aheadworks Commerce Cloud is the best platform for running B2B eCommerce stores.

Instead of conclusion

Though, at first, the primal differences between the B2C and B2B concepts might make the adaptation of consumer eCommerce features to your Magento platform feel implausible. After all, B2B procurers are consumers themselves, their needs, preferences, and purchasing habits personal and specific.

Gearing towards the second decade of the millennia, we appreciate online shopping more and more. Both customers and vendors, we demand simple, attractive and personalized, and often all-in-one shopping experiences.

Such duality given, one needs a trusty partner, a renowned developer and service provider, ready to suggest flexible, scalable eCommerce solutions and incorporate targeted B2C features and functions into your B2B eCommerce reality. Aheadworks can help your company build robust B2B eCommerce procurement solutions which put you—and your customers—in control of creating a truly exceptional buying experience. Grow and succeed online with our tips, extensions, and services