According to McKinsey & Company research, 65% of B2B companies preferred to sell online in 2022. With the endless opportunities that the B2B eCommerce portal offers manufacturers, some are still stuck with old-school manufacturing methods. This may be what they feel comfortable with, but with the constantly changing trends, manufacturers ought to look for the collective aspects of their business growth to stay aligned with the buyers’ requirements.
Many manufacturers have come ahead to adopt a portal for B2B eCommerce, and that is undoubtedly a piece of good news. But going for the correct approach is critical as it can make or break your entire plan. This blog will present a guide for developing a portal for B2B eCommerce for manufacturers.
So, let’s start by citing a clarified introduction!
What is a Self B2B Portal?
B2B eCommerce is a self-service portal. Yes! You can understand it better when comparing it with supermarkets, including Woolworths, Coles, etc. A B2B buyer comes to your store, accesses products, and makes purchases.
Due to no manual interferences, there are fewer chances of glitches and errors – An advantage!
A B2B buyer is far more comfortable with a self-service portal in today’s era for buying multiple items, including products, services, and other informative and valuable consumables. Along with selling products, it syncs your orders, data, customer information, and wholesale information as well – All consolidated into one place! A well-fitting platform for modern businesses, nurturing productive relationships with customers.
Another undeniable advantage is it offers customer-oriented benefits.
The Odds-On Challenges
While multiple trends are advancing the future of the eCommerce industry, It’s still a big decision to step into the digital world and explore more with your brand. Similar to every accomplishment, this task too, has a few challenges; let’s check them out!
1. The Right Tech
The list of available agencies offering ecommerce web development services is long, and confusion is apparent.
As a priority, you must look for the most suitable one.
Research! Research! Research!
It helps a lot more than you think, and you should never underestimate the value of expert help.
The platform should be:
- Scalable
- Secure
- Flexible
- Affordable
- Well-suited for your brand
- Smart enough to address multiple requirements at an enterprise level, including
- a. Customer-relationship management
- b. Vendor management
- c. Payment processing management
- d. Order volume management
2. One Portal for All Brands
Do you consider getting all your brands in one place as a manufacturer? Guess what? It is attainable!
Yes!
But extensive back-end work is required. A professional eCommerce website development company like Enterprise Monkey can help you develop a tremendous B2B eCommerce platform.
But why would you want to create a multi-store eCommerce brand?
The benefits are endless. The response is simple! A multi-store ecommerce business model is all-time helpful for your brand. It won’t be wrong to say that a multi-channel platform can help you to stay updated and far ahead of your competitors. No extra effort is required!
Whether you want to channelise your existing products or prosper new ones as a result of experiments, this platform will significantly help.
Need more reasons?
It’s a fair choice for:
- Better traffic
- More conversions
- Better brand visibility
The common portal allows you to anticipate win-win situations in the market.
3. B2B & B2C Implementation
Who doesn’t want to increase their visibility and generate more profits? Extending your business works favourably. To fulfil the enterprise-level requirements, a common platform is good to go. From marketing strategies to showcasing your products, you can follow a mutual plan and try implementing it to both business types.
And why is it considered a challenge?
Because B2B and B2C integration needs experts’ minds and hands, approaching customers that think differently is a task that emerges to a new level when you implement B2B and B2C together.
4. Managing Third-Party Integrations
Third-party integrations are necessary for customers’ needs and to maintain the flow of your business. It may be a map functionality or any CRM; integrating any third-party tool or software into your platform results in an easy and seamless workflow for your clients and customers.
A feature-rich technology is unbeatable – A great way to expand the capabilities of your venue, incorporating features and functionality and adding versatility. Moreover, it reduces the demand for troublesome plug-ins and development costs. Yes, staying under the budget is the key objective.
Why Go for a B2B eCommerce Business?
1. Revenues and Profits
A self-service eCommerce platform is driven to make customers happy and satisfied, directly generating more revenue and profits. More money leads to fresh opportunities for cross-selling. Improved customer experiences can be cracked by the easy-to-navigate portal leading to more sales.
2. Real-Time Data
While you are working offline, the most significant thing you miss is customer metrics. Of course, to escalate your business name, it’s mandatory to know a lot about customers’ visits, likes and dislikes. Furthermore, conversion rates, page views, and bounce rates are highly imperative. Metrics are crucial in this part!
3. Easy Customer Retention
When a customer visits your website and finds everything organised and straightforward, it is easy to retain them. A B2B eCommerce portal is proven to be highly successful in providing the accurate demand of the customers. What else do you need to scale your brand in the market?
4. Explore the Undiscovered Regions
Unleash the undiscovered territories with your eCommerce platform. You can test and try its need in other regions when selling a product, whether a necessity or a luxury. Manually or physically, it’s tough to reach out to every possible location. So, what’s the solution? The eCommerce platform. It opens the gateways to explore across global audiences.
5. Easy Order Management
Order management can be hectic, from receiving to dealing with feedback, and B2B eCommerce portals make it easy. It should be easy and work both ways; for you and your customers. A thorough process is involved, and the online platform adds discipline and improves the order cycle. You can train your people and move to the most suitable eCommerce platform to take your brand to the next level.
Pick Up The Best Practices
Your brand’s credibility is your responsibility. Performing well-known best practices can help you to organise your business more effectively. Let’s see what we have in our bucket:
1. Quality Over Quantity
It’s well said that quantity brings satisfaction and happiness, so why not incorporate quality into our processes? Your brands require sustainability and establishment in the market. Eventually, it saves your money. Not only for you but for your customers, too; if they buy from a brand that offers quality, they will not turn their backs on you.
2. Go Moderately With Features
Why are we asking you to incorporate the features gradually? It is a norm that people ask you to be updated and competitive, and this pressure may lead you to create a comprehensive portal that is difficult to manage. And the hurry will create a mess. Expert believes in researching, trying, experimenting, testing and then adding a feature to your portal.
3. Prioritise User Experience Above Everything
Bringing down the bounce rate or increasing conversions significantly improves the user experience on an eCommerce portal. How do you define a great user experience? An experience that keeps a customer loyal to your brand. He wants to come again and again to buy the product of your niche, neglecting all your competitors, right? Embody the usable functionality to your portal, strong enough to throw an accurate impression to your customers. Everything matters, from catchy CTAs to loading speed, images, and mobile responsiveness.
4. Keep Up the SEO
A top factor is attracting customers to your website!
You must keep your SEO game strong. The ultimate goal is to crawl up the search engine result pages if you want to be seen and known. Optimise your descriptions, pages, and website so the customers can find you without putting in the extra effort. Do campaigns, review and analyse daily.
What works the most?
Begin with low-traffic keywords, and move step-by-step towards high-traffic ones.
Choosing a suitable CMS is the key! Drupal is considered an apt choice for SEO.
5. Smooth Ordering
“Logout” action – A possible nightmare for manufacturers.
The heart of your eCommerce portal is the “ordering” feature. Constant buyers are impatient, predominantly. Usually, when customers visit your store, they struggle to choose their desired product, not on the portal. It’s widespread, and they quickly get irritated when stuck with something and log out. This is not what you want as a manufacturer. So, ensure the smooth flow of processes for ordering.
Key Takeaways
- Manufacturers must look to develop an eCommerce portal for their B2B business.
- A B2B portal for manufacturers acts as a digital supermarket for buyers.
- Incorporating the right technology, B2B & B2C implementation, using a common portal for all brands, and managing third-party integrations are the possible challenges.
- Customer retention, generating revenue and profits, collecting real-time data, easy order management and opportunities to explore undiscovered regions.
- Best practices are highly required to beat competitors in the market.
