In the past, most of these activities took place face-to-face or over the phone, with customers speaking to trusted suppliers.
Nowadays, almost every business also uses the internet as a sales channel.
E-commerce allows them to disseminate better information, such as 360-degree product demonstrations, and reach more people, including international audiences.
Even as they begin to make good use of e-commerce, B2B companies are not always as effective as consumer-centric (B2C) organizations.
To succeed in online sales, they must bridge the gap between them and their B2C counterparts by locating potential customers wherever they are online and providing them with personalized experiences, greater convenience and a simple and intuitive way to buy.
The importance of e-commerce
The vast majority of today's business buyers are young adults who have therefore all grown up with the Internet: they constantly use social networks, AI-powered search engines and review sites.
Most of them avoid talking to sellers, preferring to make their queries and close their deals anonymously through their preferred vector.
Typically, this is obviously done electronically, with 90% of B2B buyers choosing online channels as their primary method for identifying new suppliers.
A recent BigCommerce study found that 74% of B2B buyers complete transactions or purchases using a digital platform.
However, sellers need to understand that business-to-business e-commerce is evolving rapidly.
Increasingly, buyers expect to deal directly with manufacturers rather than retailers.
The most effective among them recognize the growing importance of using all online channels, including social media, to deliver sophisticated personalized messages to highly segmented audiences.
They know that while B2B brands are often very different from consumer brands, B2B buyers ordering online want to be treated the same as consumers.
Respect very specific processes
B2B brands that sell online must combine two opposing requirements.
They need operational efficiency to maintain their profit levels.
But they also need advanced marketing capabilities that they can leverage to increase revenue.
Online sales enable considerable efficiency gains and savings.
Processes such as invoicing can be automated.
And we can encourage buyers to favor self-service by emphasizing its benefits, thereby further reducing costs and improving customer satisfaction.
However, more than operational efficiency, it is the excellence of the customer experience that matters.
But to achieve this, companies can't just copy B2C e-commerce best practices.
The requirements of B2B partners are very different.
Billing processes and credit checks are more rigorous.
Payment methods may require greater flexibility, especially when it comes to major transactions.
And the delivery options are more complex: you cannot drop off equipment costing several million euros on a doorstep like you would with a simple package.
E-commerce technology must therefore be adapted.
The vast majority (85%) of B2B buyers say they would switch to a competitor if their supplier's digital channel failed to meet their needs.
A high level customer experience
What are users' expectations when it comes to online shopping?
Along with convenience factors like 99.99% uptime and low website load times, they want a great customer experience, which can be achieved by taking the B2C commerce model and then adapting it. the appropriate elements.
Ease of use.
Buyers should have a simple and intuitive interface.
To enable them to find the products they are looking for, regardless of the channel used, item descriptions must be customizable in order to increase SEO effectiveness.
It is imperative that viewing product pages is easy and that ordering is frictionless.
Hence the need to provide sufficient and precise information at each stage and to include a procedure for interrupting the purchasing process at any time.
Personalization.
To meet the demands of B2B commerce, flexibility is essential.
Individual buyers have varied profiles and it is not easy to satisfy their needs, which can differ significantly depending on size and industry.
Business constraints, such as the need for flexible credit terms, also vary.
Sellers must therefore be able to adapt the content they display online.
This may include personalized information based either on past behavior or on customer requests, such as quotes for bundles of individual products.
An effective way to manage this complexity is composable infrastructure, which allows you to combine the best elements of e-commerce from different applications.
This agile approach gives businesses the ability to keep up with recent trends and leverage new features.
Continuous optimization.
With extensive website setup, it is possible to experiment with the devices and learn quickly and inexpensively.
For example, sophisticated A/B and multivariate testing can be run continuously, with the constant stream of small iterative improvements provided gradually increasing conversion rates.
A powerful analysis.
To deliver personalized experiences that will optimize conversion rates, businesses need to have a deep understanding of their partners and what motivates them.
Previous purchases, website visitor behavior, external business information, and market trends all provide data that can be used to drive sales.
A single view of the customer delivered on a proper dashboard will be essential for B2B sellers to understand what is going well and how they can improve.
Entering new markets
Once businesses have successfully delivered a satisfactory customer experience, they can use e-commerce to expand into export markets.
But to succeed, they will have to take into account that market conditions are unlikely to be identical.
Logistics can be more complicated when exporting and import rules are likely to further add to this complexity.
The ability to adapt the website to the new market will be essential.
Cultural specificities also play an important role.
Aside from practical considerations like price, taxes, and even availability, branding can be perceived differently depending on location;
users’ reactions may depend on their origin.
For example, a study in France showed that businesses prioritize product availability when choosing online B2B suppliers.
In comparison, while this same criterion is crucial in the United States, other factors such as reliability, price and customer service weigh more heavily in the decision-making process.
Italians, for their part, often favor personal trust in business relationships by emphasizing contacts, while Americans, while valuing relationships, attach more weight to efficiency and professionalism.
Simply translating a website from one language to another is therefore unlikely to be effective.
Any e-commerce solution must allow content to be personalized for different markets.
Simply translating web content is not enough; anchoring it in a defined location is imperative.
Prepare for the future of your business
Business-to-business e-commerce is complex.
Success will come from using cutting-edge technologies like composable infrastructure to deliver the best experience imaginable to every customer, whatever they're looking for, wherever they are.
With automation and the benefits of self-service, it is possible to optimize conversion rates and control costs.
However, agility should not be neglected, as the buyer's journey must be able to be continuously adapted to conform to their expectations as well as the new market challenges of high costs, emerging regulations and chains fragile supplies.
By adopting the right mindset and leveraging cutting-edge technologies, B2B sellers can now meet these challenges and deliver the highly personalized content and constantly adapting services that are at the heart of business success.
Learn how BigCommerce helps drive e-commerce efficiency in the
B2B catalog.