B2B Ecommerce relies on certain techniques that ensure that a customized shopping experience is possible. One core aspect is the concept of Access Restrictions, and it’s a critical part of what makes Zoey so successful for our B2B Ecommerce sellers. In today’s post we’ll review what Access Restrictions are, and some of the ways they can be implemented to provide a truly unique experience for Ecommerce buyers.
What Are Access Restrictions?
At its core, Access Restrictions allow for rules that determine who can see what aspects of your site and its catalog. They can be very basic or very nuanced, depending on your preferences.
The key benefit is being able to offer a more personalized approach for your existing buyers, while still leveraging some of your product details to woo in new ones. In that way you can not only use your website as a search engine opportunity, but still offer a bespoke shopping experience for buyers you already work with.
How to Leverage Restricted Access Options
Let’s explore some of the core ways Access Restrictions can be leveraged to develop a site that fits your business logic and requirements. Our goal is to make shopping for B2B Ecommerce buyers an experience more specific to them, whether it be what they’re buying, how they’re buying it, or for what price they’re buying it.
Require Login to View Catalog and Pricing
The most basic of access restrictions effectively makes your Ecommerce site a private shopping experience only for your registered customers. Customers can submit a registration form to be accepted by you as the merchant; you can ask for specific information, adding fields to the registration form as you see fit. You can even include the ability to upload files such as PDFs or images (for example, tax exemption documents if they’re a tax-exempt organization).
Some B2B businesses need to protect their information heavily, so this format allows for maximum protection of a catalog while still allowing customers to request access.
Show Catalog, But Disable Cart and Price
The biggest flaw of requiring login is that all of your content is completely hidden from search engines. If you rely on your catalog to help draw in customers, that model would require a second, content-driven site that means twice the work, since you have to list everything twice.
A more modern take on Access Restrictions is a public version of your Ecommerce site with key proprietary information hidden from the view of guests. While helpful information, such as titles, descriptions, photos and documentation can be made available to the public, you can disable the display of pricing and adding items to the cart by guests. This ensures you can still protect key aspects of your shopping experience to only your registered customers.
With Zoey’s upcoming Sales Quotes capability, this experience will be further enhanced by allowing guests to request pricing information if they find you, giving you the ability to bring them in to your customer base with a personalized quote.
Offer Customized Catalogs Within Customer Groups
For many B2B and wholesale Ecommerce businesses, not all products they sell may be relevant to all customers. To focus in your customers on the products that are most relevant to them, access restrictions can be used to hide products or categories from certain segments of your customers, leveraging Access Restrictions in tandem with Zoey’s Customer Groups capabilities.
Customers who have products or categories turned off can have this experience without a visual hiccup – items are suppressed cleanly and completely. This provides a unique shopping experience, while still ensuring an optimal presentation for your customers.
An Integrated Solution That Works Well Together
All of our Access Restrictions features are core capabilities built directly into Zoey – no add-ons or additional purchases are required. This means that whenever you leverage an Access Restrictions setting, the entire site will respond to those changes. For instance, if you hide pricing from guests, or certain products or categories from a Customer Group, our advanced search capabilities properly respect those settings and will stay in step with your settings within Zoey.
Other platforms may have add-ons that can approximate some of our capabilities, but for true, end-to-end experiences that are seamless and easy to maintain, Zoey is the right choice for your B2B and wholesale Ecommerce customers.
Video Tutorial for Zoey Restricted Access Tools
Here is a video walkthrough of some of Zoey’s Access Restrictions capabilities:
Learn More About Access Restrictions
Need Access Restrictions to implement your Ecommerce vision? Simply click the button below and fill out your information – a member of the Zoey sales team will follow up with you and show you how Zoey can help fulfill your business requirements.
