Part of the keys to success for B2B Ecommerce is personalization – the ability to offer information and commerce capabilities specific to a customer or organization. With a more complex journey than B2C Ecommerce, B2B Ecommerce personalization is a critical step to reduce friction towards your buyers completing transactions.
Personalization can come in a number of ways, so we’ll break down a number of ways you can introduce this to your store. Some will be more critical than others for your use case, but all will offer benefits.
8 Ways to Implement B2B Ecommerce Personalization
- Pricing
- Catalog
- Billing & Shipping Options
- Order History/Reordering
- Most Recently Ordered Items
- Promotional Options
- Theming
- Salesperson/Customer Service Support
Let’s explore each of these and how they can improve the B2B buying experience for buyers of brands, wholesalers and distributors:
1. Pricing
By far the most important form of personalization will be pricing. B2B businesses expect pricing that is rationalized for their business, whether it be purchasing amounts, frequency, and overall spend. Most B2B and wholesale businesses set various pricing schema, and they need to either group their customers into buckets based on these criteria, or set pricing for an individual customer based on their agreements with that customer.
If a B2B Ecommerce solution can’t generate the correct pricing for these rules, your buyers won’t use it, so this is one of those you have to be able to do. It’s expected that any B2B Ecommerce solution you use can manage these pricing scenarios, given its importance to the process.
2. Catalog
Adjacent to this, but not always required for all businesses, is the ability to identify which aspects of the catalog are exposed to which customers. For some distributors, they may have product lines not relevant to all buyers, and listing them just get in the way.
On a more specific level, you may have products that are only available to a specific buyer. This was the case for Zoey customer Backyard Nature Products:
“One of our customers is a national retailer with a specialty line of private label products made solely for them. With Zoey’s capabilities we were able to create a custom catalog specifically for those customers which nobody else can see. That was awesome. Our team never knew something like that was even
possible. The customers just love it.”
—Mike Kasdorf, Director, Backyard Nature Products
It’s possible your business may not have these catalog scenarios. But if your business has multiple aspects to the product lines, or you have products specific to a subset of customers, this form of segmentation can keep your buyers focused on the relevant items to them, while still allowing them to order what they need from you.
3. Billing and Shipping Options
When it comes to the payment and shipping options you offer buyers, you may have different sorts of agreements with different customers. Or you might only offer a subset of your buyers Buy Now, Pay Later options like Net Terms. When it comes to shipping, you might offer free shipping to customers in certain groups, and not in others, given the types of shipping involved.
While it may be less obvious, you will want to select which shipping options are presented to different classes of customers. And you’ll also want the same control over the payment options presented to your buyers.
4. Order History/Reordering
Shifting attention to a My Account area, order history and a quick reordering mechanism is pretty standard B2B Ecommerce personalization functionality. This is particularly important if you sell items that your buyers frequently buy.
That said, reordering should allow for tweaks, additions or subtractions before a fresh order is placed. That’s your buyer’s opportunity to adjust based on buying patterns or changes that should be factored into a new order.
One of the easiest ways to make reordering possible is through a Order History area. Allow your buyers to see their previous orders, and build a new cart in one click with a Reorder button.
5. Most Recently Ordered Items
Another way to support your buyers to simplify purchases is to show their most recently ordered SKUs. This can place items they care about in an easy to find location, and add in bulk items they tend to order frequently from a single screen.
An alternative to this could be the most frequently ordered items, whether by order frequency or volume. This, too, aims to put the most important SKUs front and center.
6. Promotional Options
Promotional pricing or deals can have its place in the B2B Ecommerce ecosystem, and personalization of these promotions can be helpful to drive sales efficiently. That means not having global codes that anyone can enter, and it can mean targeting sale pricing or promotional offers to only certain subgroups.
This takes two forms:
- The ability to set up promotions to only apply to certain customer groups
- The ability to message said promotions only to those customer groups
Your B2B Ecommerce platform should support being able to show messaging to only certain groups, just like it can pricing, and your email marketing system will ideally support similar segmentation.
7. Theming
For some B2B businesses, presentation can be critical. Do you need a branded portal for specific buyers? Do you need a browsable experience for certain clients and a streamlined approach for others?
Theme segmentation is a less obvious, but potentially quite helpful, way to manage these needs efficiently in a single solution. By having the ability to present things differently, you can make the experience feel even more customized for the buyer you’re targeting.
8. Salesperson/Customer Service Support
Personalization goes beyond the technology you use to support your customers, and into the team that supports them. This means ensuring tools that allows sales and customer service to support your buyers as well.
For salespeople, this can be the ability to create Sales Quotes with customized pricing. It can also mean allowing your buyers to request pricing on bespoke items, or orders that may need a pricing review.
For the customer service team, it can mean the ability to build or adjust a cart on behalf of your buyers, including pricing in real time, while working with them via chat, phone or email.
B2B Ecommerce Personalization is a Key Benefit of Zoey
Zoey’s been refining the personalization process for years, with a robust set of tools for managing all of the above possibilities and more. To learn how we can empower your business to manage successful B2B Ecommerce personalization and sales online, click the button below to chat with our team:
