Most B2B businesses want to increase wholesale sales. The tools to do so are improving rapidly! So are B2B Ecommerce sales; Grand View Research forecasts 18.7% compound annual growth in the coming years.
To make the most of them, you should leverage best in practice capabilities to strengthen your sales potential. Here are five ways you can increase wholesale sales by supporting the things your buyers and internal team needs for success:
- Customized and/or Tiered Pricing
- Support Net Terms and Other “Pay Later” Scenarios
- Self-Service Ordering
- Cross-Selling and Upselling
- Mobile App for Salespeople
Let’s go over how each helps accomplish these goals.
1. Customized and/or Tiered Pricing
One important aspect around wholesale sales is that it tends to be a volume business. Brands, wholesalers and distributors sell in bulk to retail and other businesses, who then sell to consumers. Encouraging those businesses to buy more, and more often, from you requires a pricing structure that’s rational to them.
So, your buyers should be able to locate their pricing on a B2B Order Portal or Ecommerce site. Tiered pricing should be leveraged to offer price breaks on larger order sizes. If they were thinking of buying 400 and the next price break is a bit above that, they may buy more. This lets them capture the additional margin such a purchase allows.
More standard Ecommerce practices like price breaks on items you’d like to move can also work. But your foundation should be set on tiered pricing and customer-specific pricing.
2. Support Net Terms and Other “Pay Later” Scenarios
B2B Ecommerce is more likely to have a foundation around invoices or other pay later scenarios, like Net Terms. This differs from B2C Ecommerce, where payment is collected upfront, usually via credit card, PayPal, or other instant payment methods.
Ironically, Buy Now, Pay Later, which has taken off in the B2C world, which effectively is installment billing, is only just getting established on the B2B side. But Net Terms has a more established history and is somewhat similar in that you or a third party can manage this for your buyer, effectively extending a short-term line of credit for a purchase.
3. Self-Service Ordering
Your buyers are increasingly comfortable buying online themselves. They want that ability to do this in growing numbers from wholesale sellers too. The solution is a self-service ordering option.
You can deploy one in a few flavors:
- Order Portal: An order portal is private and requires a login. This lets you manage who has access, and what they see when they log in.
- Website: This is a more traditional approach with a public-facing site. However, B2B versions can hide pricing or cart options unless a buyer is logged in. That protects the pricing and shopping experience to only approved buyers.
- Mobile: Both of the above options can support mobile-specific shopping experiences. Some businesses might offer an app if it makes sense to require a dedicated app on a buyer’s devices. Otherwise, a site that can support mobile transactions could be sufficient.
4. Cross-Selling and Upselling
When your buyers work with salespeople, they can probe around other needs that could lead to order size growth. On self-service Ecommerce, that discovery has to be focused on exposing the buyer to your other catalog offerings.
The B2C Ecommerce practice of recommending other products through cross-sells and upsells, bundled products and more can work here too.
Zoey customer Manamed explains how this has helped them educate buyers to their broader catalog:
“Most of our customers only buy 2-4 products out of our 58 products because they would previously only buy what they are directly sold. Now, while they are in Zoey, they can see our entire product lineup as well as recommended products and related products. This has opened the door to more sales conversations which is a big advantage to us.”
–Erik Lorenz, Chief Information Officer, ManaMed
5. Mobile App for Salespeople
A mobile app isn’t necessarily a must for buyers, but it is for your salespeople. Mobile apps overcome challenges, such as offline mode, that the mobile web cannot. Apps for salespeople are custom built for their workflows too.
Salespeople sell just about everywhere, so a mobile app supports that anytime, anywhere ability.
Increase Wholesale Sales Today
Zoey helps hundreds of businesses like yours increase wholesale sales. Our sales process is designed to help you solve problems, not push you into hasty purchases. Talk to our sales team today to learn how we can help you:
