Today’s blog post is an excerpt from our recently revised eBook, The Changing Landscape of B2B Commerce, which is filled with suggestions and ideas for businesses looking to transform themselves to a more modern, more efficient digital technology stack.
This excerpt focuses on components that can make building an order simpler and quicker for your buyers. A good B2B Commerce option will ensure that ordering is as organized and easy as it can be.
Streamlined Ordering Interface
Central to a self-service model is most often an ordering portal. Such a system is stripped of a lot of the bells and whistles commonly found on B2C-focused sites with an eye toward making ordering as obvious, simple and straightforward as possible.
Catalog is presented most often in list format, with various speed-up techniques we’ll explore in this chapter.
Another way to simplify ordering is to provide a robust array of ways to piece together an order. Some examples:
Table Catalog or Product View
The ability to see a variety of products in a quick, skimmable list, akin to the paper catalogs of yore, is a B2B-specific method of surfacing products and key information on them in a format that’s familiar and comfortable to your buyers.
Matrix Product Screens
For products with a couple of variable data points, you can offer a matrix view that makes it easier to enter all the variations you need of a product at once.
If you use the example of a T-shirt, you could have size and color, and a matrix of choices that mix and match the various sizes and colors.
Bulk Add to Cart
Table and matrix formats also facilitate being able to set quantities on multiple items on the list and adding all to cart at once, which reduces clicks and avoids having to travel to each product page.
Quick Order
For customers who know what SKUs they need, a quick-order screen can speed up the ability to enter SKUs and quantities to move to the cart quickly. An ability to have a pre-populated quick order SKU with commonly ordered items can speed up the shopping experience even more.
CSV Import or Copy/Paste
Another option is to allow for a copy/paste of CSV values for businesses that retain that information in Excel or other data formats, which can help bridge the gap for customers who relied on older methods of managing core purchase lists.
Save SKUs to List
For customers who order the same SKUs reliably, the ability to save SKUs to a list for purchase, such as Wish List or Saved Items functionality, can provide customers a quick way to get back to items they need.
Recently Ordered
A Recently Ordered screen can show SKUs they’ve purchased in recent orders and allow them to quickly add those items back into a cart. This can be found in the form of a Reorder option on existing orders or a list of SKUs contained in those orders.
Download Your FREE Copy of the eBook!
You can get your copy of the eBook for free at this link, and if you’re inspired by what you see in the book, you can request a conversation with our Success Team to see how Zoey can support your company in these efforts!
