Online-centric B2B Ecommerce solutions are great to grow into as you expand your business and are interacting with more buyers, more salespeople, and need to centralize your orders in one system. Manual forms of order taking, such as pen and paper, email and phone can work when your business is new, but as it grows becomes very inefficient. Zoey can help you take self-service and salesperson-driven orders in a single platform, giving both forms a distinct way to get information, place orders and review account histories. By leveraging online SaaS Ecommerce for your business, you can make capturing orders simpler, allowing the same team size to be able to do more, growing your business’ sales without having to expand labor costs as quickly.

Many distributors in the Home & Gifts category may supply an array of product lines to gift shops and home goods retailers by the nature of the eclectic range of items they sell. With customer groups, you can arrange customers into categories and display the lines that are relevant to those businesses. You can work with multiple vendors in a system like Zoey if you need to route orders to them directly or aggregate everything into a bigger order from them. Zoey offers capabilities like Split Orders to break orders up by vendor, for example, making it easier to see what each vendor needs to supply you so you can in turn provide stock for your retail customers.

Independent sales reps many times represent multiple brands. If you’re a home & gifts brand that uses an independent sales rep to sell into locations on your behalf, there are multiple ways you can make a scenario successful. They can have access to sales rep licenses on your Zoey store, and use the Zoey app to capture orders. They can also link Zoey to their system leveraging one of the various ways Zoey makes data accessible to other systems. In either case, they can sell on your behalf, and those orders can still flow through Zoey like any other order type you manage.

Shopify was built as a B2C-focused platform. Their basic offerings have access to add-ons that can offer some B2B functionality, but linking data from those add-ons to other systems can be incredibly difficult and frustrating. More recently, Shopify has added wholesale capabilities to Shopify+, but with an astronomical price tag and fees based on volume. Zoey was built with B2B functionality top of mind, offers a more complete solution (including a salesperson-centric mobile app not available on Shopify), and is priced to be accessible to more businesses. Learn more about Zoey. vs. Shopify

If buyers can place their own orders, and salespeople can avoid processing orders later by placing them in real time, it can unlock time for recruiting more businesses and increasing purchase frequency of existing customers.