A number of B2B Ecommerce trends have been reinforced in recent years as more businesses continue to adapt to electronic ordering opportunities.
Some have been fearful of online commerce, but those fears are largely misplaced. If you’re still looking into your options, here’s a few areas you shouldn’t ignore:
- Self-Service Ecommerce
- Net Terms and Buy Now Pay Later
- Mobile App for Salespeople
- Ecommerce as a Primary Capability
- Integration with Other Systems
Let’s see how each benefit your business.
1. Self-Service Ecommerce
Your buyers are more and more likely to want to shop on their own. This is particularly true if what you sell is easy to understand and/or easy to reorder. This is why a self-service option is so critical.
By having an always-available online option, your buyers can order when convenient. You can offer a fully-functional website or order portal.
Regardless of method, this will take pressure off your team to have to be involved in every order. This frees up your team to acquire new business, or reach out to customers you haven’t heard from in awhile.
2. Net Terms and Buy Now Pay Later
When many think of Ecommerce, they think credit card transactions, thanks to the way purchases are done on B2C sites. That’s not generally how B2B sales flow. B2B transactions quite often feature invoicing or other means to pay after an order.
The predominant way of handling this is Net Terms, which give buyers a window of time after purchase (or shipment) to pay their bill. There are a variety of ways to manage Net Terms, each with their own benefits and risks.
Buy Now Pay Later models, quickly gaining ground in the B2C space, is also an area of interest in B2B, and has similar benefits to Net Terms, especially terms managed by a third party. This model could join Net Terms in the B2B Ecommerce trends list relatively soon.
3. Mobile App for Salespeople
Your salespeople are traditionally on the go, even if working remotely from home. While laptops and other portable devices can help, a mobile app is the gold standard today.
This app should allow for product information look-ups, customer pricing validation, and order placement. It should work offline, and have a syncing mechanism to update when back in service. And it should make customer and order creation easy for the salesperson.
4. Ecommerce as a Primary Capability
Some brands, wholesalers and distributors leveraged a tool that had B2B Ecommerce as an added value feature. This means highly limited functionality and control. A number of modern B2B solutions, Zoey included, provides a much better experience.
Zoey and others can provide much more granular control over business rules, team member access and buyer segmentation. And, as you’ll see in the next item, you can generally uses these tools with the other primary solutions your business requires.
5. Data Accessibility
SaaS platforms and open source solutions alike are putting a higher priority on making data accessible in a variety of forms. This means easier integration of systems in whatever forms can best serve the platforms.
Whether it be first-party integrations, APIs, Webhooks, SFTP or even basic CSV export/imports, access is paramount. With this, you can avoid data duplication or mistakes, and ensure all data is where it needs to be.
See How Zoey Can Help Your Business
Leveraging all of these B2B Ecommerce trends is possible with Zoey! Click the button below to request a chat with our team, and we’ll show you how you can use these ideas to benefit your business:
