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 important aspects of a My Account section for a self-service order portal or website when selling as a brand, wholesaler or distributor. Today’s B2B and wholesale Ecommerce scenarios encourage self-service access to take the pressure off your team, freeing them up to help drive more sales.
Robust My Account Section
Providing self-service tools includes covering standard capabilities found on B2C sites today, like the ability to see previous orders and get shipment information for those on the way. It also incorporates more B2B-centric needs like paying open invoices. Features include:
Order History
Customers can see what they’ve previously ordered in case they can’t remember what SKUs they need to get.
Reorder
Leveraging existing orders and building a fresh order around them can make things easy for customers who regularly order the same or similar items and quantities.
Shipment Tracking
Customers can see if their order has been shipped and where in the process it is for delivery. This is one of the most common needs customers have, yet many B2B business don’t support it.
Information Management
As noted in the checkout section, buyers can set up their billing and shipping addresses, and save payment information when allowed, to make checkout simpler by having that information readily available.
Being able to manage customer information within the store also reduces the number of customer service tickets or calls, as customers can easily keep pertinent information current for purchasing.
Bill/Invoice Payments
For orders where buyers have a Net Terms or Buy Now/Pay Later arrangement, or have installments to pay based on an order agreement, a My Account section will allow acceptance of payment for those bills and invoices as well.
Multi-Buyer Accounts
One area where B2B Ecommerce diverges is many businesses have the need for multiple people to place orders on the company’s behalf.
Having the ability to have multiple buyers tied to an account is a helpful capability that allows order histories to be pooled and monitored more effectively by the company.
Order Approval Workflows
Connected to multi-buyer accounts is the ability for one or more people within the buyer company to be able to review orders being requested by other employees, and approve or deny orders, allowing for a validation step before orders are processed and fulfilled.
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!
