How to Choose the Best B2B eCommerce Platform

Do you provide services to help businesses grow, hire or manage their teams? Do you supply products specifically to companies? Are you able to sell wholesale items?

If you're in B2B or would like to become one, you could benefit from a B2B eCommerce platform. It will make life easier for your clients and your team, and help you grow quicker and faster.

We'll take a glance at the ways that an eCommerce store could benefit your B2B business in deciding the right store.

What is the reason to create an eCommerce B2B store?

A majority of the online retailers that you've come across are B2C (Business to Consumer) that provide your pet's meals, birthday present, or perhaps your favorite specialty groceries. Beware of thinking that eCommerce stores are just intended for businesses that cater to the consumer. They are a powerful tool to B2B companies as well.

According to a recent study, 41% of B2B shoppers said that the self-service feature will make it easier making business transactions on the internet. That's a big number! and the capability for clients to manage their accounts and perform other similar tasks is an important aspect of eCommerce functionality.

As an example, instead of calling for a quote, a Sourcing Manager could send a request via the web and find out this information instantly, regardless of the timing of the day. You can also place an order, or enroll to have your items delivered each month. Or, if you provide landscaping services for retail shops, a store manager could login to their account and adjust the frequency of their services, or see when the next time to stop by.

B2B eCommerce stores go a long way towards making processes easier to manage. They are able to take the burden off customer service reps and sales team members by completing some of the self-service tasks mentioned earlier. They are able to sync data between multiple distribution channels and ensure that everything's up-to-date and accurate. Additionally, they eliminate all the hassle of manually sending invoices and quotes and then contacting any potential customer.

Finally, an online store acts as the brand's image and the hub of all your marketing plans. You can link directly to the products and services you offer in your emails to customers and in advertisements. You can create valuable information that can guide prospects through the sales funnel. You can also monitor the effectiveness of your efforts and steer the future direction of your business.

Considerations for choosing B2B eCommerce platform

The platform that you select for your eCommerce is the base of your online storefront. We'll look at some of the factors to take into consideration when selecting oneand then look at why it is the top solution for B2B eCommerce stores.

The types of goods you're selling

There is a wide range of possibilities for B2B firms. Below are some items you may sell, and some of the examples you can use:

• Physical products. Think equipment, printed training booksand cleaning products.  Storage and Handling Equipment  is an example. It provides eco-friendly shopping carts for retail and grocery stores.
• Digital items. Things like online classes including eBooks and eBooks available for download, as well as software licenses. TipoType is one example. It offers font licenses to businesses as well as freelancers.
• Services. Offers include graphic design, accounting, and legal advice. Your Benefit Store is a provider of services offering healthcare insurance for companies to offer as part of plans for employees.
• Wholesale products. The company sells large amounts of its products to retail stores, basically acting as their supplier. Porta Pro Chem, for example, sells portable restroom products to clients around the country.
• Memberships. Access to a range of benefits and other resources like a video library or online forum. For instance, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, as an example, has a membership program with resources including courses, invitations to events and more, specifically for marketers and media companies.
• Subscriptions. Services or products that are recurring, like a yearly licence, weekly cleaning service, or monthly box of coffee beans for your breakroom. Designs Modo sells digital subscriptions to design tools, however, subscriptions may also include physical products or even newsletters.

You can tell that they all vary widely from one another, but there is also the possibility of overlap. It is possible to sell retail and wholesale products. It is possible to sell digital and physical books in tandem. Or you may subscribe to a service that provides an office clean-up every week, as well as a set of cleaning supplies.

It's important to note that your business can be conducted in a variety of ways and be sure that your platform supports all of them.

sells functionality on each of the items as well as services described above and more! Indeed, each websites mentioned are using . Sell one type of product or several side-by-side. Anyone can purchase or restrict capabilities to specific wholesale or retail customers.

No matter what you want to offer, it's feasible.

Design flexibility

Like your products and services are distinctive Your brand, also. Naturally, you want your website to reflect the personality and traits of your brand.

A reliable B2B eCommerce system will give customers total and complete flexibility to create and design anything you can imagine -- without having to edit code or hire an expert developer, in the event that you do not want to.

As it's an extension to WordPress it is able to harness the capabilities of the Block Editor to create all of your posts and pages. The Block Editor allows you to drag and drop components -such as headings, paragraphs video, images, and columns -- to make your own custom layout. Then, you can switch options to alter colors, font styles, and other design characteristics so that the layout is individual to your.

Content ownership

If you are a business online, having control of your content is absolutely critical. Your website can be a source of revenue and you shouldn't be putting your money at risk by exposing it to that it will disappear. You see, many proprietary eCommerce platforms could shut down your site without warning in the event that they decide that you've violated their terms and regulations. This means losing revenue as well as time and work!

However, WordPress and are software, tools to help you achieve your goals. Your website is hosted wherever you'd like it to be and you have full control and control over it. There's no need to be concerned about deleting your website. It's because it'sthe site is yours.

Integration of payment gateways

Payment gateways let you receive money from clients as well as clients in a secure manner, and then transfer that money into your account at the bank. They have pros and cons for the various tools, as well as specific functions you'll need to have for your specific company. In particular, you could require recurring payment or accept multiple currencies. integrate with express pay tools such as Apple Pay, or offer finance options.

Make sure that the platform for eCommerce you choose works with the one you want to work with, particularly in the event that your company already has some sort of payment processing or invoicing.

Integrates with a range of payment gateways. These include:

Shipping

If you offer physical items that require shipping, it is likely to be a crucial element when selecting an eCommerce platform. Shipping can be a bit complicated, which is why you require a system that allows you to create fees in the manner you prefer, and works with all shipping companies you work with. This is especially important if you deliver large volumes of products at once, or require specific requirements such as refrigeration.

User experience

User experience is important to any company, and for many reasons. For instance, if a prospective customer or client visits your website and finds it difficult to navigate, they'll likely abandon your site and go with a competitor instead. Second, search engines consider the user experience when they determine rankings.

The challenge, at present is to identify an application that can make creating the best user experience feasible. There are a few things you should consider:

• Content management. Find an online platform for eCommerce that helps you structure your menus, categorize posts and products as well as add functions such breadcrumbs for navigation. Because WordPress was designed as a blogging platform since its inception, its content tools are unrivaled.
• Mobile-friendly design. Your site must look stunning across devices of every size such as tablets, desktops, and phones on mobiles. WordPress and are responsive by default, and you can choose from a variety of mobile-friendly themes you can choose from.

Marketing and Customer Service

Marketing of course helps you reach new prospects and increase sales from current customers. Good customer service helps you retain customers and encourage them to tell their friends about your company. Both are essential to running a successful B2B eCommerce shop.

The platform that you work with should make all of your marketing and customer service strategies possible, whether that involves integrating with the applications you're already using or making it easy to include tracking codes.

Here are some examples of marketing and customer service capabilities included in :

• Integration with CRMs. Connect to your CRM of preference with an extension for Jetpack CRM, HubSpot, Salesforce, and more.
• Integration with support forums and ticketing systems. Add live chat to your site, create a support forum and integrate it with tools like Freshdesk and HelpScout
• Content creation capabilities. Create regularly beautiful, efficient blogs, landing pages, and other content to complement the rest of your marketing strategies and help educate prospective customers.
• Integration with an extensive variety of tools for marketing. Track traffic using Google Analytics, connect to social media platforms such as Facebook and TikTok and publish Google ads directly on your dashboard, and send emails messages, track abandoned carts, and many more.
• The simplicity for your team members. You can give each member of the team a separate account that has the appropriate permissions for their roles. Approved accounts can respond to queries from support, review and process orders, administer refunds, publish blog posts along with other.

Extra functionality

The features you require on the B2B eCommerce site will be specifically tailored to your business. Consider any specific requirements that you need to consider. Below are some instances:

Scalability

The B2B eCommerce platform you select should not hold you back. Watch out for ones which base their fees on the number of sales, customers, or volume of visitors to the site. Your platform should also load quickly, whether there are 100,000 visitors on one time or 100,000.

You can expand your business up to any size. It's not limited to the quantity of items or variants you could have (in fact, this test site included 1 million!). It's designed to handle huge amounts of orders and spikes. The platform is completely free however, you might want to use paid extensions, and pricing is not based on factors like the number of sales or clients.

The best part? It is possible to choose the hosting service you'd like. That means that, while you may have an existing shared hosting account in the moment, you could upgrade to a VPS or dedicated server as the traffic grows without affecting the performance of your store online.

User-friendliness and Management

In business there's a saying that time is money. You shouldn't be wasting time on a platform which is difficult to navigate, difficult for new employees to understand, and requires a developer to make even the smallest of modifications.

If you're able to employ a web developer to handle your site if you'd like but you don't need to in order to make the most of your online store. As we mentioned earlier, Block Editor Block Editor enables you to move, rearrange, and delete elements by simply dragging and dropping. Do you want to change the layout of your products? It's easy to do this through the use of buttons, and then editing fields -- no code necessary!

Store managers are able to access all of their inventory information, from site analytics to order information all from one location. And if you use products like Jetpack CRM, Shipping and Payments, you'll be able to handle label printing, payments, refunds, quotes, and more right via your dashboard.

If you're interested to hire a professional to create, maintain or modify your store, check out our list of WooExperts. They're highly-rated, vetted agencies ready to help!

Develop and increase the size of your B2B eCommerce business with

Whether you're an established B2B business or are new to the market, this platform provides the necessary tools and flexibility needed to expand. Plus, it can improve the user experience for your clients and even make your team more efficient.

Ready to grow? Start with the best B2B eCommerce platform now.