Four crucial metrics drive growth for business-to-business e-commerce companies: traffic, conversion rate, order size, and margin. These metrics help to improve customer experience across all platforms and increase engagement.
With increasing numbers of online customers, their enhanced business-to-business e-commerce capabilities have no longer attracted them. Businesses' ability to deliver personalized, engaging and predictive customer experiences will provide more advantages.
Businesses looking to enhance innovation, speed, and scale should seriously think about these 5 pillars of the modern approach.
Integrations
The integration of business-to-business e-commerce enterprises with different apps is a two-fold process for many. Businesses have many critical systems required to run business, choose platforms, and integrate with other strategies for future success.
As the business grows, enterprises often need to integrate with other platforms. Adding AI Chabot’s, for example, is as easy as a new integration with modern eCommerce.
Personalization
Personalization is an essential part of any business, whether B2C or B2B. B2B customers might purchase on behalf of their companies, but they are still people.
It also means feeling and emotions play a vital role to drive their attention and decisions. Customers' intent can be extracted implicitly by analyzing data on multiple platforms.
Unlike the traditional approach to curate personalized approach, businesses can benefit from AI-based automation to drive customized approach. This aspect of personalized experience also helps collect data used by ML to deliver a more tailored experience.
Scalability
All B2B businesses aim towards growth. For business-to-business e-commerce, growth typically means more sales and more traffic.
As businesses grow, the eCommerce software cannot handle the increased traffic; however, companies can easily solve these problems with cloud-native technology.
Empathy
Empathetic experience, is in fact, required across the entire B2B journey from researching to even after purchase. Human expertise is aligned to the specific B2B user's goal, including a research goal, a purchasing goal, or a service goal.
Research Goal: Businesses can align information to help customers decide on making a purchase. It can include providing the correct specification, compatibility, product literature, videos, and content in the pre-purchase phase.
Purchasing Goal: Today's technology can automatically detect and prioritize attributes crucial to buyers' goals adding ease to their decision-making process. A deep level of attribution that exposes all the specific parameters of your products can be used to provide the tools and resources they need to confirm and find the right product for their needs.
Service Goal: Post-purchase experience includes providing ongoing information, such as updated information, a self-servicing guide, and a bridge to customer service. Customers love to get timely responses on issues, availability of relevant support, and usage of products procured.
Flexibility
Today, a cornerstone of business-to-business eCommerce is that its front and backend are decoupled. It allows developers to make changes to the user experience without the risk of disrupting the backend code. It makes it easier for businesses to roll out new features and expand capabilities.
Customizations
Businesses have always looked towards commerce suite vendors for basic support like running online catalogs, shopping carts, and promotions.
But with, new demands like seamless purchasing journey, unique corporate account ordering, assisted sales alternatives, and much more are driving eCommerce business towards new technologies.
To Conclude
It is important to understand customers first before building a digital strategy and technology stack. A powerful B2B eCommerce platform gives you the tool to personalize the digital experience for your customers.
Improving the search function by recommending the right products by analyzing data is a great way to make the business-to-business eCommerce experience delightful.