B2B eCommerce is growing by the minute. In fact, B2B eCommerce is predicted to be 17% of all B2B sales in the U.S. by 2023 according to BigCommerce, compared to only 9% before the pandemic. According to Gartner, by 2025, 80% of B2B sales transactions between buyers and suppliers will occur via digital channels. Now that’s what we call a fast-growing industry.
As you see, online shopping is no longer reserved for B2C businesses selling products to individual users. Nowadays, big businesses are choosing to expand their offer and give more options to their customers, who might prefer doing their shopping online, even when we talk B2B.
However, B2C differs from B2B in some ways. So it does when it comes to selling online. How is the B2B field evolving within the eCommerce industry? What are its challenges and benefits? Let’s talk about it.
eCommerce was, for most of its lifetime, something pretty much reserved for B2C businesses. Nowadays, however, more and more eCommerce platforms like BigCommerce are paying extra attention to B2B. This became more evident since the pandemic made it necessary for businesses to broaden their horizons and look for new solutions. “There’s not a lot of businesses in the next 10 years that won’t have an eCommerce site”, said BigCommerce’s Business Development Director, Alec Berkley, during an episode of eCommerce podcast The Link.
It has now become obvious that it’s important to offer a B2C experience even within a B2B space. We are still dealing with people when we sell to other businesses, and they also want an easy-going, pleasant online shopping experience.
Now, this evolution doesn’t come without its challenges. Some might argue that sales reps can feel threatened by B2B eCommerce, but eCommerce isn’t a competition to old selling systems. Here are some ways BigCommerce advises incorporating eCommerce in B2B:
- Use technology to reduce manual work and mistakes.
- Increase customer support and loyalty with all your extra time.
- Align your teams with a single source of truth — and scale better.
- Reduce costs while increasing sales (no-brainer).
- Make ecommerce integral, not central.
- Talk to customers as you always have — now, over text or messenger.
Another common fear of B2B businesses is average order value decreasing when making their sales online since sales reps can add value to orders by talking to customers and advising them on other products they might want to try. However, nowadays there are personalization tools that can target that online, based on data, that also have immense potential to grow AOV.
Now, let’s talk about the benefits. As we said, some eCommerce platforms are already on top of it and working daily to improve their B2B features. In the case of BigCommerce, they created a B2B Edition that focuses solely on B2B businesses, with some very useful features such as:
- Price lists and customer groups: Provide custom pricing down to the SKU level, offer bulk buying discounts, and create promotions for select groups.
- Corporate account management: Allow customers to set up multiple tiers of buyers with specific roles and permissions based on their roles and authority levels.
- Restricted log-in: Leverage customer groups to require merchants to log in before accessing particular content. Guest and B2C users can also apply for a corporate account.
- Invoice portal: Allow customers to easily manage and pay invoices online with a credit card, ACH, purchase order, or other payment methods.
- Shared shopping lists: Manage and save multiple shopping lists, retrieve these for future use, and seamlessly purchase previously saved products.
- Buy again: Company users can view all company-level previously purchased products with the company-specific base price.
- Sales representative quoting: Sales representatives can create a quote and provide additional discounts to customers on top of pre-arranged pricing.
As we can observe, B2B eCommerce is growing rapidly. We can expect that most B2B businesses will add eCommerce as an option for buying their products in a matter of a few years since we can see it already happening. And we’re here to help!
For more information on B2B and BigCommerce, listen to this episode of The Link: eCommerce connections.
To learn more about BigCommerce and our BigCommerce NetSuite integration to leverage both platforms or about optimizing your eCommerce site, contact our experts today.