The landscape of B2B e-commerce is ever-changing. Things that were sufficient yesterday simply won't do today. Here are a few to-do's that will help you to get better and more conversions, and build a lasting relationship with loyal customers.
Improve Customer Experience
Yes, B2B e-commerce is all about businesses and companies, but we should never forget that it's still actual people that do the searching, deciding and buying. And they do that with a good portion of gut-feeling! Granted, your prices should be good, your service should be good, but people and their companies will never actually click the 'buy now' button unless the "Customer Experience" is as it should be. What exactly is this Customer Experience, you might ask? Great question!
Often abbreviated to CX, the customer experience can be defined as the sum of all interactions customers have with a company. The quality of any encounters a customer has with your company, your products, services and brand, results in either a positive or negative experience. In this blog post we focus on the digital customer experience; researching your products or brand online, visiting your website or webshop, searching for technical information. It all has to be done well! As we have written before, your website needs to be fully responsive, meaning it works well on PCs, tablets and mobile phones.
Again, any step in this journey adds up to the complete 'experience', and you want it to be a good one!
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Request For Proposal
A great CX is not a goal in itself, however, it does help to lower the threshold for your customer to start interacting, and eventually buying your products. As we have explained in this post, conversion rules. Now, one of the best-proven ways to make it easier for your customers to start interacting is to 'request a proposal'. This simply means that your customer does not have to buy to straight away, he can easily request a special price. When you use an extension such as Cart2Quote on your Magento website, it might look something like this:
Now, what this does for you as the seller, is that it helps you to start communicating with your website visitor. For when you receive this 'request for a proposal', you can easily make a custom price and, through the built-in CRM module, initiate a chat with your customer. That obviously helps you to create a positive Customer Experience; respond fast and accurate, make it personal and helpful, and lift your service level to new heights!
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Simplificate Your Order Processes
So, your customer accepts the Proposal you have sent? Great! That's a conversion, and that's why you made a website in the first place! But, wait, actually, you have only just begun. Because now you need to deliver and live up to the expectations of your new customer. That means that the order process, shipping, service and follow-up communication has to be in place! The great thing about Magento is that it's a great platform for B2B companies. The basics are all in place to be able to handle repeated purchases (your customer has his own order history available), you can easily assign multiple contact persons per company*, you can create custom products, plus there are many extensions available that make Magento even more B2B proof. We have already mentioned the Cart2Quote Request-for-Quote extension, but you might also like the Not2Order extension, giving you even more freedom in showing or hiding prices, buy-now buttons and more. Though Magento has a complete workaround for orders and processes, you can still choose to use API's to make it work together smoothly with your existing Order Management Systems (OMS) or Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). Whatever makes your processes work as smooth as possible for your customer. You decide!
Conclusion
For B2B companies, e-commerce is definitely the way forward. Simply copy-pasting the way of running an offline business to a website is really not enough. Here at Cart2Quote, we are fully committed to serving B2B companies as good as we can to make their e-commerce platform a success! Want to pick our brains? Have some questions? Please contact us or simply make a start with Cart2Quote and see how it can skyrocket your sales!
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