For many B2B companies, their website is just a brochure for the business. They may offer content that attracts prospects, like information about the company and its products, useful blog posts, or brochure and white paper downloads.
But their B2B website doesn’t manage ecommerce. You can’t buy via it or set up a customer account or access other services as a customer. Is your website B2B ready? If not, you are missing out on opportunities to grow your business and to serve your customers at any time.
Here are some of the ways that a B2B ecommerce website can help your company.
Provide Customers with 24/7 Self-Service
With an ecommerce website available 24 hours a day, every day of the year, you are always open for business. Your customers can sign into their accounts at any time to view their details, print statements and make payments. They can check the status of a current order, including delivery details, and view details about their prior orders.
Giving your customers the autonomy to access and amend their information like this improves customer satisfaction.
Self-service also reduces pressure on customer service staff and frees them up to concentrate on other important tasks. Customers can buy at any time of the day or night, without you needing to staff your office or phone lines.
Grow Sales More Efficiently
A B2B website increases your capacity to scale. You can handle greater levels of demand and grow your transactions without having to correspondingly increase your head count.
You can provide customers with a wide range of self-service buying features. They can request quotations, place orders at any time and view your current range of products and stock levels. You can also market directly to them, promoting any new inventory that you are planning to launch.
Improve Efficiency
With integration from your web store directly into your ERP, you limit the amount of manual entry that you staff need to perform, improving efficiency in your business. The B2B portal eliminates the need to duplicate orders on your other systems or to wait until the next working day to place the order.
With customers logging in to the B2B portal at all times of the day or night, the system can process their orders immediately, which also reduces delays in the supply chain.
Reduce Errors
Because the automated processes and workflows mean no rekeying is needed, there is a reduced chance of errors made by staff. In this way, shipping processes become more efficient, and order processing speeds are increased.
Sales transaction costs are lowered and the whole sales-delivery-payment cycle happens faster.
Give Your Customers What They Want
Analysis from McKinsey shows that the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed B2B sales forever. For many B2B companies, selling online began as a necessity during the pandemic. However, that “new normal” has persisted and about 70-80% of B2B buyers now prefer being able to digitally self-serve and having remote sales interactions.
If B2B buyers prefer this way of purchasing, then those that do not provide this kind of digital experience will miss out on sales, which will go instead to competitors that do have B2B portals.
Services from UnlockCommerce for NetSuite SuiteCommerce
We’ve partnered with UnlockCommerce to provide services for customers wanting to deploy or improve their existing NetSuite SuiteCommerce instance.
Whether you want to create a new B2B portal or are looking to migrate your website from a different platform, together UnlockCommerce and NoBlue can help you provide a seamless self-service experience for your B2B customers.
Through implementation, customisation and integration, we can deliver a self-service portal to manage your website. Plus, we can enhance it with custom scripting and workflows that help SuiteCommerce integrate more tightly with the rest of NetSuite.
For more information or for a quote for a B2B website that will help your business grow, contact us today to speak to a certified consultant.
