The way of doing B2B business has shifted drastically.
Give it to the pandemic and its aftershocks reshaping the B2B ecommerce trends for good.
Digital-age B2B buyers are inclined towards a B2C-like shopping experience due to shifts in customer preferences and remote-first engagement.
Is your B2B marketplace well-equipped to offer quick and effortless shopping?
With hybrid sales expected to be the dominant B2B sales strategy for 2024, do you have the means to adapt to these emerging trends?
Is your enterprise ecommerce solution versatile enough?
Wonder what are the trends we are talking about?
Let us explore the top 10 B2B marketplace trends for 2024 and beyond.
But before doing that, here is a quick sneak peek into the B2B ecommerce world.
- 80% of interactions to happen online between buyers and sellers by 2025
- 90%+ of B2B organizations have already shifted to digital channels
- 5% projected contribution of ecommerce in the Indian B2B market by 2030
- 50% of B2B companies are ready to move to an eB2B platform in the coming year
- 74% of B2B buyers feel buying from a B2B website is easier than buying offline
- 74% of B2B buyers would switch suppliers if another B2B marketplace offered a better experience
Source: Statista, Redseer, Bessemer Venture Partners
The B2B ecommerce sector is going to see a continuous climb in its growth down the line. To keep your marketplace ready for the upcoming challenges, you need to stay atop the customers' changing buying habits. Wonder how to ace your ecommerce game and keep your cash counter ringing?
Simple, keep an eye out for the trends as you build an online store for your B2B business.
Table of Contents
10 B2B Marketplace Trends for 2024 and beyond
Well, there’s a new trend coming up every other day. B2B buyers are becoming more and more clear about what they expect from their brands. With the right mix of in-person interactions, remote contact via phone or video, and e-commerce self-service, B2B buyers have driven the ecommerce trends towards B2C like experiences. However, to stay ahead of your competition and offer seamless shopping on your marketplace, here are the top 10 trends to watch out for.
1. B2C-like shopping experience
Going ahead in 2024, B2B marketplaces no longer mean plain websites or one-on-one buying. Digital selling is increasingly becoming the norm with the pressure on sellers to deliver B2C-like shopping experiences. As the B2B buyers are becoming more and more spoiled for choices, the onus is on the business-to-business sellers to have ample features to decorate their marketplace and offer vast product catalouges. Clear pricing information, real-time interactions, tailored content, etc is what drive customers to your B2B marketplace today.
StoreHippo B2B ecommerce platform comes with the best-in-class features to help customers navigate through your marketplace seamlessly and interact with the customers seamlessly. You can create unique design solutions for your website with StoreHippo’s built-in design library that comes with 100+ device-optimized themes. The easy-to-use drag-and-drop functionality helps even novice users to create professional looking designs in no time. With the faceted search feature your B2B customers can locate the exact product they are looking for.
2. Omnichannel selling
B2B buyers are using up to 10 sales channels before making a final purchase. The ecommerce trend has made the sellers opt for omnichannel ecommerce solutions for their B2B business. Yes, 61% of the B2B companies have already adopted an omnichannel strategy. With the growing demand for multi channel engagement, make sure that going ahead in 2024, you interact with your customers on multiple channels and offer them a seamless buying journey across all channels.
StoreHippo comes with ready-to-use ecommerce solutions for the multi channel selling needs of your B2B business. You can seamlessly create new customer touchpoints using the same backend logic and APIs with StoreHippo. You can also offer a personalized shopping experience on all the channels and manage them centrally using a common dashboard on your B2B marketplace. You can improve the operational efficiency across all sales channels. As you get better customer insights, you can leverage the best-performing sales channel and create data-driven growth strategies.
3. Dynamic personalizations
50% of the B2B buyers say personalization is the key factor in making a final purchase. As we enter 2024, personalization becomes a priority for all types of businesses. Personalized user experience is driving brands success, making it imperative for the brands to opt for enterprise ecommerce solutions that offer quick and easy personalizations. The modern age customers look forward to feeling acknowledged and being treated special when they come surfing your marketplace.
StoreHippo solutions come with a host of features to help you offer personalization on your marketplace. With the price override feature, you can seamlessly offer personalized product prices on your B2B ecommerce platform according to your customer segments and locations directly from your admin dashboard. You can also offer personalized discounts and coupons with the powerful discount engine and send out personalized notifications to your customers in real-time. With StoreHippo’s multilingual feature, you can also translate your B2B marketplace content and product descriptions into 100+ different languages.
4. Mobile-first approach
Well, it's 2024. B2B transactions are no more done in traditional ways. The business-to-business buyers are as accustomed to mobile shopping as B2C or D2C buyers. 91% of the B2B buyers use mobile for product search. Yes, with the advancements the B2B ecommerce is making, you need to build an online store on a platform that also offers mobile-ready solutions. Mobile sales channels have off-late become the primary sales channels for brands of every scale and size.
Storehippo ecommerce platform is built on a mobile-first approach that comes with a built-in mobile app builder. You can create your Android or iOS B2B mobile apps directly from your admin dashboard at zero additional costs without having to worry about coding. The online stores built with StoreHippo enterprise ecommerce solutions are PWA stores that work, look, and feel like mobile apps even on entry-level devices and work in poor internet connectivity. StoreHippo also offers a variety of apps for admins, vendors, delivery boys, etc. for brands to run their business on the go.
5. Automated business operations
The B2B ecommerce model entails complex business operations due and large-volume orders. It can become tiresome and challenging to manage multiple SKUs manually and keep track of all the orders and shipments. To seamlessly manage the business operations, you need a robust ecommerce solution that helps you not only manage the inventory but also automate the process and ensures faster order fulfillment. The 2024 ecommerce trend calls for quick moves and efficient business processes.
StoreHippo ecommerce solutions come with a built-in product management system that helps you streamline your products and manage the vast catalouge seamlessly. With the end-to-end vendor management solutions from StoreHippo, your vendors can seamlessly manage their day-to-day business processes via their separate vendor dashboards. Your vendors can add, delete, or change prices of single or bulk products in a single click with the advanced product management solutions from StoreHippo. The advanced order management system from StoreHippo helps save time and make the B2B order processes smooth and faster. With StoreHippo enterprise ecommerce solutions, you can seamlessly view your orders, check the best-selling products, and perform various other activities.
6. AI to improve customer experiences
It's 2024 and AI has become the new normal. Artificial Intelligence is growing at its full pace to be a huge part of our everyday lives. With AI existing in almost all spheres of ecommerce, B2B companies are going to adopt the ecommerce trend to create an improved customer experience. The power of AI can be harnessed to create personalized shopping experiences and target customers based on their buying preferences. The past purchases or browsing history of the buyers helps brands implement recommendations and personalize the customer experience using powerful AI tools.
With StoreHippo’s headless API technology, B2B enterprise brands can seamlessly integrate with the tools of their choice and chart an upward trajectory of growth going ahead in 2024. You can integrate with the best-in-breed AI or other advanced solutions to give an edge to your business over your competitors. You can seamlessly manage your day-to-day business with hassle-free and quick integration of third-party software like CRM, ERP, accounting, etc. StoreHippo also enables you to integrate with multiple delivery partners, payment channels, chatbots, live chat, etc to connect better with your customers and offer improved customer service on your B2B marketplace.
7. Self-service buying
75% of buyers prefer digital self-service and remote human contact over in-person communication. When you offer self-service facilities to your buyers, it cuts down their dependency on sales reps, reducing the multiple rounds of negotiations needed during a B2B order process. The future of ecommerce is faster sales cycles and automated business processes like shipping, order management, sending follow-up emails, etc. You can reduce system delays and inefficiencies, cater to customer grievances, and win happy customers for your B2B business by opting for self-service buying in 2024 and beyond.
StoreHippo enterprise ecommerce solutions come with a host of B2B features like RFQ, customizable forms, differential/multi pricing, tiered pricing, credit management, MOQ (Minimum Order Quantity), tax engine, etc. With such advanced B2B features at your fingertips, you can easily automate your B2B business processes and introduce self-service on your marketplace. StoreHippo also offers automated chat support via chatbots, delivery tracking, easy cancellations and refunds, etc. to help your buyers stay on top of their orders.
8. Analytics for strategic growth
B2B businesses need feature-rich marketing tools to implement strategic business moves and cater to different audience segments. The B2B buyers look for more real-time interactions with their brands, expect continuous offers, quick deliveries, etc, along with personalized deals and a seamless shopping experience on your B2B marketplace website. To plan strategically and implement all that your customers look for, you need a rich set of analytical tools that provide you with customer insights from various sales channels.
StoreHippo comes with a gamut of marketing tools and analytical solutions to help you analyze your customer segmentation and make data-centric marketing plans for overall business growth. Built on decoupled headless API, StoreHippo helps create personalized landing pages, and custom forms using the built-in form builder and helps capture rich customer data. With StoreHippo enterprise ecommerce solutions, you can seamlessly integrate with several data tools like Google Analytics, Zoho, etc. that provide rich customer data. The gamut of marketing tools from StoreHippo like email, push notifications, SEO tools, data analytics, etc help B2B brands drive sales on their marketplace. You can also recover abandoned carts by sending out personalized notifications to your customers.
9. Payment flexibility
B2B buying involves complex payment cycles and the buyers look for a simplified payment option that helps them shop seamlessly. With multiple digital means of payments, going ahead in 2024, B2B brands need to align safe and secure payment options on their B2B marketplace. Some of the B2B payments are also done in halves, part by part, half in advance, half after delivery, or even later after a pre-decided payment period (usually a month to 90 days) etc. Along with these, you can also offer rewards for full payments, and give them multiple payment options like digital wallets, UPI, etc.
StoreHippo ecommerce solution comes pre-integrated with 60+ domestic and international payment gateways. You can integrate with more than one payment gateway on your marketplace website so your customers can choose from their preferred payment options. You can offer payments to your customers via credit/debit cards, UPI, mobile wallets, store credit for deferred payments, net banking, etc. to ace the ecommerce trend of multiple payment options.
10. Streamlined supply chain
It’s 2024, and B2B buyers also look for quick deliveries. However, with bulk purchases, streamlining a quick supply chain can be a time-consuming process. You need to work in tandem with local delivery partners that help to streamline and fulfil large orders while also reducing manual errors. When you integrate with multiple logistic partners, you can also optimize shipping costs and time. You can also leverage your distributor’s warehouses to make hyperlocal order fulfilment seamless.
StoreHippo enterprise ecommerce solution helps automate the shipping and logistics process to import bulk orders, update order status, assign delivery partners, customize the shipping rates, etc seamlessly. With StoreHippo, you can also centrally control all your orders from different platforms and manage them effortlessly with the order management system. StoreHippo comes with 30+ logistic partners to streamline your shipping solutions. You can also integrate with the shipping solution of your choice to offer a quick and seamless delivery to your B2B buyers. With the built-in delivery boy management system from StoreHippo, you can also handle your fleet of delivery boys to create a streamlined supply chain.
Conclusion
B2B marketplaces have surpassed traditional sales methods. The continuous evolvement and new ecommerce trends have been catching up with the B2B buyers as well. As companies focus on keeping their customers happy, going ahead in 2024, customer satisfaction will be the driving force for both big and small brands.
StoreHippo B2B enterprise ecommerce solution helps you build conversion-oriented B2B marketplaces for your business. It offers a variety of features and tools to help you keep up with the trends like hyperlocal ecommerce, multi channel shopping, seamless checkouts, faster delivery etc. As you align your B2B business to the customers’ expectations, you carve a niche for your brand in the ecommerce market and succeed in staying relevant, proactive, and customer-centric.
All set to leverage the unique feature-rich, mobile-ready B2B ecommerce platform to build your B2B marketplace? Start your 14-day free trial now.
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