10 Enterprise ecommerce trends to build a successful B2B marketplace in 2024 and beyond

How do you envision making your B2B marketplace successful?

Wonder what’s the next big step to make your B2B marketplace platform stand out?

Well, to race ahead of your competition, you need to stay atop the customer buying preferences. So Are you aligned with your customer’s expectations?

But what exactly are the enterprise ecommerce trends for 2024? And definitely in the years to come?

Have a look:

• 90%+ of B2B organizations have shifted to digital channels
• 74% of B2B buyers feel buying from a B2B website is easier than buying offline 
• 80% of interactions to happen online between buyers and sellers by 2025
• $90-100 billion GMV of eB2B market in India by 2030
• 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

Source: Redseer, Statista 

B2B enterprise ecommerce trends have redefined how B2B companies do business in 2024 and beyond. To build a successful B2B ecommerce platform, you need to be well aware of the ecommerce trends and your customer’s buying habits. Large enterprise businesses like yours can seamlessly manage multiple sellers, distributors, manufacturers, partners, etc to offer the best shopping experience to your customers. You only need to win buyers by adapting to what your customers are demanding.

10 Enterprise ecommerce trends to build B2B marketplace in 2024 and beyond

Wonder how to capture the B2B ecommerce market and scale your business? by building a successful? The right approach is to be well-versed with the customer buying trends and power your brand with a cutting-edge B2B marketplace platform that aligns your brand with the latest enterprise ecommerce trends. 

Here are the 10 top trends to look for before hopping on the ecommerce bandwagon:

Build your brand around customers 

It is the customers who make or break your business. When you create an online store for your B2B business, you need to make sure you have a continuous flow of customers on your platform, right? The right way forward is to build your brand around your customers. As you make your customers feel comfortable and confident with your brand, they become loyal, purchase repeatedly, and thus help boost your revenue.

StoreHippo is built on the decoupled headless architecture that helps you customize your B2B marketplace seamlessly. You can easily tweak your marketplace platform inside out for multi-level customizations suiting your business needs. You can build multiple storefronts/sub-stores for different locations, audiences, or different categories, customize the shipping solutions and digital payments, multilingual content, personalized pricing, different store designs, discounts, etc. with StoreHippo’s inherent flexibility. 

Offer your customers a wide choice of products 

Your customers are spoiled for choices. Conditioned by B2C buying, B2B customers also look for a wide range of options from their wholesale brands. As you spoil your customers for choice, you can boost your conversions and gain better engagement on your B2B marketplace. With a wide range of dealers or sellers on your marketplace, you can also plan your business growth and introduce new product options for your customers. 

StoreHippo ecommerce solutions offer inherent flexibility to help you manage multiple products seamlessly. With cloud scalability, you can scale to any number of products, vendors, markets etc. without compromising on the site performance or page load speed. You can also opt for product bundling, cross-selling, and upselling to experiment with new marketing strategies on your B2B marketplace. You can also onboard multiple vendors on your B2B marketplace platform with StoreHippo’s multi vendor ecommerce solutions. It comes with an easy-to-use and intuitive vendor dashboard that even novice sellers can seamlessly use to sell their products to customers.    

Connect with customers on multiple channels

B2B buying is no longer linear. Customers tend to explore various channels before they go ahead with a purchase. To build a successful marketplace for your B2B enterprise business, adopt the enterprise ecommerce trend of engaging with your customers on multiple platforms. You need to create a strong presence on at least 5-6 touchpoints to connect with the potential buyers.

StoreHippo ecommerce solutions come with comprehensive omnichannel solutions that help you create multiple touchpoints in just a few easy steps using the same backend logic and APIs. StoreHippo helps you create consistent buyer experiences across multiple channels and boost engagement on your B2B marketplace. You can also centrally control all your B2B sales channels and improve the operational efficiency across all the sales channels. With the rich customer insights from StoreHippo’s B2B marketplace platform, you can seamlessly leverage the most profitable channel and implement data-driven marketing strategies.

Reach your customers on their mobile devices

Well, 91% of B2B customers use mobile for product search. With mobile devices being the primary sales channel for most businesses, make sure to choose an ecommerce platform that comes with mobile-ready solutions. Building a mobile app for your enterprise business should not be time-consuming or challenging. As you create a strong mobile presence, you can reach a wider audience.

StoreHippo is built on a mobile-first principle that comes with a built-in mobile app builder. You can seamlessly build Android and iOS mobile apps from your admin dashboard at zero additional costs and without the need for coding. To leverage mobile solutions even in tier II and III cities, you can also build PWA stores for your B2B business with StoreHippo B2B enterprise ecommerce solutions. StoreHippo also comes with a host of mobile solutions for different users like delivery boys, admin, vendors, etc. to help them manage their business on the go. 

Personalize the shopping journey

Gone are the days when B2B shopping was simple. Today B2B buyers are well-accustomed to a user-friendly shopping experience and expect their brands to offer the best-in-class personalized buyer journey. Yes, you could be losing on your sales if you fail to implement multi-level personalizations on your B2B marketplace platform. Using personalizations you can make your customers heard and seen. 

StoreHippo is built on a decoupled headless architecture that helps you offer multi-level personalizations on your marketplace. The B2B ecommerce solution comes with a powerful built-in discount engine to help you offer multi-level personalized discounts, order-volume based, category-based, brand-based, etc. You can also use your customer’s browsing and order history to offer them personalized shopping journeys like product recommendations. You can also send personalized notifications to your customers like push, web, or mobile notifications to inform them about offers and discounts. With StoreHippo B2B enterprise ecommerce solutions, you can also recover abandoned carts by sending out personalized follow-up emails. 

Offer self-service 

97% of the buyers prefer self-service in a B2B marketplace set-up. Customers prefer eliminating the middlemen and salespeople from different stages of B2B buying. It is however not possible to remove them from the picture completely, so what is the next step? You can introduce forms and features that make it easy for the buyers to connect with the sellers on your B2B ecommerce platform. 

StoreHippo comes with a host of B2B features that help you create custom forms that you can place at different stages of B2B buying. You can choose the place where your customers are more likely to interact and gain rich customer insights. You can leverage rich customer insights to create personalized marketing strategies as per the enterprise ecommerce trends. Once the inquiry is registered on your platform, your sales and support team can follow up with the customer as their query is registered on the platform via custom forms. StoreHippo also comes with a built-in 3-party buyer-seller-admin chat that facilitates faster negotiations, and pricing comparison for your B2B buyers.

Strategize your marketing 

Is your marketing approach well aligned? Or is it a hap-hazard marketing approach that you have right now? To succeed in B2B marketing, you need a clear understanding of the market conditions and draft a marketing strategy that helps you boost profit margins on your B2B marketplace platform. To successfully strategize your marketing and carve a niche for your B2B brand in the ecommerce industry, you need the right set of tools that help you strategize and implement marketing plans seamlessly.

StoreHippo comes with a gamut of marketing tools and features to help you market your B2B enterprise brand. The comprehensive and easy-to-use built-in SEO tools help you rank higher on SERPs. You can create unique URLs for pages, meta titles, meta descriptions, meta tags, keywords, etc right from the admin dashboard of your B2B marketplace. With the powerful built-in discount engine from StoreHippo, you can offer multi-level discounts and create customized coupon codes for your customers. 

Composable commerce

Do you think composable commerce is a new entrant in the B2B ecommerce marketplace? Well, the enterprise ecommerce trend has been around for ages. Almost 50% of the companies have already adopted composable commerce to race ahead of their competitors. Composable commerce is about choosing the best-of-breed commerce components and combining or 'composing' them together to build tailor-made solutions for the specific business needs of your B2B marketplace platform. You can seamlessly integrate with the best solutions/software available in the market, test it, and use it.

StoreHippo is built on a MACH architecture that connects all disparate systems and applications to help you integrate with best-in-breed marketing, accounting, ERP, CRM, logistics, payment providers, etc. With composable commerce B2B enterprise brands get greater flexibility, agility, and creative control. Brands can create personalized customer experiences, and seamlessly add or edit features using StoreHippo’s headless ecommerce solutions.  

Provide multiple payment options

B2B marketplace payments are complex. Customers need a frictionless payment process that helps them make payments seamlessly. Since B2B buyers prefer to make payments in segments, you can incentivize quick and faster payments by offering discounts and offers on instant payments. You can offer a 2% discount to customers who pay their invoices within a given time frame, say a week. You can also make payments easier by integrating multiple payment options that allow your customers to choose their preferred payment gateway.

StoreHippo B2B enterprise ecommerce solutions help you integrate with multiple payment options. StoreHippo comes pre-integrated with 60+ domestic and international payment gateways like digital wallets, mobile payments, credit cards, UPI, net banking, etc. Some of the B2B payments are also made 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. StoreHippo solutions also provide B2B wallets and credit management for your enterprise brand. .

Streamline quick deliveries

B2B purchases are often done in bulk, making it a tad bit tough to streamline quick deliveries. However, accustomed to a B2C-like shopping experience, B2B buyers look for quick deliveries as well. The enterprise ecommerce trend of quick deliveries has made B2B brands partner with local logistics companies which also helps them optimize their shipping costs. You can also leverage your distributor’s warehouses for seamless hyperlocal order fulfilment. 

StoreHippo comes with 30+ pre-integrated shipping solutions to help you seamlessly fiulfill your B2B orders. You can integrate with multiple shipping solutions for a seamless supply chain. You can also optimize the shipping charges by choosing the best solution for your B2B marketplace. You can also manage your fleet of delivery boys with StoreHippo’s built-in delivery boy management solution to ensure timely deliveries.   

Conclusion

It could no doubt be challenging to build a successful B2B marketplace in 2024 and beyond. But when you plan to build an online store with futuristic features and a robust ecommerce solution, you can be positioned to carve a niche for your enterprise business-to-business brand.  

StoreHippo is the best B2B enterprise ecommerce solution that comes with 300+ enterprise-grade features and helps you build a secure and scalable B2B marketplace platform for 2024 and beyond. With a host of dynamic features for your B2B enterprise business, StoreHippo provides you with everything you need to take your business to the next level. 

All set to carve a niche for your B2B marketplace and build an online store for your business? Explore the wide range of features from StoreHippo B2B enterprise ecommerce solutions by starting your 14-day free trial now.