5 ways to modernize your B2B ecommerce buyer journey

Just implementing B2B ecommerce is no longer enough to scale your business.

You need to feel the pulse of your customers and offer them what they are not getting from other enterprise brands.

Well, the buying journey is not a straight line, it's flexible, and unique for each customer. 

And once you understand what your customer's buyer journey is, you can design your B2B ecommerce solution according to the tailored needs of your customers. 

However, to modernize and align your B2B online marketplace with the modern times, you need to first understand and attune your brand with the shifts in the digital B2B landscape. Here is how B2B ecommerce is shaping up:

• 90% + of B2B companies have moved to biz-to-biz ecommerce in some way or other
• 80% of business-to-business sales to be done online by 2025
• 70% of B2B buyers prefer remote, digital self-serve business
• 10+ touchpoints explored by average B2B buyers to connect with sellers 
• $31.19 billion is the estimated GMV of global B2B online marketplaces 
• 20.2% is the forecasted CAGR for business-to-business ecommerce for 2023-2030

Source: Statista, McKinsey & Company, DHL Express

The B2B ecommerce industry is expected to take massive turns and soar high. With such impressive growth of the industry, you need to attune your brand to your customers expectations. 

The B2B buying process 

B2B buying is much more complex and intense than meets the eye. 

Wondering what the B2B buying process looks like? Let’s have a look at the different stages of biz-to-biz buying.

• The awareness stage where the customer has just realized their pain point. For example, a corporate office needs a copier in bulk. It's the need for a new product that has to be acknowledged
• Now the business starts the search stage for the pain point using traditional offline channels and digital channels such as brand websites, search engines, white papers and B2B online marketplaces 
• In this stage of the buying process, the customer is evaluating and comparing solutions to figure out the best solution for their company. Once done, the buyer might also request an RFP
• In this transactional stage, the customer has made the decision and is discussing and negotiating the payment terms

As the technology escalates, and as new buying trends set-in, the buyers' habits shift. This means the B2B companies need not only be a step ahead but also be innovative in providing the best-in-class buyer journey to their customers.

How to modernize your B2B ecommerce buyer journey 

Is your buying journey seamless enough for the new-age buyers to make a stop on your B2B ecommerce platform? 

If not, now is the time to drop everything you are doing and modernize your B2B buyer journey. 

Wondering how to go about it?

StoreHippo brings a list of 5 proven ways to modernize your B2B ecommerce buyer journey

Implement seamless digital buying on your B2B marketplace 

Every customer is in a hurry today and does not like to wait for a long sales cycle. B2B buying is however categorized with a longer sales cycle which calls for the need to make selling faster. And if you are battling how to go about that, try automating the sales process. By implementing self-service, B2B ecommerce businesses can not only facilitate quick selling but also easily handle the negotiations of bulk orders. 

Self-service is no more an alien concept for business-to-business buyers. To help you align your brand to the self-service model, StoreHippo comes with a host of enterprise-grade features. It offers built-in forms that enable enterprise brands to add various forms at different stages of a purchase cycle, RFQ, MOQ, inbuilt 3-party buyer-seller-admin chat that help facilitate faster negotiations, pricing comparison, tiered pricing etc help make informed decisions faster and cut down on negotiations time. 

You can also integrate your B2B online marketplace with different chatbots and live-chat software enabling buyers to connect with support teams and sellers in real time. 

Make your B2B ecommerce brand available across multiple digital channels

94% of B2B decision makers say the new omnichannel sales model is as effective or more compared to the sales model they used before the pandemic. Having said that, B2B buyers look for an impeccable shopping experience across multiple digital channels. In this highly competitive market, making your brand available across multiple channels can help you engage your buyers better and identify your B2B ecommerce business as a customer-centric brand.

StoreHippo helps you add new customer touchpoints rapidly with its decoupled headless architecture and 300+ API endpoints. You can seamlessly build marketplace apps and create multiple frontends to quickly engage and convert your buyers using the same backend logic and APIs used for building the B2B marketplace. You can also experiment with different product-market mixes for different channels to identify the best channel-product fit. With better customer insights on multiple channels, you can leverage the most profitable channel and create data-driven strategies for your enterprise brand.

Implement customer-centric marketing

With 83% of B2B buyers believing that personalization enhances their purchasing experiences, B2B ecommerce brands need to focus more on implementing customer-centric marketing across channels. To lock in more sales and gravitate your enterprise business towards increased conversions, offering a personalized customer experience becomes a must. 

StoreHippo enterprise solution provider has everything you need to offer quick and personalized buying. With the powerful in-built discount engine, you can set up multi-level discounts like order-based, device or buyer behavior-based promotions. You can seamlessly engage with your B2B buyers by sending out personalized email pop-ups or mobile push notifications. With StoreHippo you can also create different b2b storefronts for different locations, audiences, or different categories and implement targeted marketing campaigns. 

Offer relevant information 

When B2B ecommerce businesses provide tailored content to their customers based on their unique needs, the buyers can make quick buying decisions. Since B2B buying is highly categorized with the long process of evaluating purchase options before actually making a purchase, it becomes imperative to offer blogs, detailed product guides and whitepapers. 

StoreHippo offers a variety of tools and features to help you implement personalized content on your B2B online marketplace. With the in-built blog engine, you can write about your products and help your ideal customers make an informed decision. StoreHippo also comes with a rich design theme library to help you build professional looking B2B online marketplaces or dynamic pages with the easy drag-and-drop tool. 

Centralize information exchange 

Gone are the days when B2B buyers used to wait for long hours to get quotations and information from business-to-business companies. In the fast-moving ecommerce world like today, everything happens at a snap. Your B2B customers expect you to offer a centralized information exchange portal that can make buying less complicated and quicker. 

StoreHippo offers a gamut of enterprise-grade features to seamlessly implement self service and easily integrate with chosen software and service providers like ERP, CRM, accounting, logistics etc. Say a customer wants to enquire about different types of chairs, the marketplace salesperson must be able to provide the customers with basic info like quote and delivery time. The buyer-seller-admin interaction helps the customer make quick informed decisions and shorten the negotiation time.  

Conclusion

Willing to carve your niche in the B2B ecommerce market? Take the sure shot way to your customers heart by modernizing their buyer journey. All the aforementioned techniques will help you set your biz-to-biz business on an upward growth trajectory. 

StoreHippo helps you seamlessly modernize the buyer journey on your B2B online marketplace with its 300+ inbuilt features such as one-stop shipping solution, omnichannel solutions, 50+ pre-integrated payment gateways, automated marketing tools, customizable themes, analytics, mobile app builder etc. It enables you to create, run, and grow your enterprise brands in no time.

But you don’t have to take our word for it, explore the B2B ecommerce solutions and its enterprise-grade features by starting your 14-day free trial now.