Top 7 B2C ecommerce features that help your B2B business carve a niche

Gone are the days when shopping on a B2B online marketplace meant browsing through a glued together site with minimal aesthetics and a complex ordering process.

New age enterprise ecommerce solutions for wholesale buying are a mirror image of their cousin B2C marketplace. 

Wondering how?

Well, the most remarkable one is its close resemblance in experience and ease of buying. 

The changing buying habits of the B2B buyers has influenced the way of doing business. 

Here are some statistics that prove the same.

• 80% of business-to-business sales will be done online by 2025
• 10+ touch points explored by average B2B buyers to connect with sellers 
• 70% of B2B buyers prefer remote, digital self-serve business
• 71% of B2B buyers prefer not to interact with a salesperson
• 59% of customers say that personalization influences their shopping decision 
• 78% of B2B brands believe that mobile commerce is a future driver of their industry

Source: Statista, McKinsey & Company

The B2B buyers no longer look for a linear shopping experience. They expect to engage more with your B2B online marketplace and have a seamless buying journey.

The question here is are you offering ease of shopping to your customers? 

If not, now is the time to drop everything you are doing and create a seamless engaging customer experience just as B2C ecommerce solutions.

7 B2C ecommerce features to help your B2B business carve a niche

Google study found that 93% of the customers look for similar ecommerce experiences as they get from B2C sites. To carve a niche for your B2B business in the ecommerce world, you need to leave a long lasting impression on your customers. 

Wondering how to provide your customers ease of shopping on your enterprise ecommerce platform? 

Let us look at the 7 top B2C ecommerce features that can help B2B businesses carve a niche in the industry.

Beautiful design 

If you are of the thought that beautiful store designs are only meant for B2C ecommerce solutions, you are mistaken there. 76% of the B2B buyers consider site design to be one of the most important factors while making a purchase decision. B2B journeys used to be a dull affair with a plain landing site, simply listed products and a checkout function. However, the business-to-business buyers are conditioned by their B2C experiences and look forward to having a similar shopping experience.

Surprising as it may sound, but you need beautiful designs to attract B2B buyers as well. When you create beautiful and attractive store designs for your customers, they spend more time on your platform, increasing the chance of purchases.

StoreHippo enterprise ecommerce platform helps you seamlessly create an astonishing website design with simple drag and drop customizations. You can completely overhaul your website look within minutes without knowing any coding. StoreHippo comes with a rich design themes library that enables you to play with various design templates and create professional looking websites in just a few clicks. You can change your logo, product grids, banners etc and align your ecommerce store with the upcoming festivals or promotional events. 

Extreme personalization

When we talk about personalizations on B2B online marketplaces, we straight away think of price-based personalizations. However, today is the era of hyper-personalization and brands that offer multi-level customizations are able to boost their businesses better. 80% of buyers trust a B2B brand that publishes relevant content customized based on their previous interactions with the brand.

Just as a B2C buyer journey is extremely customized to the preferences of their buyers, when you personalize your B2B business, your platform becomes engaging and keeps your buyers hooked. By offering personalisation on your B2B ecommerce website you can ensure that your customers see the products they are interested in buying, along with the prices or promotions that specifically apply to them and get to choose the payment and shipping solutions that fits their requirements. Additionally, offering content in native language goes a long way in boosting conversions.

With StoreHippo’s headless architecture-based B2B ecommerce solution you can easily create personalized buyer journeys that can engage, convert and retain your customers better. With StoreHippo, you can also level-up your personalization game with support for multiple languages, multi-currency payments, multi-currency invoices, options to choose different types of shipping solutions etc. You can seamlessly implement multi-level pricing (like volume-based pricing, rule-based prices, customer segment or customer-specific pricing, pricing comparison, tiered pricing etc) to attract different buyer segments. 

Mobile commerce presence 

It is mobile phones where most of the ecommerce happens today. 70% of B2B buyers have increased the usage of the mobile channel for their purchase journey and 65% of enterprise B2B brands already have their mobile sales channels in place. 

Enterprise ecommerce platforms that offer a seamless shopping experience on mobile channels can win over their customers easily. When you offer your customers ease and convenience along with engaging site design on all devices, you can effortlessly boost your conversion rates. With PWA stores and marketplace apps, it becomes easy for your sellers and buyers to reach far-off remote as well as international markets.

StoreHippo B2B ecommerce solutions is built on mobile-first technology offering a variety of mobile-ready solutions. B2B ecommerce stores built on StoreHippo are PWA stores that work, look, and feel like mobile apps even on entry level devices. With the inbuilt mobile apps builder from StoreHippo, you can build mobile apps without any coding and at no additional costs. With a mobile admin panel you can seamlessly run and manage your business on the go. 

Omnichannel shopping experience

The B2C buyers are now fully accustomed to an omnichannel shopping experience. These B2C buyers whilst shopping on B2B online marketplace also look for a similar multi channel shopping experience. And as you add multiple selling channels to your wholesale ecommerce business, your customers connect and engage with you like never before. 

The decoupled headless architecture from StoreHippo enables you to add new customer touchpoints quickly using the same backend logic and APIs used for building the B2B marketplace website. 

With the comprehensive omnichannel enterprise solutions you can centrally control all your sales channels and improve operational efficiency across all channels. You can easily strategize product-channel mixes for faster growth of your B2B online marketplace. StoreHippo also enables you to build your own marketplace apps and create multiple front ends to quickly engage and convert your B2B buyers. As you get better customer insights from multiple channels, you can leverage the most profitable channel with data-driven strategies. Sounds amazing right? 

Simplified search and navigation 

92% of B2B purchases start with search, implying how essential it is to offer a seamless search and navigation on your B2B online marketplaces today. When you facilitate quick searches, you enable your business-to-business customers to make quick buying decisions.

With the rapidly shifting buyer habits, you need to stay a step ahead of the buyers’ needs and align your business to carve a niche in the industry. One way to go around is to display products that align with your business goals, such as promoting new items or items that are high in demand. Along with a quick search, you also need to offer a fast page load speed on your enterprise ecommerce platform. Imagine you’re a buyer trying to make a big purchase, the very last thing you want is a slow and unresponsive search experience

With StoreHippo, you can enhance the online shopping experience of your customers by introducing faceted search for product filtering on your online store. You exercise complete control on types of filters and their order of display. You can define category levels and create different facet groups based on the search criteria for any given category. Built on the most advanced technology stack (MEAN stack), StoreHippo also offers an inherently scalable solution for your high-volume fast-growing businesses. StoreHippo helps you build a disruptive B2B online marketplace offering peak-load tolerance even during seasonal peaks. 

Easy order process 

B2B buying can be complex, which can push the buyers away. The new-age buyers have seen how B2C ecommerce solutions offer a seamless shopping experience. With those expectations in mind, when B2B buyers face a long complex B2B buying experience, they tend to never return. 

However, when you automate the buying process, you can quickly convert sales and boost your ROI. B2B buyers usually purchase in bulk, meaning that the sellers need to offer easy negotiations and quick handling of large orders. Have you thought about embracing self-service on your B2B online marketplace?

StoreHippo comes with a host of enterprise-grade features that help B2B businesses implement self-service on their platform. It offers built-in forms that can be enabled 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. It helps the buyers make informed decisions and cut down on negotiation time. 

With the built-in blog engine from StoreHippo, you can also create  informative user-friendly content, which will yet again help the buyers make informed decisions. With the StoreHippo enterprise ecommerce platform, you can also integrate with different chatbots and live-chat software to enable your business-to-business buyers to connect with support teams or sellers in real time.

Multiple payment options

The one thing that makes B2C selling seamless is multiple payment options offered to the customers. When you offer flexible payment choices, your buyers are able to choose the payment method based on their preferences, feeling more confident and comfortable with shopping on your platform. The same is true for B2B buyers. As you offer multiple payment options, your buyers will prefer shopping on your B2B online marketplace.

B2B purchases usually happen in bulk with high-value orders. So how do you make the complex payment process seamless? With StoreHippo.

Yes, StoreHippo offers a wide array of payment options for your business-to-business customers. You can choose from 60+ pre-integrated payment gateways from StoreHippo or offer B2B wallet and credit options for payment. Along with these, StoreHippo B2B ecommerce solutions also supports a wide spectrum of other payment options like netbanking, UPI, digital wallets, mobile wallets etc.   

Conclusion

Although B2B ecommerce businesses have unique requirements and the audience is hugely different from that of B2C businesses, B2B brands can as well gain a competitive edge by incorporating a few features from B2C ecommerce solutions. 

However, you need an enterprise ecommerce solution that can help you design a diverse range of B2B and B2C business solutions. StoreHippo SaaS-based ecommerce solution offers future-ready technology with 300+ enterprise-grade features, to give your B2B online marketplace an edge over your competitors.

Are you ready to explore the unique B2B features from StoreHippo enterprise ecommerce platform? Start your 14-day free trial now.