10 things to consider when you build an online store for your B2B2C brand

Needless to say, you know how complex handling a B2B2C brand can be, right?

With the combined needs of B2B and B2C ecommerce business models and the ecommerce industry being no longer linear, you need to create a seamless and value-driven ecosystem. 

And then you need to plan a multi-channel brand presence!

To build an online store for your B2B2C ecommerce business and carve a niche for your brand takes quite some hard work.

If you are flummoxed about where to start and how to plan your digital transition, you are just at the right place.

StoreHippo helps you plan a hassle-free transition and brings a list of 10 things to consider while taking your business-to-business-to-consumer brand online. 

B2B2C Ecommerce Transition made easy for your Brand

Data is the new-age gold. So to begin our journey, let us look at a few emerging B2B2C ecommerce trends:

• $1.7 trillion will be the global B2B2C market size by 2025
• 42% growth in B2B2C market size from 2021 to 2025
• 25% faster growth of B2B2C sales than traditional B2B sales
• 14.6% CAGR of the B2B2C market for 2021-2025
• 42.3% of the brands have the B2B2C model as their’ second main sales channel

Source: Forrester Research, Grand View Research, Copperberg

Speaking volumes, the above data paints just the right picture. With the crystal clear shift in the ecommerce industry, building an online presence for your B2B2C brand might not be enough. You need to reach out to your customers with a tailored solution that speaks to them and helps you strategically position your brand in the competitive ecommerce industry. 

How to handle the complex B2B2C businesses? Let’s find out: 

10 Things to consider when you build an online store for your B2B2C brand

To successfully build and run your B2B2C ecommerce brand, you need a powerful combination of effective strategies and comprehensive solutions. Since the ultimate goal is to boost your order volume and keep customers coming back to your B2B2C brand, let us look at top 10 things you should consider before stepping into the ecommerce space.

Build an online store that is a conversion magnet

The very first step towards building an online store is to work on its look and feel. You can’t just put together a few pieces and start selling online to customers who are looking for a unique, flexible, and intuitive shopping experience. To engage better and convert faster, you need to consider the store designs and create a personalized online store for your B2B2C ecommerce brand. As you offer personalized shopping experiences to your customers, you can also get repeat purchases and engagement. Personalization is what will help you become a conversion magnet.

StoreHippo ecommerce solutions come with a rich design library to help you play around with the store’s design and completely overhaul the look and feel of your B2B2C website in just a few clicks. With the easy drag-and-drop tool, you can create unique designs for your B2B2C ecommerce store without having to code. With 100+ device-optimized themes, you do not have to worry about your designs working on different devices. Built on a decoupled headless architecture, the StoreHippo ecommerce platform helps you implement multi-level personalization like personalized landing pages, product recommendations, discounts, checkout and payment options, delivery choices, etc. 

Comprehensive solutions for B2B and B2C aspects of business

B2B2C businesses require a combined setup of B2B and B2C business models. This means you need to consider a comprehensive solution that works best for B2B and B2C aspects of businesses. To build an online store for your B2B2C enterprise business, you need a cutting-edge technology solution that offers you multiple ways to remain agile, customer-centric, and future-proof. With the right ecommerce solution, your business can handle the complex requirements of both B2B and B2C businesses seamlessly.

StoreHippo offers a 360-degree ecommerce solution that helps build and run an enterprise-level ecommerce business and stay attuned to dynamic market trends. Powered by MEAN (MongoDB, ExpressJS, AngularJS and NodeJS) stack technology, StoreHippo is undoubtedly the most scalable technology stack currently available. With StoreHippo you get the freedom to experiment, innovate, and scale your B2B2C brand to higher levels. The built-in solutions for B2B and B2C ecommerce businesses, you also get unmatched flexibility, inherent scalability, and super-fast performance for your B2B2C businesses. 

 Create user-friendly interfaces for all stakeholders 

Wonder why we are focussing on a user-friendly interface? Well, as you make buying and selling easy on your online store, you set your business up for unprecedented growth. With a streamlined selling channel and a smooth buying process, you can make a kill in the B2B2C ecommerce sector. As you offer an intuitive interface and an easy ecommerce solution to carry out the business operations for your B2B business partners or delivery partners, you have a smooth functioning online store for your business. 

StoreHippo ecommerce solutions come with an easy-to-use ecommerce solution that even novice sellers can easily sell on. With a host of features like built-in multi vendor solutions, separate vendor dashboards, built-in product and order management solutions, shipping and return management solutions, and an intuitive interface, the B2B partners get freedom and flexibility to run their business effortlessly. When you build an online store with StoreHippo, you can create a simple user interface and easy navigation for your customers. Accessing orders, transaction details, getting in touch with customer service, etc helps you align quick conversions. The guided navigation and faceted search help customers find the product they are looking for in just a few clicks. 

Be available on multiple touchpoints

Customers today interact with their brands on multiple channels and expect their brands to be available for them over multiple channels. Are you all set to take your B2B2C brand on multiple touchpoints and offer an omnichannel experience to your customers? If not, you might want to reconsider and target your customers on all the channels they love to shop on. Yes, 60% of millennials expect brands to provide consistent experiences across multiple channels.    

StoreHippo comes with a ready-to-use omnichannel solution that takes care of your multi-channel selling needs. You can add new customer touchpoints using the same backend logic and APIs with StoreHippo and create consistent buyer experiences across multiple channels to boost engagement in just a few clicks. When you build an online store for your B2B2C business, you can also improve the overall business operational efficiency by centrally controlling all your sales channels. By selling omnichannel, you also get customer insights from multiple channels that help you leverage the most profitable sales channel for your enterprise business.

Factor in scalability to accommodate growth

The one thing we all tend to miss is factoring in the scalability of the ecommerce platform when building an online presence. To help you not make that mistake, here is why you should care about scalability in your B2B2C ecommerce marketplace builder. As you grow in the ecommerce industry, you need an ecommerce platform that can accommodate the growth your business is going to see. Handling the business operations should not be a pain as you scale up to millions of users or expand your business to new geographies.

StoreHippo is built on the most advanced technology stack that offers an inherently scalable infrastructure for a fast-growing ecommerce business like yours. The stores built on StoreHippo offer consistent high performance even when your business scales up to millions of users. With autoscaling and redundant server architecture, B2B2C ecommerce solutions from StoreHippo offer amazingly fast-speed online stores. It offers peak-load tolerance even during seasonal peaks and with 99.99% uptime . With StoreHippo, you do not need to worry about ecommerce migrations when you scale your business.

Focus on flexibility to build tailored solutions

Today is a world where customers are going gaga over unique, flexible, and intuitive shopping experiences. But how are you planning to leave a mark in the ecommerce world with your online store? Simple, by being flexible enough to make quick changes in your online store as the market trends shift. To become a versatile B2B2C ecommerce brand, build a tailored ecommerce solution that is adept at handling the complex requirements of the combination of B2B and B2C business models. 

Highly categorized by out-of-the-box features, built on next-gen ecommerce technology and MACH (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, Headless) architecture, StoreHippo is your go-to ecommerce solution provider. It accommodates business growth and is agile enough to adapt to changing market conditions. The fully hosted and managed, next-gen B2B2C software, StoreHippo unleashes the burden of managing the IT part and frees you for business development. You can easily extend the backend or frontend without disturbing the existing flow to create tailored ecommerce solutions for your B2B2C brand.

Scope for pivoting to new business models, markets and product lines 

Yes, it could be too early to predict if you would want to scale to new business models or to add new product lines, new geographies, etc. However, you would consider diversifying your business to a new or hybrid business model later, right? What are your plans then? Go for ecommerce migration? What if we bring you a better idea? When you build an online store for your business, consider a solution that helps you pivot to new business models seamlessly. 

StoreHippo ecommerce solutions come with advanced features to help you tweak your ecommerce platform to the unique needs of your business. With the battle-tested ecommerce solution by StoreHippo, you can build disruptive hybrid business models. The fully hosted and managed ecommerce solution helps you go to the market in record time with B2B, B2C, D2C, B2B2C, quick commerce, or other hybrid business models. Equipped with the right features for any B2B2C ecommerce brand like inherent flexibility and adaptability, StoreHippo helps switch or combine any new business model with an existing model, or add new product lines and new geographies. 

Create a secure website for your customers 

The fear of data scams is real. With the growth of online shopping and digital payments, security threats have become a challenge for enterprise brands and their customers. Your online store can not be vulnerable to cyberattacks like credit card fraud, phishing, SQL injection, etc. 

To do away with the pain of cyber attacks and keep your sensitive data safe, you should consider building a secure ecommerce website for your B2B2C brand. 

StoreHippo helps build a secure ecommerce website with its extensive features by securing transactions with PCI-DSS compliant payment gateways. StoreHippo provides data encryptions, strong security for all user access, compulsory login for the B2B2C ecommerce website, audit trails, and much more. StoreHippo also offers SSL security to keep your online business secure and ensure the safe experience of customers on the website. 

Advanced marketing and analytics tools 

To take your marketplace to your customers, you need the right marketing tools and a strategic marketing plan that will yield quick results, right? However, it can be challenging to channel out a marketing approach that suits both the B2B and B2C buying needs. While the B2B buyers look for quick negotiations and personalized deals, the B2C buyers look for push notifications and repeated offers. To cater to the needs of both audience segments of a B2B2C brand, you should consider an ecommerce solution that comes with the right set of tools and features. 

StoreHippo ecommerce platform offers a host of marketing tools to help you chart out a marketing strategy that fits the unique needs of your B2B2C business. The built-in powerful discount tool helps you create multi-level discounts for both your audience needs. With the ready-to-use SEO tool, you can rank higher on SERPs and gain organic traffic to your online store. With the help of a blog engine, you can curate personalized content for your B2B2C brand. You can also easily integrate with other popular marketing tools, analytical tools, etc. of your choice to take your business up a notch. 

Secure and hassle-free payments

Are you offering a frictionless checkout process? If not, it's time to consider streamlining your payment processes. Customers do not prefer long or complex payment processes, making it imperative to offer a smooth checkout process. Wonder how to do that? Simple. Offer multiple payment options to help your customers choose from. As you create an online store, make sure to consider offering a comfortable payment solution to your customers.

StoreHippo helps you build an online store with 60+ pre-integrated domestic and international payment solutions. You can offer an easy buying solution to your B2B2C customers by integrating with multiple payment gateways. As your customers can choose from a wide choice of payment options like COD, net banking, cards, store credits etc, they find buying easy on your online store. You can also enable payment gateways based on the location of the buyers and offer multi-currency payments for your global B2B2C customers.

Conclusion

As you plan to build an online store for your B2B2C business, you need the support of a 360-degree ecommerce solution provider to carve a niche in the market. With the ever-changing buyer habits, to sustain the ecommerce market you need the right set of features. A versatile and flexible business model like B2B2C helps you take your business places by onboarding other businesses from your desired industry verticals. 

StoreHippo is a robust, future-ready ecommerce platform that comes with 300+ API points and 120+ built-in integrations to help B2B2C brands get on an upward growth trajectory. StoreHippo also helps brands integrate with various third-party software of their choice like CRM, accounting, marketing, etc. StoreHippo comes with built-in ecommerce solutions for both B2B and B2C models. 

Are you all set to build an online store for your B2B2C ecommerce brand? Explore the enterprise-grade features of StoreHippo by starting your 14-day free trial. 

FAQ

1. How much time is needed to build B2B2C ecommerce mobile apps?

When you choose StoreHippo B2B2C ecommerce platform to build your mobile apps, you do not need much time. StoreHippo is built on a mobile-first technology that comes with a built-in mobile app builder. It helps you create multiple Android and iOS mobile apps right from your admin dashboard at zero additional costs and without the need for coding.  

When you build an online store with StoreHippo, you also create PWA stores that look, feel, and work like mobile apps even on entry-level devices. StoreHippo also offers multiple mobile solutions for different users like admin, vendors, delivery boys, etc. to help them handle their business on the go.                    

2. Do I need third-party apps and software to run my B2B2C brand online store?

Your need for third-party apps depends on your choice of ecommerce software. When you choose StoreHippo ecommerce software to build an online store, you do not need any extra apps or plugins to manage your business operations. StoreHippo is a 360-degree fully hosted and managed B2B2C ecommerce platform that comes with plug-and-play solutions to help you manage complex B2B2C business operations. You can however integrate with multiple software for smooth functioning of your B2B2C ecommerce marketplace with StoreHippo.             

3. Can my vendors integrate their existing software and logistics providers into the B2B2C marketplace?

Yes, when you build an online store with StoreHippo, your vendors can integrate with their existing software and logistics providers. StoreHippo offers seamless integrations to build innovative solutions using headless APIs. B2B2C brands can manage their business with hassle-free and quick integration of software like CRM, ERP, accounting, and so on. You can integrate with multiple delivery partners, payment channels, chatbots, live chat etc. StoreHippo comes with 120+ built-in integrations and integrates easily with the preferred software and service providers of enterprise marketplace brands.                                    

4. Will my vendors be able to sell easily on the B2B2C ecommerce store?

When you choose StoreHippo Solutions to build an online store for your B2B2C brand, you get an intuitive easy-to-use vendor management solution that even novice sellers can use. StoreHippo’s vendor dashboard offers a separate vendor account for each seller that makes it easy for them to manage and perform day-to-day business activities. Sellers can seamlessly overview their order summary, sales report etc. 

StoreHippo B2B2C ecommerce platform also offers a rich help center that comes with detailed answers to all your questions. You can refer to the guide as and when while working with StoreHippo ecommerce platform. 

5. Can the vendors set their own prices on the B2B2C ecommerce marketplace? 

Yes, with StoreHippo B2B2C ecommerce platform, your vendors can seamlessly set their prices. The built-in tiered pricing from StoreHippo helps you implement and manage multi-pricing in your marketplace. Your vendors can easily set up multi-level prices like volume-based pricing, rule-based prices, min-max quantity-based pricing, customer segment, or customer-specific pricing to attract and engage with customers from various segments.   

6. Is there any marketing tool to help me market my B2B2C brand?

Yes, when you choose StoreHippo B2B2C ecommerce solutions, you get access to a gamut of marketing tools. StoreHippo comes with a powerful built-in discount engine that helps implement multi level discounts. You can recover abandoned carts using the PUSH notifications feature from StoreHippo and engage with the audience using personalizations. The built-in SEO engine from StoreHippo helps you create unique URLs, meta descriptions, meta tags, etc., and rank higher on SERPs. You can also publish personalized content using the built-in blog engine from StoreHippo.                                                              

7. Can I implement transactions in different countries and currencies on my B2B2C ecommerce store?

Yes, you can. StoreHippo B2B2C ecommerce solutions help you handle transactions in multiple currencies seamlessly. StoreHippo comes with built-in global solutions to help you take your B2B2C ecommerce solutions to the global market. StoreHippo comes with 60+ pre-integrated domestic and international payment gateways. You can integrate with more than one payment solution to help customers choose from their preferred payment options like COD, netbanking, digital wallet, etc. With the multi currency support from StoreHippo, you can also enable your customers to make payments in their native currencies. You can enable IP-based auto switches on your B2B2C ecommerce marketplace or set different currencies for different locations. Your customers can also choose the currency of their choice while checking out.                                                                                                               

8. How can I manage data privacy and security when I build an online store for my B2B2C business?

When you build an online store with StoreHippo B2B2C ecommerce solutions, you can manage data privacy and security seamlessly. StoreHippo offers multi-layer security with an SSL certificate and highly secured payment gateways. You can ensure payment safety and protect sensitive information like passwords, customer details, etc. seamlessly with StoreHippo’s PCI DSS-compliant ecommerce platform.  

9. What are the features in StoreHippo to take my B2B2C brand to global markets seamlessly?

Yes, you can seamlessly take your B2B2C ecommerce multi vendor marketplace to the global markets. The multilingual feature from StoreHippo supports 100+ languages to help you convert your marketplace into different languages. You can engage with your customers in their native language. You can also build multiple sub-stores for the global markets right from your admin dashboard and create different URLs for each sub-store. You can also onboard multiple vendors from different countries on your B2B2C marketplace with the comprehensive multi vendor solutions from StoreHippo. The multi-currency support helps your customers make payments in their native currencies.                                                                                                      

10. Can I offer the option for customers reviews for vendors and products on my B2B2C ecommerce marketplace?

Yes, your customers can leave reviews for vendors and products on your B2B2C brand marketplace. With StoreHippo you can enable a custom feature to let your customers leave reviews. However, since it is a customized feature, it will entail extra costs depending on the requirements and efforts needed to build an online store with tailored solutions. Based on your customization requirements our expert team will assess the time and effort and charges will be decided on a pro rata basis.