In today’s competitive B2B landscape, a satisfactory shopping experience does not suffice.
You need your clients to fall head over heels in love with your B2B marketplace.
Wonder why?
Well, when your clients are truly in love with your brand, they become more than just customers.
The emotional connection fosters trust, drives growth, and helps build a successful B2B marketplace.
How to take this strategic imperative ahead?
How to transform your ecommerce journey into a lasting love affair?
What are the secrets to creating loyalty in your B2B relationships?
Let us elevate your B2B game and unlock the power of liking, and loyalty in your marketplace strategy as you create a B2B marketplace website.
Before we take the high road, let us sample some B2B buying trends.
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B2B Ecommerce Marketplace: Customer Buying Trends
The B2B ecommerce market has seen a massive upsurge in recent years. Give it to the COVID-induced disruptions that the buyers have shifted online, reshaping the way B2B businesses are done.
- 90% of B2B organizations have started selling through digital channels
- 97% of B2B customers are comfortable with self-serviced digital purchases
- 10+ channels are used by B2B customers to connect with suppliers
- 70% of B2B buyers started using m-commerce channels more in the past 2-3 years
- 74% of B2B buyers prefer online buying over buying offline
- 72% of B2B buyers expect personalized experiences across all channels
- 90% of B2B buyers would switch to a competitor B2B marketplace website if their supplier/manufacturer’s website fails to keep up with their needs
- 89% of B2B buyers say consistent experience across channels is essential to their loyalty
Source: Forbes, McKinsey & Company, Digital Commerce 360, Gartner, LinkedIn
One notable trend in B2B buying habits is the growing preference for a B2B marketplace that offers intuitive user interfaces, personalized recommendations, and easy access to information. With the technical advancements and changing market dynamics, brands need to interact with their buyers across channels, mobile being the most preferred mode of shopping.
How to get your clients fall in love with your B2B marketplace
As you build a successful B2B marketplace, you certainly look at operational efficiency. However, to get your clients go gaga over your marketplace brand, you need special insights and insider tips.
Based on the data-driven insights we just shared with you, here are the top 10 winning strategies to get your clients to fall in love with your business-to-business marketplace.
B2C-like Shopping Experience
Well, B2B clients love their brands to offer a B2C-like shopping experience. Gone are the days when a simply put-together website could do the trick. If you need your clients to fall in love with your business-to-business marketplace, you must offer them something other marketplaces are not offering. And what could be better than a shopping experience filled with multiple product options, real-time interactions, tailored content, and personalized buyer journeys? As you create a B2B marketplace website, deliver a B2C-like shopping experience that drives customers to your marketplace.
StoreHippo B2B ecommerce platform offers best-in-class features to help you create a seamless shopping experience. You can create unique design solutions for your marketplace with StoreHippo’s built-in design theme library. You can choose from 100+ device-optimized themes and use the easy drag-and-drop tools to create professional-looking designs in no time. You can create designer product grids, banners, etc, and align your B2B online marketplace with upcoming festivals or promotional events.
Next-gen Tech for Automated Business Operations
The complexities of a B2B business model like large order volume and handling other B2B marketplace operations calls for an advanced next-gen tech. It can be challenging to manage the bulk orders, vast product catalouge, keep track of the shipments, etc. And hence you need a robust ecommerce solution that can automate the process and help customers enjoy a seamless shopping experience.
StoreHippo is built on a MACH architecture which gives enterprises the flexibility and control to build tailor-made solutions for their unique B2B brand’s requirements. With the built-in product management system, you can streamline and manage the vast products catalouge seamlessly. StoreHippo’s B2B ecommerce solutions comes with an end-to-end vendor management system that offers a separate vendor dashboard to your sellers to help them manage their day-to-day business operations effortlessly. Your vendors can add, delete, or change prices of single or bulk products in a single click from a central admin dashboard. With StoreHippo you (the admin) can seamlessly view your orders, check the best-selling products, and perform various other activities.
Ease of Shopping on Mobile Devices
Customers love brands that offer them the ease to shop on mobile devices. Without being available on your customers mobile phones, you can not win them over. You can only build a successful B2B marketplace when you are able to tap into the mobile channel for your audiences. Of late, mobile devices have become the primary sales channel for brands of every scale and size. Yes, as you give your buyers the flexibility to shop from anywhere anytime, using a handy mobile device, you can boost your conversions and experience your customers showering their love on your B2B online marketplace by ordering more frequently.
StoreHippo is built on a mobile-first approach that comes with a built-in mobile app builder. You can create Android and iOS B2B mobile apps directly from your admin dashboard at zero additional costs and without any coding. As you create a B2B marketplace website with StoreHippo ecommerce solutions, you also build PWA stores that look, feel, and work like mobile devices even on entry level devices. StoreHippo also offers a variety of built-in B2B mobile apps for different users like admins, vendors, delivery boys, etc. to help them run their business on the go.
Advanced Search Filters and Navigation
Well, you shouldn’t let your clients roam cluelessly on your B2B marketplace searching for their desired products. Instead offer an advanced search filter that makes it easy for your customers to find their products. A well-built ecommerce marketplace is one that makes it easy for their customers to navigate from one page to another and make shopping a tireless journey as a whole. You can create multi-tier hierarchical categories, make best selling products easy to discover by strategic placement on the home page, offer advanced sorting options, and filters based on price, color etc to simplify product discoverability.
You can build a successful B2B marketplace with StoreHippo ecommerce solutions that come with built-in search and advanced filter options. Brands can use product bundling, upselling, cross-selling and other built-in features to boost orders and make buying easy on B2B online marketplaces. StoreHippo also comes with a well designed site navigation, multi level categories, and wishlist feature to help its B2B customers enjoy a seamless shopping experience. Built on API-based integrations, StoreHippo also helps you engage better with your B2B customers by sending real-time notifications and nudging buyers towards exploring more products. You can boost your ticket size and upsell products on your B2B marketplace to the customers.
Omnichannel Presence
61% of the B2B companies have already shifted to omnichannel marketing strategies. B2B buyers prefer omnichannel brands. To make your customers fall in love with your marketplace, leverage the growing demand for multi channel engagement and interact with your customers on multiple channels. As you opt for omnichannel presence, you will not only boost your conversions but also retain loyal customers for life.
StoreHippo B2B ecommerce solutions come with a ready-to-use omnichannel solution that can take care of all your multi channel marketing needs. With StoreHippo, you can create new customer touchpoints using the same backend logic and APIs. You can also offer a personalized shopping experience on all the channels and manage them centrally using a common dashboard on your business-to-business marketplace. StoreHippo also offers rich customer insights to help you leverage the best-performing sales channel and implement data-driven marketing strategies.
Hyper Personalizations
Personalization has been a key factor in making a purchase decision for a long time now. As you create a B2B marketplace website, it becomes imperative to opt for ecommerce solutions that help create a hyper-personalized buyer journey. B2B deals have always had a touch of personalization, however, the B2B buyers now also expect the negotiations and the entire buying journey to be personalized. You can create promotional landing pages with personalized deals and offers leading to higher engagement and increased satisfaction of your B2B buyers.
StoreHippo solutions come with a gamut of features to help you offer personalized solutions to your customers. You can use the price override functionality to offer personalized product prices on your B2B ecommerce platform based on your customer segments and locations directly from your admin dashboard. StoreHippo B2B ecommerce solutions come with a powerful built-in discount engine to help you offer personalized discounts and coupons. You can also send out personalized notifications to your customers in real-time and engage with your customers in their native language with StoreHippo’s support for multiple languages. StoreHippo also helps you create multilingual themes and personalize your promotional pages for customers from various locations.
Self-service Buying
Self-service has successfully replaced traditional in-person communication. As you implement self-service facilities for your buyers, you cut down the dependency on sales representatives, reduce the negotiation time, and create a B2B marketplace website that is loved by all. Well, each one of your customers is looking at faster sales cycles and automated after sales services like shipping updates. As you opt for self-service buying on your B2B marketplace, you can reduce system delays and cater to customer grievances.
StoreHippo ecommerce solutions for B2B businesses come with a host of B2B-specific features like RFQ, customizable forms, multi pricing, tiered pricing, credit management, MOQ, tax engine, etc. You can easily automate your business operations and introduce self-service on your B2B marketplace with such advanced B2B features from StoreHippo. With the other StoreHippo features like automated chat support via chatbots, delivery tracking, easy cancellations, and refunds, etc., you can help your B2B buyers stay on top of their orders.
Create Secure Shopping Channels
Since business-to-business marketplaces entail huge volumes of sensitive client information and financial records, building a secure marketplace becomes imperative. Keeping the marketplace website protected from fraud, malware or human data breaches requires multi-level security measures in place. Well, to sail through the security challenges, you need to ensure data security and protection from fraud and create a B2B marketplace that is trusted by your customers.
StoreHippo ecommerce solutions have built enterprise business-to-business marketplaces across industry verticals. The PCI-DSS-compliant platform comes with a host of security features like authentication, authorization, and audit logs to ensure multi-level security. The 60+ secure, PCI-compliant payment gateways from StoreHippo also help ensure secure payments on your enterprise marketplace.
Payment Flexibility
Customers love a B2B brand that offers a flexible payment option to them. Giving your customers a choice of easy and flexible payment options is the icing on cake that is going to make your customers fall in love with your B2B marketplace. In the B2B world, payment cycles vary from 30-90 odd days with bulk orders and large payment amounts. Now who doesn't like a streamlined payment channel with focus on digital payment options and store credits. Such a myriad of payment options help your business stand out and gain word-of-mouth publicity.
StoreHippo ecommerce solutions come with 60+ pre-integrated domestic and international payment gateways that help create a frictionless checkout process on your B2B marketplace. With the complete wallet management solutions from StoreHippo, you can add a store wallet and use it for storing cashback, loyalty rewards, refund points, cash back, etc. You can also manage full or partial refunds seamlessly using these store wallets.
Round-the-clock Customer Support
Providing stellar communication and customer service is another great shot at getting your customer's love and attention. Yes, you can build a successful B2B marketplace by projecting your business as a customer-centric B2B brand. When you have your dealers and salespersons communicate with your buyers round-the-clock, you can provide wow customer service that defines you as a market leader. Offering 24x7 sales assistance to cater to queries on your B2B ecommerce marketplace can help you take your brand right into your customer's hearts.
StoreHippo helps you put a chat system on your marketplace where your buyers can connect with sellers to get their queries answered. With StoreHippo, you can integrate with the best email helpdesk software, chatbots, and live chat software to offer multi-channel customer support. StoreHippo also has a built-in 3-way chat system where buyers-seller-admin can chat to answer client queries raised on your B2B marketplace.
Conclusion
To build a successful B2B marketplace that is loved by the customers requires efforts, strategic planning, and meticulous execution. You need features that enable your distributors to sell efficiently and independently and data-driven strategies that attract, engage, convert, and retain your customers.
StoreHippo B2B ecommerce solutions come with 300+ enterprise-grade features and offer a 360-degree solution to create a B2B marketplace website and mobile apps. With support for diverse business models like D2C, B2C, B2B2C, hyperlocal, and hybrid ecommerce, StoreHippo also helps businesses pivot from B2B business models to custom ecommerce solutions. You can carve a niche for your B2B brand in the ecommerce market with StoreHippo ecommerce solutions.
All set to make your clients fall in love with your B2B marketplace? Explore the wide range of features by starting your 14-day free trial now.
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