How to build an online store for your B2B company in India

When the entire Indian B2B industry is veering towards the online ecommerce route, is your B2B company still tethered to selling offline?

Well, staying behind is no more a choice today. 

As the Indian B2B industry is rapidly adapting to online sales channels, it's time you build an online store for your B2B company as well. 

Wondering what way to take to hop on the ecommerce bandwagon?

How to align your brand to the needs of your customers?

Well, simple. By choosing the best B2B ecommerce solutions in India.

But before we start attuning your brand, let us have a sneak peek at the growth of the B2B industry in India:

• 90%+ of B2B organizations have already shifted to digital channels
• $90-100 billion GMV of eB2B market in India by 2030
• 1% share of ecommerce in the overall B2B market in India in 2022
• 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, Bessemer Venture Partners

The data mentioned above clearly states that enterprise B2B companies are headed to make a difference in the Indian ecommerce industry. With the steady growth that the enterprise ecommerce industry is witnessing, it is just about the right time to build an online store and create your phygital presence. Yes, enterprise brands like yours can seamlessly manage a large network of sellers, distributors, manufacturers, partners, etc with the right set of tools and features. As you sell online, you not only get an edge over your competitors but also derive multiple benefits like better customer engagement, an increase in conversions, better brand visibility, etc.

What are the benefits of building a B2B online store in India 

Taking the hybrid ecommerce route, you can give your enterprise brand an edge over the competition in many different ways. Here are some of the benefits of building an online store for your B2B company:

• Save costs by reducing the staffing cost, less CapEx, etc
• Automate and Modernize the business processes for increased efficiency
• Reach to new markets and explore wider audience segments
• Easy to onboard vendors from across diverse industries and geographies
• With the automated self-service sales process, you can speed up your sales
• Easy to pivot to new hybrid business models to grow your business     
• Quick to add multiple customer touchpoints to engage and convert customers better 
• Boosts brand visibility for better brand recognition and substantial growth 
• Easy to add new revenue streams to your B2B company like ads, subscriptions, etc

One understanding that is clear from the list of benefits is: that building an online marketplace for B2B businesses is a win-win deal. The right set of features and tools helps you plan and strategize multiple marketing solutions and offers your customers exactly what they are looking for. However, to be able to seamlessly attract and convert buyers, you need access to the best B2B ecommerce solutions available. 

Must have features to build an online store for your B2B company in India 

All things given and said, how do you identify the best solutions for your enterprise business? To help you take your enterprise brand to the road of success, here are the top 10 features to look for in an enterprise ecommerce solution for your business-to-business brand.

Cutting-edge technology

Since B2B business operations are complex, brands require next-gen technology to future-proof their businesses. With the current market scenario, you need to build an agile and customer-centric marketplace. But how without the support of cutting-edge ecommerce technology can you build tailored solutions for your B2B company? Managing bulk orders and lengthy fulfillment cycles should come easy. Right?

StoreHippo is built on the powerful next-gen MACH architecture that helps B2B brands experiment, innovate, and scale their B2B ecommerce marketplace seamlessly. The 360-degree B2B ecommerce solution by StoreHippo comes with a plug-and-play solution that does not require third-party integrations or paid extensions to create tailored ecommerce solutions.

End-to-end vendor management solutions 

For a large network of dealers and distributors on your eB2B marketplace, you need advanced end-to-end multi vendor solutions. Onboarding your vendors on the platform and managing their vast product catalouge can be challenging, but not with a comprehensive B2B ecommerce solution that offers an easy-to-use admin dashboard. 

StoreHippo comes with an end-to-end vendor management solution that offers a quick and easy vendor registration process for your B2B marketplace. StoreHippo creates a unique dashboard for each of the vendors in your dealer-distributor network. With separate dashboards. each of your sellers can manage their product catalouge, orders, inventories, returns, etc. As an admin, you can also easily manage your sellers, payouts, commission rates, vendor-based taxes, discounts etc. right from your admin dashboards. As you build an online store with StoreHippo, you can also use the adaptive payment feature and multi seller cart feature to easily divide a single customer payment into multiple sellers and admin.

Ease of customizations

With every business having its own unique needs and requirements, you need to create an ecommerce solution that is tailored to the uniqueness of your business. Also, customizations are often misunderstood as being time-consuming, expensive, and technical. All you need is a robust ecommerce platform for your B2B company that offers quick customizations of both the backend and the frontend, that too without the need for extensive coding.  

StoreHippo ecommerce solutions built on decoupled headless architecture come with extensible entities which can be tweaked to create unique business flows. The headless architecture and microservices-based structure make the StoreHippo platform extremely flexible to unique brand requirements. Your B2B enterprise company can also use API-based integrations and add its preferred business software and services to create a unique ecommerce ecosystem exclusive to your brand.

Omnichannel ecommerce solutions 

With more than 80% of the enterprise brands investing in omnichannel experiences, your B2B company should also take the omnichannel route. The B2B buyers expect their brands to engage with them on all the fronts they love to shop on, especially on mobile channels. With multiple new sales channels popping up, it can however be tough to keep up and offer a synchronized shopping experience without a solid omnichannel strategy in place.  

Built on mobile-first technology, StoreHippo comes with a built-in mobile apps builder. You can quickly create Android or iOS apps directly from your dashboard without having to go with extensive coding and incurring additional costs. StoreHippo’s B2B ecommerce solutions also come with mobile apps for your dealers, delivery partners, etc to help them manage their business on the go. The online stores built by StoreHippo are PWA stores that look, feel, and work like mobile apps even on entry level devices and in poor internet connectivity. StoreHippo comes with an easy-to-use omnichannel solution for the multi channel selling needs of your B2B enterprise business. StoreHippo helps you seamlessly create new customer touchpoints using the same backend logic and APIs. With the 300+ API endpoints, you can create an unmatched omnichannel buying experience for your B2B company. 

Personalized shopping experience

It’s a fact that B2B buyers are well-accustomed to a user-friendly, personalized B2C-shopping experience and expect the same from their business-to-business brands. Yes, if you fail to implement multi-level personalizations on your marketplace, you are losing out on a great deal of customers. To make your customers come back to your ecommerce platform and become a loyal customer, you need to make your customers feel important and seen. And personalization is quite an effective solution here. 

StoreHippo comes with decoupled headless architecture to help you offer multi-level personalizations. The B2B ecommerce solution offers a powerful built-in discount engine to help the B2B brands offer multiple personalized discounts like order-volume based, category-based, brand-based etc. You can also leverage the user’s past browsing and order history to offer them a personalized shopping experience like product recommendations. StoreHippo also helps you send personalized notifications to your customers like push, web, or mobile notifications to inform them on various offers. You can also recover abandoned carts by sending out personalized follow up mails. 

Host of B2B features 

With all the technological advancements happening in India, your B2B company needs to be ready for the digital transformations. B2B buyers look forward to an easy and smooth shopping experience and quick responses from their B2B brands. The dynamic market requirements call for an advanced set of B2B features that help your enterprise B2B brand to stand out. 

StoreHippo comes with 300+ enterprise grade features and 120+ integrations to help you build an out-of-the-box B2B solution for your brand. With StoreHippo’s unique set of features like price override, you can offer different prices of similar products based on your customer’s location, order volume etc. The B2B ecommerce solutions from StoreHippo also offer features like self-service, RFQ, MQQ, white labeling, wholesale and retail pricing, credit/wallet management, pricing comparison, custom entities, form builder to create custom forms, and much more. StoreHippo also offers a 3-way chat between sellers-admin-clients to speed up the negotiation cycle and cut down the longer sales process. 

Automated product and order management system

B2B businesses are categorized by bulk and large-volume orders. With multiple SKUs to keep track of, it can be tiresome to manage the inventory manually. You need a robust, well-rounded, feature-rich solution as you build an online store for your B2B business to seamlessly manage the inventory. It becomes important to streamline and automate the process for faster order fulfillment. 

The built-in product management solution from StoreHippo helps you streamline your products and manage them seamlessly on your ecommerce marketplace. The end-to-end vendor management solution from StoreHippo offers a separate vendor dashboard to all your dealers to help them manage their business seamlessly. You can add, delete, or change prices of single or bulk products in a single click with the advanced product management solutions from StoreHippo. The order management system saves time making the order processes faster and seamless. You can view your orders, check the best-selling product, and perform various other activities in just a few clicks. 

Support for different business models 

Enterprise businesses usually start with a few sales channels at the beginning. But as your B2B company grows, you might want to scale up your business. What happens when you plan to pivot to a different business model but your ecommerce platform holds you back? You will have to go through the pain of ecommerce migration. But what if we say, you can choose an ecommerce platform that has in-built capabilities to support multiple business models like B2B, D2C, B2B2C, hybrid, etc?

StoreHippo is a fully hosted and managed ecommerce solution that comes with built-in solutions to create disruptive business models for your enterprise business. The Indian ecommerce market dynamics are ever-evolving, given that, you need to build an online store that is easy to shift to another business model. StoreHippo solutions help you go to the market in record time with its battle-tested ecommerce features. Be it switching to a hybrid business model or combining a new model with the existing one, it becomes a seamless task with StoreHippo’s inherent flexibility and adaptability.

Multiple payment options 

The B2B buyers look for simplified payment options when buying online. With the onset of the new era of online shopping, the one sure-shot way to get your sales aligned is a safe and simple payment process. Since B2B payments can be done in halves, part by part, half in advance, and the other half after delivery, etc., you can offer rewards for full payments, and give them multiple payment options like digital wallets, UPI, etc. 

StoreHippo B2B ecommerce solutions offer a vast variety of payment solutions. With 60+ integrated payment gateways, buyers can choose their preferred payment gateway and make a seamless purchase. Your customers can choose from credit/debit cards, UPI, mobile wallets, store credit for deferred payments, net banking, etc. 

Quick and streamlined deliveries 

Entailed by bulk purchases, B2B buyers look for quick deliveries as well. If you are under the impression that a time-consuming delivery process does no harm, you are wrong. To seamlessly fulfill large orders and reduce manual errors, it is wise to combine local delivery partners, various logistics partners etc to optimize shipping cost and time. You can also leverage your distributor’s warehouses to make hyperlocal order fulfilment seamless. As you build an online store for your B2B business, look for seamless order tracking and streamlined delivery service from the solution provider. 

StoreHippo helps automate the shipping and logistics process to import bulk orders, update order status, assign delivery partners, customize the shipping rates, etc in just a few simple steps. You can also centrally control all the orders from different platforms and manage them seamlessly with the order management system. StoreHippo comes with 30+ logistic partners to streamline your shipping solutions. You can integrate with the shipping solution of your choice to offer a quick and seamless delivery to your B2B buyers. 

Step-wise guide to building an online store for your B2B company in India 

To build an online store, you need the right ecommerce solution provider that can handle the complex business requirements of an enterprise B2B business like yours. Here is a step-wise guide to help you take your B2B business to the online markets:

Step 1: Chart your business idea and conduct intensive market research 

Step 2: Register your business name and complete all formalities like permits, clearances, etc

Step 3: Choose a unique yet simple domain name and get it registered

Step 4: Choose the StoreHippo subscription plan as per your business needs

Step 5: Select a design theme and customize it according to your B2B company requirements

Step 6: Upload the product catalouge with detailed description and multiple pictures to help buyers make an informed decision

Step 7: Onboard multiple dealers and distributors if you plan to create a multi vendor online store for your B2B business

Step 8: Set up your payment and logistic partners with StoreHippo or add your preferred logistics partners

Step 9: Build mobile apps using StoreHippo’s built-in mobile apps builder

Step 10: Put in place a customer support channel for your customers to chat on when required 

And voila! Your enterprise online store is ready in 10 simple steps with StoreHippo’s B2B ecommerce solutions. You can set your enterprise brand for unprecedented growth with StoreHippo and start selling online in record time. 

Conclusion

Well, we understand that it could be challenging and tiresome to build an online store for your B2B enterprise business. But, to help you plan your transition to hybrid commerce, here is everything you need to know. Right from the must-have features to a step-wise guide to take your B2B company online, you can now seamlessly create an online sales channel. 

StoreHippo is the best B2B ecommerce solution in India that comes with 300+ enterprise-grade features and helps you build a secure, scalable, and easily customizable B2B online store. With a host of dynamic features for your enterprise business, StoreHippo makes sure you have everything you need to take your business to the next level. 

Are you ready to build an online store for your enterprise B2B brand with StoreHippo’s B2B ecommerce solutions? Explore the wide range of enterprise-grade features by starting your 14-day free trial now.