How to manage poor sales season on your B2B wholesale marketplace

Is your current B2B sales strategy not yielding results?

Worried about the slack sales season?  

Don’t know what is the winning formula to skyrocket sales for your B2B wholesale marketplace?

Well, the success mantra is TIMELESS, give your customers what no one else gives them.

In the competitive digital world, where every business is vying for attention, the whole gameplay is about keeping your customers happy and satisfied. 

And to take that road, you need to know the trends in customer behavior and the best B2B marketplace software at your disposal to implement these trends.

However, before we start on the journey to win customers over and chart a plan to escape the sales mishap, let us go over a few B2B ecommerce buying trends for 2024 and beyond.    

• 35% of the B2B buyers said they purchase half of the products through online marketplaces
• 80% of the B2B buyers say they are more likely to engage with a brand that offers a personalized experience
• 91% of the B2B searches are carried out on a mobile device
• 89% of the B2B customers can be retained with effective omnichannel marketing strategies
• 50% of the B2B buyers go through at least eight pieces of content while purchasing

Source: Linkedin, Frost & Sullivan, Mckinsey 

The B2B ecommerce continues to grow. And we have seen several ecommerce trends take off and make their way into B2B ecommerce. From personalization to faster delivery and self-service, the B2B wholesale marketplace is highly categorized by B2C-like shopping experiences. To keep your cash counter ringing and manage the slack sales season, you need to keep up with the emerging trends that are defining the industry this year and beyond.   

10 ways to drive sales during poor sales season on your B2B wholesale marketplace

Ready for the hot tips? 

StoreHippo brings the top 10 battle-tested tips and tricks to drive sales even during a poor sales season on your B2B wholesale marketplace.

Analyze your data and customer feedback to identify issues

The first thought that comes to mind when we talk about poor sales is finding the root cause behind the drop. Wonder where to begin your investigation from? You can start by analyzing the rich set of data you have on your marketplace. With feature-rich tools on your B2B marketplace, you can target the right audience set, interact with them in real time, and identify the issues.

StoreHippo enterprise ecommerce solutions offer a host of marketing tools to help you analyze your customer segmentation and make data-centric marketing strategies to convert potential customers. With the reporting and analytical tools from StoreHippo, you can understand your buyer personas and choose the most befitting marketing approach for your B2B ecommerce brand. 

Make product descriptions better

If your customers are returning without placing an order on your B2B wholesale marketplace, one reason could be poorly defined products. The modern age B2B wholesale customers prefer to understand the product in and out before making a final decision. As they become more aware of their choices, they find it necessary to compare two or more products for better prices, quality, etc. To keep the order flow coming right up, add detailed product descriptions, multiple images, and videos for a 360-degree view on your B2B wholesale ecommerce website. 

With StoreHippo, you can build comprehensive product pages and add a detailed product description. With the advanced product management system from StoreHippo enterprise ecommerce solutions, you can create an advanced look and feel for your product pages. You can add multiple product images and 360-degree videos to engage with your B2B wholesale customers better. StoreHippo helps you showcase multiple product options for your customers to choose from. 

Enhance the site’s look and feel

Gone are the days when B2B businesses were done on bland ecommerce websites. Today the buying perspectives of the B2B buyers are highly influenced by their B2C shopping experiences. B2B wholesale brands need to amp up their design game to attract more buyers and convert potential customers. You can make a kill in the wholesale ecommerce industry by jazzing up your B2B wholesale marketplace. 

You can implement unique store designs or make quick design changes in your wholesale ecommerce marketplace with StoreHippo. As you engage with your customers via different designs, you can seamlessly implement multiple strategic marketing plans, engage in A/B testing, and make quick tweaks based on data-driven results. StoreHippo comes with a rich design themes library that helps you create unique yet professional store designs with the drag-and-drop feature. The easy-to-use design feature helps even a novice user to overhaul the website design within minutes with zero knowledge of coding. The futuristic enterprise ecommerce solutions from StoreHippo offer 100+ device-optimized themes for your wholesale marketplace. 

Expand product range 

The B2B wholesale buyers are spoiled for choices in their B2C experiences. They are quick to move to brands that offer them a vast product catalog to choose from. Certainly they expect same from their wholesale buying. Yes, the sure-shot way to manage a poor sales season is to offer your B2B wholesale customers a vast array of products and product combinations to choose from. You can also onboard multiple vendors from different locations to create a vast range of products on your B2B wholesale marketplace. 

StoreHippo comes with a comprehensive multi vendor ecommerce solution to help you seamlessly onboard multiple vendors in just a few easy steps and widen your product offerings. As StoreHippo creates a separate vendor dashboard for each seller, it helps them manage their day-to-day business operations like orders, shipments, returns, etc. As you add B2B vendors from diverse product categories, you build a multi-product marketplace that attracts customers. The built-in product management system from StoreHippo helps your vendors manage their products in the backend and the front end seamlessly. With the time-saving features from StoreHippo enterprise ecommerce solutions, your sellers can add, delete, edit, import, export, search, publish, or unpublish single or multiple products in just a few clicks. 

Optimize multi-channel presence

B2B buyers now regularly use 10 or more channels to interact with their suppliers. Yes, omnichannel selling has long made its way into the B2B ecommerce industry. Your depleting sales could also be a warning sign to optimize your multi channel presence. Customers today love to interact and engage with their wholesale brands on multiple channels. You can boost your conversions manifold by building a strong brand presence on all the channels loved by your customers.

StoreHippo, the best B2B marketplace software can take care of your multi channel selling needs seamlessly. The ready-to-use omnichannel solutions from StoreHippo help you create new customer touchpoints using the same backend logic and APIs. You can create consistent buyer experiences across multiple sales channels and boost engagement on your wholesale marketplace. When you build an online store for your wholesale business, you can also improve the business's operational efficiency by centrally controlling all your sales channels. As you get access to rich customer insights from multiple sales channels, you can also leverage the best-selling sales channel to your profit. 

Give personalized discounts

To manage poor sales on your B2B wholesale marketplace, go for calculated discounts. If there is one thing that can bring back your lost sales, it's the power of discounts, and when you personalize it, you can make a kill even  in the B2B ecommerce market. In today’s age of hyper-personalization, each brand has become cautious about offering a personalized shopping experience to their customers. Based on the browsing history of your customers, you can offer discounts that are customized to the customers’ needs.

StoreHippo comes with a powerful built-in discount engine that helps B2B brands offer multi-level discounts to their customers. With StoreHippo, the best B2B marketplace software, you can also set up personalized discounts like promotions, coupons, free shipping, promo codes, etc on your business-to-business marketplace. Your coupons and discounts could be based on various factors like customer’s order volume, frequency, etc. 

Offer multi pricing 

B2B buyers are sensitive to pricing. With multiple rounds of negotiations happening in a B2B buying journey, you can divert poor sales season and boost your sales. Wonder how? Well, if your buyer is looking to buy books in bulk, you can offer customized pricing to them, say, Rs 100/book for 50 books, Rs 80/book for 150 books, and so on. This helps cut down the negotiation time on your B2B wholesale marketplace. 

StoreHippo comes with a built-in pricing override feature that helps you offer customized pricing to your customers. You can also customize the pricing for different customers based on their order volume, order frequency, geolocation, etc. The built-in tiered pricing from StoreHippo helps you to quickly implement and manage multi-pricing on your marketplace. You can quickly set up multi-level prices like volume-based pricing, rule-based prices, quantity-based pricing, customer segment, or customer-specific pricing that engages better and attracts more B2B buyers from various segments. 

Improve payment solutions

The one reason for a massive drop in sales on your B2B wholesale marketplace could be your outdated payment solutions. As the world is moving towards digital modes of payment, online buyers look for multiple payment gateways to choose from. Since B2B buying is complex, you need to offer a simple and short payment process that does not make the buying process a tiresome job. Your B2B customers will feel confident and comfortable making online purchases as you improve your payment solutions.

StoreHippo ecommerce solutions make it easy for you to create the best payment solution for your B2B marketplace. StoreHippo comes with 60+ pre-integrated domestic and international payment gateways to help you create the best enterprise ecommerce solution for your business. You can integrate with more than one payment gateway and offer your customers a host of payment options like COD, credit/debit cards, netbanking, digital wallets, etc. You can also implement multiple payment gateways based on the location or device of your B2B buyers. 

Streamline shipping

Even though B2B wholesale purchases are done in bulk, you cannot skip quick deliveries and streamlining shipping from the bigger picture. A long waiting time is something that pulls away your customers, and so to keep customers coming back to your B2B wholesale marketplace you need to streamline shipping and fulfill quick order deliveries. As you partner with multiple local delivery partners, you can create a seamless supply chain and even leverage your distributor’s warehouses to make hyperlocal order fulfilment.

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

Offer multi channel support

The hottest trend going ahead in 2024 is effective customer service. As you offer the best customer service to your B2B customers, you can easily boost your sales rate. Yes, customers love the brands that offer them round-the-clock customer service. However, there’s a catch here. Now since the customers are present on multiple channels and they love to engage with their brands on all these channels, you also need an enterprise ecommerce solution that helps you offer quick customer service on all the sales channels. 

StoreHippo ecommerce solutions help you offer the best-in-class customer service to your customers. You can integrate with a host of tools and features like live chats, chatbots, etc., and offer multi channel customer support seamlessly. You can also send personalized notifications to your customers for abandoned carts, or price queries and convert potential customers quickly. 

Conclusion

You can seamlessly manage poor sales seasons on your B2B wholesale marketplace with the right solution provider at your disposal. A robust ecommerce solution like StoreHippo helps you set an upward growth trajectory for your business-to-business brand seamlessly. You can create unique B2B business flows, and offer your customer a shopping experience they have been looking for.       

StoreHippo is built on a MACH architecture and is a 360-degree enterprise ecommerce solution provider that helps you create a conversion-oriented marketplace and boost your sales ratio seamlessly. You can adapt to the market dynamics and keep the cash counter ringing with its 300+ enterprise-grade features and 120+ integrations.

Ready to convert your poorly performing marketplace into a conversion-oriented B2B wholesale marketplace with StoreHippo? Explore the wide range of features from StoreHippo the best B2B marketplace software by starting your 14-day free trial now.