How To Prepare Your B2B Ecommerce Store For Changing Buyer Expectations

Are you exhausted by how fast the future is coming to the B2B ecommerce industry?

Well, online wholesale businesses are matching and even exceeding the growth speed of the online retail industry. With this major transformation of the B2B industry, customer expectations are also changing super fast.

Because it’s not just plain wholesale businesses anymore. The B2B industry is experiencing major digital transformation driven by the habits of buyers. In today’s time, when over 73% of millennials (source) are involved in the B2B buying process. These millennials grew up alongside technology, their expectations and priorities are also changing big time.

And the new-age millennials prefer to get their information from product trials, social media, data sheets etc.

Let’s understand what do buyers expect from their B2B e-commerce experience today?

6 shifts in b2b customer expectations

• Enhancing the digital customer experience

• Direct-to-consumer sales

• B2B mobile commerce

• Growing expectation of personalization

• Faster B2B order fulfilment

• Managing multiple channels

Let’s explore how to prepare your B2B ecommerce store for new-age buyers

1. Leverage mobile commerce

With emerging technologies like mobile commerce, it is already time to match up with the demands of next-gen consumers. Mobile commerce technology has become one such necessity for B2B ecommerce stores. 

Migrating to mobile is not only about improving the user interface of the website but it offers many more benefits. Some of the benefits include mobile-ready stores with responsive themes for various device screens,easy and mobile-friendly checkouts. You can also engage and convert customers better with mobile apps (Android/iOS). And the inbuilt mobile specific features like push notifications enhance the mobile shopping experience of customers.

The best part is that a turnkey mcommerce solution like Storehippo gives you a tested solution to leverage m-commerce. The platform offers additional mobile-specific features like push notifications, user personalization, login-based deals add to benefits of mobile platforms. It also helps your B2B ecommerce store to be mobile-ready and build your mobile app (Android/iOS) without any additional cost. The icing on the cake is that StoreHippo supports PWA online stores to deliver a native-app like experience to users.

2. One-stop shipping solution

Shipping is one of the major concerns for B2B customers because they deal with bulk and high transaction orders. The proper optimization of shipping is at the core of enterprise business because most of the customers abandon their cart if they are not satisfied with the shipping services or cost. 

This is why you need a streamlined and automated shipping solution for your B2B ecommerce store. Also, the modern customers have very high expectations. This is why you need to keep delighting your customers with a smooth order delivery process. And StoreHippo can help you fulfil the modern day customer expectations with its inbuilt shipping solution. It helps you to manage bulk deliveries, shipping process automation, discounted shipping, and plan your way to a successful shipping strategy.

3. Flexible ordering and pricing options

Offering flexibility to consumers is one of the most crucial aspects of the ecommerce industry. Talking about B2B online stores, personalized purchasing experience and flexibility goes a long way to secure sales. Adopting a headless platform offers high-end capabilities to personalize the user experience. The headless solution decouples the backend and frontend of your enterprise website to make changes as and when required. You can easily make changes in the checkout flow, add new fields to customer accounts, and much more with the simple architecture of headless solutions. 

For this purpose, you need a highly flexible ecommerce platform like StoreHippo to personalize the user experience. And its B2B platform also provides pricing flexibility with dynamic features. With StoreHippo, you can easily offer personalized pricing based on the order volume and client relationships. Also, you can attract new clients by offering specific limited-period discounts. The feature of customer segmentation or location-based pricing is a PRO-level strategy to acquire new clients.

4. Multichannel selling options

Be it online or offline, customers always remain the real king. Today, customers have access to multiple channels and sources of information. With multiple choices of sales channel, the B2B customer experience has become very important. With the changing buyer expectations, it has become necessary to offer a seamless omnichannel experience in the B2B ecommerce landscape. Access to multiple touchpoints can become a real game-changer for your online store. 

For enterprise businesses, delivering the products, product videos, blog posts to different channels has become the trendiest thing ever. And StoreHippo can help you do it all with an inbuilt headless architecture. It helps you to re-architect your e commerce platform to publish across multiple channels,  improve user experience, retain existing customers, and acquire new ones in no time. 

5. Execute a full-blown marketing strategy with automation

The primary key to online business success is customer satisfaction and there is no better way to achieve it than the right marketing strategy. A full-blown automated and personalized marketing strategy can be your best hack to do it. But to implement this kind of strong marketing strategy in your B2B ecommerce store, you need the right technology in place. 

Unlike B2C companies, online wholesale stores require additional tools and features to execute the full-blown marketing strategy. Automating your marketing efforts is eventually the best way to match the customer expectations through customized invoices, personalized deals, custom pricing, and much more.

And you need not to opt for different technologies to streamline and automate your marketing efforts. You can get it all with StoreHippo. It offers inbuilt marketing tools and seamless integrations with the best marketing tools to offer unparalleled customer experience.

6. Design your B2B website for scalability

As most of the B2B customers deal with the high volume of orders, products, users, and customers, it is crucial to choose a right B2B ecommerce platform that grows along with enterprise business. While selecting the enterprise technology, you need to check if the platform can manage large scale orders, high volume sales, capability of handling high volume traffic during peak seasons, a lot of online searches, server uptime, and much more. 

Well, there is a highly scalable platform that can do it all. StoreHippo is built for flexibility and handles the unprecedented scenarios of the B2B landscape. It offers 99.99% server uptime with high peak load tolerance. Also, it is backed with the most advanced MEAN stack technology to support the ever changing needs of your enterprise store.

7. Multiple payment options

With the major shift in the ways customers shop, the ways to pay online have also evolved. Well, payment options are not only a mode of payment but it directly impacts the conversion rates, shopping cart abandonment rates, customer retention, and many other important factors.  For the same reason, providing multiple payment options has become a necessity.

If you are also looking forward to increasing your sales conversions and match the expectations of new-age buyers, StoreHippo can help. It offers multiple payment options like debit card, credit card, net banking, COD, subscription-based payments like Razorpay subscription, Stripe billing etc, marketplace payments like Paypal Adaptive, pay-later options with 60+ integrated payment gateways. Don’t wait to make your B2B ecommerce store ready for online success.

How StoreHippo B2B ecommerce platform can help you match your customer expectations?

The customers are getting smarter with the evolving ecommerce trends. Now, they look for B2B websites with ease of use, convenient payments, streamlined logistics, great shopping experience, high-end personalization, and much more. With the changing expectations of customers, it is the right time to choose the right B2B ecommerce platform that helps you to succeed in the new age world. StoreHippo allows you to think beyond B2B ecommerce websites and help you to make your online wholesale business successful with more sales and ways to beat your competitors.

 StoreHippo offers 300+ inbuilt features, 60+ integrated payment gateways, automated marketing tools, enterprise-grade functionalities supported with headless commerce architecture to prepare you for the ecommerce market shifts and changing customer expectations in the B2B world. The best part is that it does not only offer a technology for your online business but helps you automate your business processes, reach new customer segments, provide enterprise-grade security and desired shopping experience. Embrace the change by scheduling your free B2B online store trial and take your business to new heights.