4 Ways To Improve Your B2B eCommerce Website

There has never been a better moment to become an online seller. Even though the competition in many industries is steep, there are various ways you can make money online, and countless successful ventures have taken off in recent years.

In fact, there are many examples of stores buying and selling on Amazon, finding their audience and becoming valuable businesses that achieved sustained growth.

At the same time, B2B eCommerce can be just as lucrative, but it’s important to remember that it has significant differences compared to B2C companies that sell consumer goods. For example, business audiences are more savvy, sophisticated, and involve more decision-makers, all of which can influence how successful you are.

But the good news is that if you set up a website using the best practices used today, you can break into almost any niche and make sales consistently.

Let’s look at some of the most effective ways you can do that below.

Make It Easy To Buy

One of the biggest differences between B2C and B2B industries is the way customers make a purchase. In typical B2C eCommerce stores, the customers select products on your website, adding them to the cart there and finalizing a purchase through your merchant services. That’s not how it always works in B2B, however.

When working with larger companies that use an e-procurement or ERP system for making purchases, they may request you provide a PunchOut catalog for them to use on their platform. 

If you don’t want to lose the sale and want to provide the best possible experience for your client, you need to be able to seamlessly integrate your catalog into their system using a specialized punchout solution that can handle that automatically.

This way, customers can go through the catalog of your products on their system, add them to the cart and finalize the purchase, making the process more secure and smoother without any added challenges on your end.

Focus on Customer Service

B2B sales can be complicated and require a lot of back and forth. Unless you’re selling lower-cost SaaS solutions that typically have shorter sales cycles, you will likely need to work with the B2B client and develop a customized solution that suits their needs. What’s more, most B2B customers will have a lot of questions and will need to learn more about how your product will work, which also requires personal attention from your end.

To accommodate that, you need to focus on providing a robust and omnichannel support system that allows customers to reach you on their terms and wherever they might be interacting with your brand.

Whether on your site, on social media, or the phone, you need to have trained and qualified support reps who can answer questions, help clients make more informed decisions, and maximize the chances of a sale occurring.

Luckily, you can also leverage technology to at least partially automate the process. With the help of chatbots and knowledge base solutions, you can provide helpful resources without a support rep present, which can save time and allow your clients to get answers at any time of the day.

Build Authority Through Content

Content marketing remains a staple of any successful B2B eCommerce business. Because B2B audiences are much savvier than B2C, you need to showcase your expertise and ability to solve complex problems if you are going to be taken seriously and want to get people to trust you deliver on your promises - experience or support in B2B marketing is key to this.

By creating high-quality content, you can address some of the most pressing questions and challenges your audience has and showing the best ways of dealing with various situations through the use and application of your products.

At the same time, you can show that you know what you’re talking about and understand the issues your customers want to overcome. Reading an insightful and relevant article can go a long way towards making a prospective customer trust you and want to do business with you.

At the same time, you can use content as a way to grow your email list, setting up lead magnets and offering reports, infographics, cheat sheets, or content upgrades for those that sign up.

Continue Testing

When improving your B2B eCommerce website, you will inevitably have to make assumptions about who your customers are and what they want. These assumptions won’t always align with the actual needs of your customers, which is why you need to continually test your website changes to see what your customers respond to best.

Each little change you make might not have a huge impact, but even a 1% improvement can make a big difference once these types of changes start accumulating. You can run A/B tests for almost anything, including headlines, color schemes, font sizes, images, layout, media, just to name a few options. 

The possibilities are virtually endless, and the only thing to remember is to only test one variable at a time if you want to gain insights you can actually use. 

Bottom Line

Finding ways to improve your B2B eCommerce website can be a crucial part of long-term success. With the strategies listed above, you will become much better at catering to your audience’s needs, showcasing your authority in your market, and learning how to make your website more profitable.