Hi there, and welcome to our “Give me 5 Series!” where we share five useful eCommerce tips that will help improve your strategies and pave your way to success.
In our most recent episode, James Arth, Enterprise Sales Manager at 2Checkout (now Verifone), will be going over the essential capabilities that every B2B business needs in order to deliver the best online customer experience.
First and foremost, every eCommerce business should think about the customer’s needs first. What are they looking for? What type of payment methods do they prefer? How could you ease their way through the checkout process? These are just a few of the questions you need to answer to build a seamless shopping experience for your B2B buyers.
Without further ado, here are the five most important capabilities you need to tick off on your checklist to build a successful B2B eCommerce business.
1. Integrated global payments
If you are looking to expand your business globally, it’s essential to be able to accept the most popular B2B payment methods, such as online and offline bank wire, payment orders, pay by link, or credit transfer (for example: Single Euro Payments Area or Automated Clearing House payments). If you are selling subscriptions, the payment methods you offer ideally should support automated recurring, as auto-renewals have a higher renewal rate than manual ones and that’s what you should be aiming for.
Offering your customers multiple payment options will help ease their way throughout the buying process, and ultimately, drive more conversions on your website.
2. Optimize customer interaction with an online self-service channel
Naturally, your goal is to optimize the shopping experience to meet the customer’s needs and expectations. Global statistics show that many B2B buyers increasingly prefer online purchases in self-service mode and your ordering engine’s capabilities are key here.
A good place to start when selling internationally is to localize the checkout experience: display the prices in local currencies and use local languages, because 80% of business buyers prefer to make the purchases in their native language.
Also related to the cart, we recommend that you integrate merchandising tools, such as cross-selling and upselling, discounts, bundles, and promotions. This will improve the customer experience while also increasing your Average Order Value. A best practice is to optimize the entire checkout experience with A/B testing capabilities so you can provide your clients with a seamless checkout flow. Try different layouts, lengths, forms and flows until you find what works best for your B2B market segments.
3. Subscriptions management and billing
If you’re a SaaS company or selling goods through subscription plans, it’s important to provide new and existing clients with a seamless subscription management flow for standard and custom deals.
With the right subscription solution, you’ll be able to manage your subscriptions and customers, better deal with invoices and recurring billing, and – ultimately – improve your revenue. The main goal of your business is to provide subscription retention, so that your subscription management partner can help you turn voluntary and involuntary churn into retained revenue while optimizing cancellation flows. Key here is to have a solid integration between the subscription management and billing, and the payments processing engine.
4. Digital transformation of the sales process
Even if you are offering online purchasing in a self-service mode, as a B2B you are likely to have a sales assisted process. Another must-have capability you should have is automation of the sales process overall, by equipping your sales teams with modern commerce tools like Configure Price Quoting, also known as CPQ. CPQ tools can help you:
- Send, customize, and validate quotes directly from your account.
- Receive automated reporting in your CRM.
- Consolidate subscription data along with self-service web orders.
- Offer flexible pricing, service, and product configuration.
- Centralize your negotiation threads.
- Integrate customer quotes and purchasing into a single step, greatly streamlining, and optimizing your sales process.
Ultimately, CPQ tools are a great way to help your sales team close more assisted deals faster.
5. Partner sales
If you’re using distributor and reseller channels to showcase your offerings to new audiences, having a platform that enables you to manage partner sales easier will considerably increase your global distribution. Try leveraging capabilities like bulk ordering, automated billing, credit limit management, and global payments processing so you can grow partner sales and expand your market presence around the globe, regardless of time-zone differences.
Now that you’ve learned the 5 most important B2B commerce capabilities, it’s time to put them to the test and start scaling your eCommerce business.
Thank you so much for watching! We hope you found these tips useful, and we’re looking forward to sharing our next Give me 5 eCommerce Tips, and more amazing content!
Interested in discovering extra tips on how to scale your subscription business and boost your customer retention? Then check out our previous “Give me 5!” episode here!
