How to leverage on the opportunities presented by B2B eCommerce market?
As seen from The Forrester Wave™: B2B Commerce Suites, Q4 2020 report, B2B eCommerce is a rapidly expanding market. Last year only it was expected to reach $559 billion by the end of 2020. This significant opportunity has been recognized by Internet giants Amazon and Google, who have ventured into the B2B e-commerce arena last year.
To be a success in the B2B market the fundamentals are the same – what works for consumers when using a B2C (business to consumer) site, are just the same in the B2B (business to business) world. So,appealing layout, functional navigation and search functionality are all essential for software company. But B2B sites that become even more lucrative are those that use B2C techniques to deliver online experiences that “transcend the transaction” — these include personalisation, long-tail selection, simplified logins and varied pricing strategies.
There are some key differences which lead to different functional and user experience needs: order values are often greater, the number of orders per customer is often larger (i.e. bulk buying) as are the quantities of orders. There are usually a myriad of payment options and shipping costs that need to be considered. It’s important that your eCommerce business it support services these key B2B differences, your pricing strategy out of the box and easily integrates with your business systems.
Most common “how to’s” faced by companies implementing B2B eCommerce processes include:
- Make it is easy for our customers to navigate our website with such a massive product range?
- Optimise my user experience with such a deep category structure?
- Build stronger direct relationships with my already-acquired customers & gain more repeat orders?
- Prevent competitors from capturing our market share?
- Create branded, white-label sites for multiple trading partners?
- Build customer engagement and loyalty through multiple channels?
- Help my distributors sell more?
- Get the right price in front of the right customer?
- Stay ahead of the curve?
300+ show atendees visited Design’n’Buy booth at ISS Long Beach 2020
Design’N’Buy team recently returned from ISS Long Beach, California 2014 where they were one of 355 companies exhibiting at the largest event for decorated apparel industry. Over the course of three days the team gave 50+ personal product demos on top of discussing specific client requirements. Along with developing mobile apps with companies from across the globe and attaining new clients on the spot, they also found the time to strenghten relationships with exisiting clients who came to visit our team. The show was a great success and an excellent platform to get insights into needs and challenges of the decorated apparel and screen printing industry. Armed with great energy and valuable client and consumer insights, Design’N’Buy team is already starting to plan for the new products. What will they come up with next? We will have to wait and see so stay tuned!
Sneak Preview For OpenCart
The anticipation around OpenCart release is highly anticipated from late 2020 when the company released an information on its soon release. But more than that lots of people welcomed the decision to build the new responsive OpenCart default theme on BootStrap which was also overhauled and released earlier in 2020. As a consequence, theme developers will be able to build responsive themes on the platform much easier and it seems it will make people using the competing open source app making softwares and osCommerce cross to OpenCart as the quality of themes available in the market increases considerably.
We thought you might like a little preview of some of the new OpenCart features:
- Responsive template (Store Front & Admin Panel)
- Extension installer
- Marketing module to track campaigns
- New image manager and file upload system
- More reports
According to OpenCart inside information, there is a short list of final changes to be made before releasing the new version which include:
- Updating the file manager (a third party, open-source software separate to OpenCart)
- Finishing the custom fields
- Applying final styling changes to the new responsive theme
- Cleaning up code in the admin section and applying styling changes there too
- Editing PayPal payment gateways to conform with current standards and match the coding style of OpenCart
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