Online stores are getting trendier these days.
Be it stationery items, groceries, jewelry items, or even apparels; everything is available online with just one click.
However, just as the B2C companies are exploring through the online market, the B2B companies are also looking forward to dominating the ecommerce industry.
Various companies are checking out online shopping stores for different business deals.
But considering the B2B and B2C businesses, the requirements or necessities of the customers differ to a great extent. The B2B companies need to continually work on altering their online stores for attracting the customers.
Hence, the regular online carts wouldn’t be helpful for the B2B eCommerce websites.
7 B2B Ecommerce Features Your Website Should Have
1. Personalized Pricing Plans
The B2C online portals have various pricing packages that remain uniform for every customer.
For instance, a T-Shirt on Amazon will be priced the same for every consumer, irrespective of the demographics, such as age group, location, etc.
But when it comes to the B2B online portals, the pricing depends on the customers and their requirements.
The pricing with the B2B portals usually depends on various factors like the company size, order frequency, type of services and products, and much more.
B2B companies need to make sure that their pricing options cater to different types of clients they might have. Each pricing plan should come with several pricing benefits, offers, discounts, combo packs, etc.
2. Improvised Checkout
Compared to the B2C online portals, dealing with the checkout process of the B2B portals can be a bit complicated. Even the customers must be specially focused while working on the checkout requirements on B2B online portals.
So, look for an improvised design that keeps the checkout process simple and at the same time reduces the steps of the checkout process. Accommodate your customers with facilities like transfer of shipping charges to the account of delivery partner, recovering the payment details of previous orders, pay through multiple modes like trade credit, line of credit, etc.
Making the checkout options simple would surely reduce the intricacy dragging more customers to your site again and again.
3. EV SSL Certificate
Security is something any smart customer would look for while visiting the ecommerce portals.
Be it sharing important details for placing an order or even making huge payments, the online websites that are protected with the SSL Certificates are widely preferred as compared to the unprotected ones. SSL is used to secure credit card transactions, data transfer, logins and more. This certificate allows secure connections from a web server to a browser.
While SSL certificates come in various types, one of the most viable are the EV SSL Certificates. When you wish for the highest validation, EV SSL is an inevitable option. However, if you want an authenticate EV SSL certificate at lower cost, then SSL2BUY should be in your list. EV SSL certificate from SSL2BUY will work same as you purchase directly from authority.
Here are the major indicators of the EV SSL certificate:
- HTTPS
- Padlock icon
- Organization name in URL
This would help companies from losing sales orders, ultimately resulting in higher revenue. Again, apart from security, the SSL certificate is also important in terms of SEO.
The sites protected with SSL come with higher ranks in the list of Google Search. So, look for the EV SSL Certificate and protect your company transactions while you rule the search engines.
4. Customer Registration
Customer registration is an essential factor attributing the success of both B2C and B2B ecommerce stores.
However, as an ecommerce business, you must encourage your web visitors to register for your email newsletter or at your site generally. To get more customer to register at your store, make sure to make your registration process quick and straightforward. Avoid asking unnecessary details and keep the registration form as concise as possible.
Once your customer registers at your ecommerce store, you can easily share details like payment terms, quantities of orders, shipping arrangements, discounts & offers, so forth.
Giving the customers a login ID to your store would also help in hiding specific products and blocking individual purchases for the customers who are not registered. So, make sure to optimize your customer registration form and keep it concise to encourage more sign-ups.
5. Flexibility In Payments
The customers are, without a doubt, going to get irritated if your B2B online website follows a single payment gateway.
Make sure to include some flexibility in your payment options to make your customers comfortable while making the payment. Invest in multiple payment options to give your customers various payment options. Apart from the online payment options, work on the offline payment options too. This includes providing a credit period to the customers, which can later be tracked with the purchase order numbers.
When the customers are provided with various payment options, your ecommerce website is likely to see an exponential jump in metrics such as ROI, click-through-rate, revenue, and more.
6. More Shipping Options
Hearing your customers complaining about any shipping issues they have faced can be embarrassing. More than that, it might result in lousy word-of-mouth and reduced customer retention rate.
Thus, make sure your B2B online portals eliminates the faulty shipping services, which may end up in losing your customers. Avoid the shipping issues like hidden delivery charges, lengthy and complicated checkout processes, zero accelerated options, high shipping charges, damaged deliveries, and much more.
Instead, upgrade to shipping facilities that would help in diverting more and more customers to the online website. Introduce features like automated orders, delivery to multiple locations, flexible payments, reliable and scalable shipping, etc.
7. Engaging + Actionable Content
As soon as you enter a website, the first you are going to see is the content, be it visual content or textual content.
Your content becomes the deciding factor for your website visitors in many cases.
Hence content on your home page, list of products, product descriptions, or any other content for that matter, should be extremely engaging in nature.
For this, make sure to identify your target audience and understand their requirements as well as the pain points.
The website should also have conversational content to engage your audience and make it interactive to keep them reading until the end. This also helps in building loyalty for the brand giving you more orders. Improve the readability of the content, work on the language, add personality for brand loyalty, etc.
Wrap-Up
Your B2B ecommerce store is not going to find success overnight — it’s a no brainer.
However, working on the right platform and serving your clients with all the advanced features is going to help you meet your goals. It will also result in increased customer loyalty, more revenue, a better return on investment (ROI), and so forth.