Trends in B2B eCommerce: how to generate sales( 1 )

It is not a secret for anyone that coronavirus has changed the way people buy and that much of what is to come has been caused or accelerated by the health crisis. 

What you may not have noticed is that this is also going to change the rules of the game for wholesale companies. B2B eCommerce (Business To Business) is landing on a new era of transformation full of opportunities. 

We are going to analyze what is behind between what will mark this evolution in the next months. 

Some of the strategies are easier to implement than others, but the truth is that they are within the reach of most of us. It only takes a minimum of strategic vision and, in certain cases, a tool. 

If, foreseeably, the market is going to grow –or at least it is going to move towards the digital part of the business–, you are going to need to be more productive and efficient in what has to do with the online channel. 

It is going to be vital to make a real digital transformation, and digital has the virtue of being able to be automated. The more mechanical tasks can be left to machines, which will solve them more quickly and will free up resources to be able to allocate them to more strategic tasks. 

At marketing automation level, there are many processes that can be carried out 100% automatically in your advertising, email marketing and social media marketing campaigns: create automatic segmentations, manage bids in SEM or create email flows based on the interactions of clients. 

By automating our customer (CRM) and enterprise resource managers (ERP), we can make things like invoice and payroll issuance, pricing, or order management and logistics all by themselves in a big deal. 

To some extent, the online shopping paradigm has made us less dependent on business interaction. Any user of a website can manage the entire purchase process by themselves. 

In the case of B2B, this trend has even further journey. You just have to bear in mind that professional clients know better than individuals what they are looking for and what their needs are. 

If you are going to join all this, it is convenient that you make some adjustments to the concept and content of your website. For example, we would tell you that, although technical terminology is not recommended on B2C websites, in your case it makes a lot of sense. 

It is also recommended that you work very well with frequently asked questions or FAQs, the knowledge bases or that you do tutorials to clear up all the questions that may arise. 

This is one of the eCommerce trends that has been growing steadily the most in recent years. 

The enormous strength of Amazon has caused countless electronic businesses to be dazzled by the volume of business that this platform moves. 

The truth is that on Amazon companies can sell to other companies (hence their commitment to what they have called Amazon Business). However, there are more specific or vertical marketplaces for wholesale businesses, such as Solostocks.

This is something that goes somewhat against the nature or the original approach of this post, but the truth is that many manufacturers have found in the agility of online sales a way to reach the end customer directly, avoiding intermediaries and, with it , costs and loss of control and commercial margin. 

You may be inspired by some of these examples of manufacturers who have switched to B2C quite successfully. 

It is worth thinking about it because, if you see yourself capable of doing it - technically it is not complicated - you will be providing an extra value to your clients. 

Not only that, but also a competitive differential advantage that you may not have had and that is increasingly important: traceability. The consumer is increasingly trained and informed, and is looking for this type of detail. 

Among the four trends in B2B eCommerce that we have already talked in this post, we have seen at least three that have to do with different channels, such as eCommerce itself (wholesale and retail) or marketplaces. 

This, in a way, leads us to the last of the trends that will consolidate and grow from now on: omnichannel in companies of all sizes and areas. 

Customers have made the shopping experience seamless. It is not something exclusive to a single channel, and they move from one to another. In these changes, the customer receives different stimuli and impacts from various channels that, together, make progress towards purchase. 

There are no longer a single channel customers, so you have to attribute their conversion share to each of them.