Business-to-business ecommerce describes Internet-enabled transactions between businesses, such as a manufacturer and a wholesaler, a wholesaler and a retailers, or a wholesaler and a business user. The B-to-B ecommerce market was expected to exceed $550 billion in the U.S. last year, offering great opportunities for distributors and manufacturers to streamline sales, boost profits, and engage with new customers.
Since the late 1990s, businesses have been using the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) system to transfer purchase orders and similar structured information electronically, representing, if you will, a form of B-to-B ecommerce.
Separately, some B-to-B sellers have created websites on which business customers can make purchases as if they were shopping on a business-to-consumer site. Examples of this newer form include Grainger, Vistaprint, Uline, Stickercutting, and Amazon Supply. This category of B-to-B ecommerce may enjoy the most growth and offer the most opportunity.
1) Shopping is part of your customer’s profession
One of the most significant differences between B-to-B and B-to-C ecommerce is that shopping is part of the B-to-B ecommerce customer’s daytime job.
This means that the stakes can be higher for the B-to-B seller. If the shopper has a good experience, that shopper is likely to return and reorder repeatedly — even suggesting the seller to co-workers or other divisions. But if something goes wrong, particularly something that would cause the shopper to miss deadlines at work or appear in some way to have done a poor job, that shopper will likely blame the B-to-B seller. Depending on the unhappy shopper’s influence, the B-to-B seller might lose the entire account, including many individual buyers or divisions.
This means that order handling and transactional communications must be top notch. Some B-to-B ecommerce sellers will call customers to confirm orders or shipments when the customer has ordered a large quantity, very expensive items, or requested express shipping, since these orders may represent important transactions to the customer.
2) B2B customers are also B2C Customers
B-to-B sites often trail consumer sites in technology, function, capabilities, and design. That is typically just not good enough.
As an example, the U.S. B-to-B site for a major multinational manufacturer, which includes information for dealers in the U.S., can only be viewed on Internet Explorer, and won’t work in any other browser, including Firefox, Chrome, Opera, or Safari. And don’t even think about visiting this site on a mobile device. It just won’t work.
Read More: http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/64226-4-Keys-for-Effective-B-to-B-Ecommerce
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