Best Practices & Strategies for B2B Ecommerce Success

1. Regularly Audit Your Ecommerce Website

A B2B ecommerce website has so many moving parts that it’s easy to overlook errors and flaws. If you ignore errors and awkward processes, you’ll frustrate your buyers and lose sales opportunities.

To ensure your B2B ecommerce website operates in a way that maximizes sales opportunities, ensure that your website:

• Loads quickly and completely
• Has working links
• Accurately reflects inventory
• Displays accurate pricing
• Provides smooth navigation
• Attracts the right audience

But how do you check for, remove, and manage errors? The first step is to conduct an ecommerce website audit.

An ecommerce website audit comprehensively evaluates your online store’s performance.

The critical aspects of an ecommerce website audit include:

• UX (User Experience) — Evaluate how easy and enjoyable it is for users to interact with your website.
• Content — Assess the quality, relevance, and effectiveness of your website’s textual and visual content.
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization) — Review strategies and techniques to improve the website’s visibility and ranking in search engine results as part of your digital marketing strategy.
• General technical assessment — Check your website’s overall functionality, performance, and responsiveness.
• Security considerations — Ensure the website is secure against potential cyberthreats and vulnerabilities.

2. Personalize Your Product Catalog

When customers browse a B2B ecommerce store, they do so with their business’s specific needs in mind. Presenting your products to all buyers without meeting their unique requirements and preferences risks lost sales.

In fact, a 2023 Master B2B survey reports that 59% of B2B sellers said they lost sales because their online store wasn’t personalized enough for customers.

B2B personalization is challenging. Without the right tech stack, your product and customer data can become disorganized and difficult to manage.

It helps to have real-time access to customer data (e.g., order history, contact details, and payment terms) and product data (e.g., SKU, descriptions, inventory levels, and pricing).

With k-ecommerce’s ERP integration, you can harness this data effectively, enabling you to personalize your B2B ecommerce website with:

• A self-service portal
• Recurring orders
• Personalized product catalogs
• Product recommendations
• Marketing segmentation

3. Provide Customized Pricing

As a B2B seller, you want to offer competitive and accurate prices. However, that becomes challenging when many customers have contractual pricing agreements or rely on bulk pricing and volume discounts.

That’s where custom pricing helps. With custom pricing, you offer pricing based on a business’s buying habits, needs, and negotiated rates.

k-ecommerce’s ERP-integrated solution gives you the flexibility to accommodate each business’s unique pricing requirements as part of its personalized catalog.

4. Streamline the Checkout Process

A smooth checkout process keeps customers satisfied and improves conversion rates, but a cumbersome checkout process can negatively impact customer experience.

It’s not surprising that 22% of customers abandon their carts due to a long, complicated checkout process, and with 98% of B2B customers encountering challenges at checkout, you have an opportunity to stand out from the competition.

Streamline the checkout process and accommodate bulk orders, custom pricing, and diverse payment methods by:

• Implementing one-click reorders: Give customers the option to save frequently purchased orders for quick and easy reordering.
• Adding a progress bar: Provide visual cues to help customers know how far along they are in the checkout process.
• Providing multiple payment options: Provide diverse payment methods to satisfy different preferences.
• Enabling guest checkouts: Allow first-time buyers to make purchases without creating an account.
• Allowing customers to save carts: Give buyers the option to save carts so they can buy at a later date.

K-ecommerce’s centralized, real-time ERP data provides up-to-date information on inventory levels, pricing, and customer data to support a streamlined checkout process.

5. Streamline Repeat Online Ordering

Most B2B transactions are not one-off purchases. If a B2B buyer buys your products and has a great experience, they will likely order again. Given that 53% of B2B buyers make daily purchases online, you want to ensure each succeeding purchase is at least as satisfying as the last.

However, if your online store requires customers to individually select and reorder items every time, it will cost the buyer hours of extra work and sour the buying experience.

Making it easier for customers to reorder their essentials saves them time and reinforces their trust in your services.

Using k-ecommerce, you can easily streamline repeat orders with tools like saved cart options, templates, quick reorder buttons, and Express Orders.

6. Use Automation to Your Advantage

Running an ecommerce business involves many tasks, from managing inventory to processing orders and customer inquiries. While these processes are critical to your online store’s success, they also involve repetitive tasks that waste time and increase your costs.

By using automation, you can eliminate or minimize that busy work, allowing the time to be spent on high-level tasks instead. You also get fewer errors, improved customer experience, and reduced costs. 45% of retailers reported increased profits using automation tools.

K-ecommerce, for example, offers seamless integration with popular ERP systems like Acumatica and Microsoft Dynamics 365, allowing you to automate ecommerce functions like:

• Order processing
• Inventory management
• Pricing
• Payment processing
• Order fulfillment

7. Optimize Your B2B Onsite Search

B2B buyers are busy and can’t afford to waste time when visiting an online store. The sooner they can find the items they need, the better for them and their organizations. Nearly half, 43%, of website visitors use the search function immediately after loading a website.

In addition, B2B items can be complex, with multiple variations, and your website search engine needs to help buyers find the exact item they need.

If your internal search feature isn’t optimized to help buyers find the items they need quickly, you may end up frustrating them. Worse, they might seek another online store that offers a more refined internal search engine.

Despite the importance of internal search engines, only 41% of B2B organizations plan to use search to meet high customer expectations.

That’s an opportunity for your B2B ecommerce business to stand out. By optimizing your B2B onsite search, you earn the trust of buyers who crave the convenience of finding what they need fast.

With k-ecommerce, you get a search functionality that allows customers to search by item number or description and filter by attributes.

8. Invest in Responsive Design

To take advantage of this trend, B2B online stores must prioritize delivering a seamless high-quality customer experience, regardless of the device buyers use.

To make your B2B online store mobile-friendly, your ecommerce website should:

• Load quickly
• Automatically adjust to different screen sizes
• Show text that’s easy to read
• Use negative space effectively
• Display important information above the fold
• Provide intuitive navigation
• Use highly visible, clickable buttons and elements

One effective way to achieve a responsive design is through CSS Media Queries or by leveraging responsive frameworks like Tailwind, Panda CSS, and Bootstrap.

9. Secure Your Ecommerce Website

Everyone is at risk of a cyberattack, but ecommerce sites are the most vulnerable.

Ecommerce websites handle a huge number of financial transactions and sensitive information. That makes them prime targets for cybercrime like identity theft, man-in-the-middle attacks, and credit card manipulation.

Cyberattacks can damage brand reputation, lead to lost sales, and result in government fines and lawsuits. To protect your B2B ecommerce business from these attacks, prioritize security.

Security measures that can help secure your B2B ecommerce website include:

• Implementing stronger passwords
• Using secure payment gateways that encrypt sensitive data
• Using two-factor authentication
• Using secure sockets layer (SSL) encryption

A B2B ecommerce platform like k-ecommerce offers robust security measures through in-house security experts, secure payment gateways, and a PCI Level 1 Certified private cloud environment.

10. Optimize Your Website for Search Engines

SEO is a powerful tool in your B2B ecommerce strategy for attracting potential customers. Since most B2B digital commerce purchases are driven by research, most decision-makers use search engines like Google to find what their business needs.

Unlike in B2C sales, where many customers turn to social media, a Databox survey found that over one-third of industry experts said their highest-qualified B2B leads came from their SEO efforts.

For your B2B online store to rank higher in search engines, you must target relevant keywords and optimize helpful content that satisfies the search intent of your target audience. Plan your content so that each piece guides potential buyers through different stages of their buying journey.

SEO is an ongoing process, so use tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to monitor your SEO performance and make data-driven adjustments.