B2B eCommerce (also known as "Business To Business" or "B2B") is defined as selling products (or services) online to another company. Many times, these products or services are then re-sold to the consumer. For some reason, many B2B companies seem to think that ecommerce is reserved for the business-2-consumer market. The truth is, however, that B2B eCommerce offers tremendous features and benefits to any company willing to accept it.
Many B2B companies are leaving serious money on the table by not embracing the net and creating (or re-designing) dynamic, sales-driven or customer-centric online businesses. They're missing out on truly revolutionary ways to generate leads, lower overhead, increase revenue, and improve customer relations and support. They may be naively ignorant of the technologies available today or simply stuck in a stubborn, old-school mindset, but they ultimately pay the price of non-action. What they don't realize, until it's too late, is that their competitors are reaping the rewards and taking market share by taking their online business seriously.
Now Is The Time for B2B eCommerce
The fact is that B2B eCommerce is alive and well on the net, and growing! It's not too late to take your company's online presence to the next level and reap the benefits. Now is the time to take action. What exactly is B2B eCommerce? It can be defined as selling products (or services) online to another company and not directly to the consumer market. When discussing eCommerce sites, typical B2B companies include manufacturers and distributors handling product.
If you're planning on starting or re-designing a B2B eCommerce website, it's important to have an understanding of the features that should be available for this type of site. Most eCommerce features will be the same as those found in a Direct-2-Consumer site. You can review the list of these features in the B2C section. See the list here...
B2B eCommerce Features
Because the majority of online business tends to be retail (ie. business-2-consumer), mostly all eCommerce systems tend to be retail-centric, which is why it's challenging to find those that can accommodate the needs of a business-2-business online store/business. What we'll look at here are eCommerce features that are unique to the needs of a B2B eCommerce site.
- Tax Exemption:
- In most business-2-business transactions where tangible product is involved, one company sells to another, who, in turn, will re-sell the product to the end consumer. In this situation, the second company should not be charged sales tax, because they are purchasing for resale. They will be charging sales tax when they sell to the consumer.
When planning your B2B eCommerce site, make sure that the eCommerce system (or shopping cart) you select has the ability to handle tax exemption. Not all of them do. If you are strictly B2B, where you never sell to the public and charge tax, then you may be able to get away with a system that will allow you to globally turn off sales tax (for all products and all sales).
There are companies, however, who sell to both the public and tax-exempt companies. This is a more complicated situation in the handling of sales tax, and where many eCommerce shopping carts drop the ball. You'll need to find a shopping cart that will allow the creation of "customer groups" or "price groups", where you can assign specific customers to a group and then be able to assign a tax exemption to that entire group. This way, you can separate your tax-exemption customers from your retail customers. - Price Levels:
- Another common feature unique to B2B eCommerce sites is the ability to handle different price levels. For example, customers in the USA receive one level of pricing while export customers (in all other countries) are on a different pricing level. Another example is with manufacturers who may have different distributor levels where each level has different pricing.
Look for an eCommerce system that will allow you to create "price groups" or "customer groups", where you can assign specific customers to a group and assign specific pricing or discounts to that group. When the customer logs into the site, the system will recognize them as a member of a group and then display the appropriate pricing for the products. For example, when an "export" customer logs in, they'll only see the export pricing and not pricing reserved for domestic customers. - Hide Pricing / Prevent Orders:
- In some cases, you may want to have your product line information (ie. images, applications, etc.) available to the general public, but you don't want them to see pricing. Why do that? Maybe you have a chain of stores or distributors and you have a store locator on your site. Consumers may find your site, research your products, find the ones they want to purchase, and then use your locator to find a nearby dealer.
In addition to hiding prices, you'll want to prevent them from placing orders. One way to do that is to hide the "Add To Cart" button. Again, not all eCommerce systems are able to handle these requirements, so you want to find one that will allow you to do this without requiring custom programming. - De-Activate Account Registration:
- Practically every eCommerce system offers visitors the ability to register and create a personal account. Benefits of creating an account may include placing orders, viewing order history, re-ordering, or saving to favorites or a wish list. But if you have a business-2-business online store, you probably don't want every Tom, Dick, or Harry creating an account for themselves. In fact, it's very common for a B2B business to first pre-qualify a lead before taking them on as a customer.
In this case, you want to de-activate the account creation feature and not allow visitors to register and create their own accounts. Instead, you will create each customer account in the B2B eCommerce system's "back-end" or administration panel. After creating the customer's account, you would then email the customer their login information. Again, not all eCommerce systems offer this ability or feature, so keep this in mind when shopping around. - Express Order Form:
- Unlike a retail store which will have many one-time customers, a B2B company typically has an established customer base that will purchase many times over, over long periods of time. Another difference is that these customers typically place orders that contain multiple line-items, whereas a retail order will contain on average 1-2 items. The business-2-business customer may also be ordering off of a catalog or may even know the product numbers by heart from familiarity, thereby already having access to product codes or numbers.
This may not seem like a big issue, until you understand the procedure of ordering products on mostly all eCommerce shopping carts, which are retail-centric. Shoppers will typically browse or search for items by navigating around the site, clicking on categories and/or filters to find what they're looking for. Once they find an item, they click on a link which brings up a product detail page where they can then add it to their shopping cart. Another scenario is when a customer already knows the product code, they can enter it into the Search box to locate the item and then they add it to the shopping cart.
The result is that the customer is limited to adding one item at a time to the shopping cart. For a retail customer, it's no big deal. For a B2B customer, this can become tedious, especially if they have tens of items to order on a single order. There are two possible solutions:
1) enable the customer to add multiple line items directly to the shopping cart
2) offer an Express Order Form, allowing the customer to add multiple line items, on a single page, which are then added, all at once, to the shopping cart
Unfortunately, these solutions are rarely found among eCommerce shopping carts as standard features. Adding multiple line items directly to the shopping cart would require custom programming. An Express Order Form may be available or can be custom programmed. Either way, this feature is important enough to warrant the price of custom programming.
