B2B and E-commerce — Tips & Tricks

E-commerce in B2B is when you sell goods or services to other businesses much more often as you do to single merchants. At the same time, the behavior of merchants in B2B is almost identical to that of B2C merchants. However, the biggest and most important difference in B2B is that people visit your website because it’s their job and this is something you should always keep in mind.

Here are some facts about B2B merchants:

• 70% of their activity on your website is devoted to searching for information;
• 50% of merchants use search engines to find what they are looking for;
• B2B merchants know exactly what they want.

B2B merchants express the same behavioral patterns as B2C merchants do:

• B2B merchants are also always B2C merchants;
• Expectations of B2B merchants correspond to the expectations of B2C merchants;
• They value an intuitive and user-friendly UI;
• They will appreciate personalization;
• Mobile friendliness matters in 2017.

Every year the number of online merchants in the E-commerce world increases. Therefore, you need to make sure that all the E-commerce processes of yours are simplified as much as possible. As we have said earlier, the biggest difference in B2B is that people who visit your website do this because it’s their job.

Therefore your tasks are the following:

• Deliver the best user experience;
• Optimize and simplify the order verification process;
• Create an opportunity to place an order without having to sign up or make the signup process as fast as possible;
• Implement the ability to link a credit card to a customer’s account;
• ERP Integration.

70% of B2B merchants’ activity on your website is dedicated to finding information, therefore:

• The website navigation structure should be intuitive;
• To improve usability, it is better to use the F-pattern design;
• Introduce a product recommendation section;
• You can implement customer support when choosing a service/product;
• It is worth implementing several filtering and sorting options;
• Incorporate calls to action;
• Avoid 404 pages and other issues related to website performance.

In most cases, B2B merchants start their solution provider search with Google or other search engines:

• Do a proper search engine optimization (SEO);
• Use pay-per-click advertising;
• Create an XML sitemap.

In conclusion, we hope that this article has been of help to you and you will become a lot more successful with our tips in the B2B E-commerce world. In addition, we would like to encourage to learn more about our lead-generation platform called Actonlytics here.

Originally published at www.actonlytics.com.