5 Key Drivers for B2B Ecommerce ROI

B2B enterprises’ only survival during the pandemic was maintaining a digital presence. During Covid, around 55% of firms relied on traditional selling, which has dropped to 21% recently.

B2B leaders who have been observing this digital change indicate that this change will remain with us for long. Buyers also prefer online experiences, and approx 47% show an inclination toward self-service models.

Customers expect a more personalized experience allowing them to order online, repeat orders, get recommendations, and much more. Since prospective customers conduct their product searches digitally to discover what’s new that suppliers are providing on some of the most promising platforms, such as Google and Amazon, it is giving equal opportunities for the B2B manufacturers and distributors to take action.

Why B2B eCommerce?

The question every B2B brand must ask themselves is how a B2B eCommerce Development can impact ROI. Let’s pick some offline B2B processes that can help you calculate ROI but before that, let’s understand how you can digitally reduce costs while making B2B processes simpler and transparent.

Reduced Cost With B2B eCommerce Solution

It’s true that one size doesn’t fit all, as every business is unique and requires unique solutions to meet its needs & objectives. Yet here are some of the common situations that any traditional B2B commerce owner faces and can be eliminated by shifting to a digital environment.

Legacy B2B eCommerce Cost — Using a legacy solution with an obsolete eCommerce website design requires a substantial cost to maintain and upgrade from time to time. If the current solution interrupts multiple times, hampering your business, it can cost you more than the investment to fix it.

Implementing a flexible, customizable, and robust digital solution can solve a lot of problems. Integrated with the latest and cutting-edge technology. A digital solution is also backed by a team of efficient developers who are always there to help with the solution.

Backorders Management — Backorders are considered the backbone of B2B commerce. This has been a conventional method of business where loyal buyers order from the sellers, which helps in business sustainability. The process of backorder becomes extremely difficult when the buyers order without knowing the seller’s stock. They have to wait for the stock availability and further their delivery, which means further business delays.

Making things digital can treat these problems. A digital solution can let buyers check for the availability of the stock, which can help in making further requests. A digital solution can save a lot of buyers’ as well as sellers’ time in handling backorders and making decisions while spending time on other business functions.

Errors and Returns — When buyers send back the orders they make, breaks the seller’s heart. Sellers bore losses under this process along with logistics costs and a whole lot of hassle. In a commerce business returns are meant to happen due to a lot of reasons.

This issue can also be minimized with the help of a fully-featured eCommerce solution. With a B2B eCommerce digital solution, you deliver transparency to the processes, reducing conflicts, keeping the communication clean, and maintaining healthy relationships.

Data-Entry Costs — The conventional accounts methods are the most annoying and complex to manage without making errors. Even if you appoint a professional, you will have to keep monitoring the data.

Integrating a great digital commerce platform can automatically sync to your account system & will free the resource to work on the most crucial tasks instead of manually adding the data.

Printing Costs — Printing catalogs, forms, banners, etc are a lot of manual, time-consuming work, which also includes a lot of costs. The worst part about printing is that once done does not allow any changes. Hence to make changes, is a whole new work and cost too.

With a digital eCommerce platform, you can always customize the design, texts, and style of the catalogs, and forms without paying that extra cost for any changes. E Commerce is a flexible method to always stay in sync with the customer’s needs as well as progress with the market, unlike the traditional method, which is slow and effortful work.

How Does a B2B Market Work?

B2B market is self-explanatory where the customers and the sellers are business owners who sell and buy products. It also refers to all the marketing efforts, tactics, and strategies directed at other businesses or organizations.

A B2B marketing helps companies to promote their products or services that can be used in the day-to-day business operations, in production, or for resale to others.

B2B eCommerce solutions target the audience that includes business executives, procurement officers, and other people who are the representatives of the organization making purchasing decisions for the company.

B2C, in contrast, targets individual shoppers or consumers. Digital disruption or digital change is quite certainly a blessing for the brands, however, they are more time-strapped than ever before.

Now it’s time to quantify the opportunity cost while calculating what your staff could do if they weren’t tied with the legacy management system. The staff could focus more on retaining customers, running promotional campaigns to drive additional revenue, or even spending time with wholesale customers or retailers. Let’s move further with decoding the revenue opportunities a B2B eCommerce provides.

Factors to Consider When Measuring eCommerce ROI

The potential revenue stream changes can deliver one aspect. Hence to gain a better picture, several other factors must be taken into account that have the potential to significantly impact the B2B eCommerce platform.

Risk Mitigation

Errors during operations can cause trouble and more risk in certain industries that handle inventory and supply chain management, supply chain management, tax compliance, invoice management, and more. Errors in these areas can lead to huge losses in the long run.

Smart automation integrated within B2B eCommerce software can improve the visibility of internal processes and data. This platform reduces operational errors in business which gives weightage when calculating ROI.

Market Share (Recent)

Integrating smart B2B eCommerce makes your firm agile, and smart, and gives efficiency in marketing your brand and generating leads. With these facilities, you can showcase an increase in revenue.

However, we shared that business scalability is not entirely dependent upon revenue because there are giants sitting in the topmost position to take away the maximum audience. Improvements in the overall performance make investment in B2B eCommerce worthwhile.

Enhance Performance’s Site

An old and slow-running website can lead to multiple negative consequences, such as delayed sales, inefficiency, and customer dissatisfaction. It is easy to tell when your website is slow or underperforming. You will start receiving more bounce rates, and your site’s load time will become slow, resulting in low traffic and more onsite searches.

Advancing the current site into a B2B commerce can provide tangible benefits to your business. A flexible and easily customizable platform can address all your SEO and development-related issues to encourage more audience incoming, thereby providing a long-term ROI.

Overall Efficiency

Using a B2B eCommerce enhances the efficiency as they are integrated with advanced technologies like AI and ML. These technologies can automate mundane and recurring tasks, like inventory management, order processing, chatbots & more.

Automation also frees the resources to work on other critical tasks that would help in multiplying the sales and revenues.

Companies must undergo efficiency assessments of the existing processes to help them calculate the basic cost and revenue efficiencies generated by their new AB2B eCommerce platform.

Customer Satisfaction

As multiple options in digital Commerce have risen, customers prefer the brands. Personalization is something which they look for, including speed, the convenience of payment, and much more.

When your site fails, customers drift to other options leading to difficulties in customer retention. A robust B2B eCommerce platform can eliminate the possible challenges to enhancing ROI, increasing the chances of higher customer lifetime value.

In a Nutshell -

Investing in B2B eCommerce has been the need of the hour. B2B Ecommerce will help meet the modern customers’ requirements while rendering the business with a plethora of opportunities. However, companies should assess the performance of the website timely and prepare a holistic approach to going beyond just a revenue improvement.

Instigating these critical factors can help the companies make a compelling case for B2B eCommerce investment in order to set a milestone ensuring continuous scalability of the business.