Improving the buyer experience translates into real business value

At the current conjuncture, companies that are reluctant to integrate e-commerce as a part of their sales channels are harming themselves.

It is vital to communicate the value of e-commerce to the decision makers in the organization, and this requires a persuasive case that contemplates factors such as strategic perspectives, cost economy, and increased revenue.

And you have the opportunity to become the champion of change that your company needs, for them we will try to provide you with three persuasive data backed approaches, that will help you sell the e-commerce proposal to the stakeholders.

The three most important benefits of B2B model are:

• Building loyalty
• Reducing costs
• Increase profitability

Building loyalty

Loyalty is based on transparency and the ability to make purchases in a simple way without inconvenience. How is transparency achieved? Transparency is to increase trust between those who have relationships with the company, in this case buyers and one of the most sensitive factors in the business management between companies are prices, today it is relatively easy to be able to find suppliers anywhere in the world and request prices, therefore it is crucial that our customers have up-to-date information on the prices of our products at hand and in time, this in the traditional channel depends on selling and the capacity it has to meet customer requirements. In addition to the above goes the purchase process, it is normal that when we are making a negotiation with a corporate client the emails come and go, the calls come and go, it usually takes a long time for the customer to receive the final offer, it is even very likely that you would have to call it to ask for it and well it is very likely that this same thing will happen in your company. To build that loyalty the customer must be the center, you most have the ability to have at all times the prices and conditions that were negotiated to be able to make arrangements and be able to buy what you offer you at all times and most important even when he needs it, it is clear that the traditional sales model does not have the ability to meet this.

Other key elements present in e-Commerce that help build loyalty are:

• Quick order form
• Lists of applications
• Recurring orders
• 24/7 service support
• Personalized experience (dedicated catalog, prices, conditions of purchase, etc.)

Reducing Costs

The traditional sales model is based on the ability to serve customers in person or by other means such as telephone or email, which are very limited based on the fact that a person usually has a working day of 8 hours a day, between 5 to 6 days a week, which is clear restricts the number of customers you can serve, especially if you have to travel physically and if we start that to have more customers more customers is required more personal, it is very difficult to cut costs, so it is a great challenge since it is not easy to apply savings without harming the service, especially when we talk about the B2B relationship, it is at this point that the B2B eCommerce model is a very attractive option for companies that are looking to reduce costs and better their service , one of the most important reasons to implement it is to achieve "improving sales management since many industries such as hotels, restaurants, supermarkets, among others, operate under extended hours 7 days a week, this represents a great challenge for the traditional channel which hardly has the ability to be available at all times", in other words you will have a sales channel enabled 24/7, where your customers will be able to self-service when and where they need it.

Benefits of the savings generating B2B platform include:

• Self-service tools:
• Corporate accounts
• Buyer roles and permits
• Payment Management
• Tracking orders and quotations
• Full account history
• Savings by avoiding order errors:
• SKU's and inventory validation
• Custom catalogues and price lists
• Orders without having to enter manual data
• Reduce IT costs because the entire infrastructure is cloud-based.

Increase Profitability

One of the biggest challenges of any company is to increase profitability, which is only achieved when the revenue is greater than its expenses and you get a profit or profit from the resources applied, both things are achieved with the B2B eCommerce model, which on the one hand helps to increase the purchase of current customers and on the other as we saw before allows us to reduce costs.

Among the main features of B2B eCommerce that allow us to increase profitability stand out:

• Increase customer sales through the shopping experience through:
  • 100% responsive website with any electronic device
  • Powerful merchandising and promotions
  • Robust content management
  • Campaign management and preview
• Captivating your customers with content:
  • Drag-and-drop tools
  • In-place editing
  • Flexible grid designs
  • Rich visual experiences
  • Full content preview
• Improving sales productivity:
  • No more order-taking
  • Sales on time
  • Ordering on behalf of customers
  • Edit existing orders
  • Make recommendations based on customer history:
    • Shopping cart
    • Latest items ordered
    • Recently viewed and compared products

As we can see, the benefits of the B2B e-Commerce model are clear and the above points will help you to get an idea of how to sustain this investment before the decision makers of the organization.