How to be successful in B2B e-commerce

What are the B2B e-commerce trends for 2020.

B2B commerce professionals are rethinking their strategies to focus more on customer engagement and digital assistance – and not just sales growth.

A rethinking of the B2B e-commerce is mandatory , a global market in exponential growth that has reached a size of more than five times the B2C e-commerce market.

The emergence of customer care as a fundamental differentiator and the growing adoption of e-commerce by B2B buyers.

The result? The explosion of portals dedicated to B2B partners and customers. When assessing e-commerce needs from an end-user perspective, many B2B companies discover they need to provide agile and effective digital assistance to their entire online ecosystem. This often results in the need to replace multiple isolated legacy systems with a single, easy-to-use system that includes product discovery, pricing and support in one place.

How to be successful in B2B e-commerce in 2020.

Looking to 2020, we will continue to focus on reducing costs – for the same (if not greater!) Quality of service for customers and partners. This trend will be particularly vigorous among the industrial segments that need more organic growth within certain budget constraints. There will also be a consolidation of technology with far fewer fragmented solutions, as many B2B companies recognize that their CRM, customer service and e-commerce apps must be synchronized in order not to become an obstacle to growth. Any customer contact technology that is not connected to any other customer contact technology will be considered much less useful in providing an excellent customer experience.

Why E-commerce should be at the center of your strategy.

In terms of best practice, some B2B companies understandably strive to adopt an e-commerce based approach. When embarking on the e-commerce adventure, it is important to make e-commerce the guide and the first and most faithful declination of the quality of the customer experience that your company is able to provide, beyond the e-commerce but starting from e-commerce. One of the most common mistakes is having only one isolated team dealing with e-commerce. The sales function must be integrated and connected with the customer service, sales and teams dedicated to the channel. It is important to have an e-commerce team to manage commercial operations, but governance requires the participation of all stakeholders. In other words, a com governance team pleto must include leaders in customer service, field sales, distribution and sales through partners, in addition to IT and traditional corporate stakeholders. The relationship between e-commerce and all the other channels must be considered, and the easiest way to do this is to obtain active participation in the program by all the main disciplines in contact with customers when you start the journey.

Let’s Start with little, but make sure you can scale immediately.

Another best practice is to start with little. It is easier to start the journey towards e-commerce with a few customer segments, for example small companies in a specific area or perhaps an entire geographical area for an emerging market. With today’s technology, it is easy to target select segments and allow certain customers to do certain things. So it is possible to implement e-commerce in a very focused way and at the same time make sure that you have the organizational capacity to regulate the other channels alongside e-commerce. The limited initial scope also makes it much easier to document changes in business processes for traditional vendors and service channels and to optimize them in the initial customer group, so that future implementations can also take advantage of new processes.