Webstores are a must, now more than ever, and we’ve mentioned before how we don’t expect that to change. Recently we also addressed the Top 5.5 things that make a B2B Webstore Different. With this understanding, we now look a little bit closer at how the B2B purchaser is buying.
More and more B2B customers are expecting a better shopping experience. One that takes less time, is more intuitive, secures their information and even suggests products that might be of interest. B2B buyers are expecting more of a B2C experience in many respects. And why not? Just look at the Amazon or Netflix experience to prove how they make buying easy.
OK, you’re not Netflix or Amazon, but B2B merchants still need to consider stepping up their online game to emulate the B2C shopping experience. This requires a collaboration between the accounting department and the marketing department, rolled into an intuitive, user friendly, and webtelligent solution. More specifically, buyers want a personalized experience. That experience can be driven by Recommendation Engines built into your web store and provides several benefits:
- Creating a better buying experience
- Easy to order and re-order, also known as content-based filtering is important. Allowing the purchaser to filter based on past or most popular features, highest price to lowest price, and other filtering options give the user the ultimate shopping experience. In a B2B world that means placing a premium on your buyers’ time. Your buyers need to have easy access with an intuitive order process that is tailored to their purchasing patterns, giving them ownership of the experience and their time.
- Identifying trends or data-driven filtering provides feedback on what products are most viewed by web site visitors or products that are often purchased together, for example. In a B2B world, offering a custom price catalogue for specific customers or segmenting customers is another way to offer that data-driven, personalized buying experience. This offers purchasers a sense of industry expertise and that you know them.
- Increasing user engagement: By enhancing the user experience we increase user engagement. When purchasers feel valued, they engage more. More engagement means more data is collected to continue to feed the recommendation engine which in return, increases engagement again. From a B2B perspective, this offers your business more customer loyalty – helping to ensure that your customers don’t spend their money elsewhere. More data allows for better recommendations on your web site, allowing you to create a tailored experience for your customers that results in a satisfying buying journey.
- Increased revenue is another advantage of adding a recommendation engine to your web store; often referred to as upselling. Upselling is an easy way to increase the average order size, increasing revenue. (This may also help with SEO – but that’s another topic.) Recommending what others have also purchased with a particular item often alerts a purchaser to something they may not have known you offered. It’s important to understand that people aren’t buying the way they have in the past. Buyers are more self-sufficient than ever before and most prefer an online experience as opposed to in person; and that has become more the case in 2020.
Recommendation engines are pervasive in the B2C world and while the buyer’s journey is different in the B2B world, once they land on your web store, the B2B buying experience must provide the best of B2C while respecting the unique purchasing habits of a business buyer.
If your web store doesn’t have a recommendation engine, your business is missing opportunities. At North49 we work with your accounting department and your marketing department to provide this and other enhancements to your buyer’s eCommerce experience.
If you want to discuss this more, book some time on my calendar.