B2B eCommerce Customizations & Functionality

Integrating marketing strategies with B2B eCommerce operations isn’t new, but creating custom features that deliver a synchronized message is among the new best practices of savvy B2B marketers. Marketers can deliver consistent messages through multiple advertising and promotional forums so that it doesn’t matter where customers access information whether it’s on a mobile device, laptop, desktop computer, company app or Business Page in social media or other digital forums.

Metrics, buyer-behavior analyses and other back-end SEO and engagement strategies are essential to drive sales, attract new customers and engage customers by offering two-way communications to every customer. No two eCommerce sites work exactly the same way, and decision-makers can reach customers, inspire loyalty and increase sales by building a marketing juggernaut that brands the business, interacts with customers on multiple channels, provides automatic real-time updates to inventory, manages vendor relationships to ensure a smooth manufacturing process and responsive supply chain and offers buyers many choices for shipping products globally.

First Step: Analyzing Needs and Opportunities

Savvy decision-makers understand that the first step necessary to ignite sales is conducting a needs and opportunities analysis to know their customers and customize their online presence to reach and engage customers with personalized marketing. Today’s functional website offers customers personalized messages, unique screen views on mobile devices based on their ordering histories and the ability to customize their orders. The process can be entirely automatic or trigger staff involvement in unusual or defined situations. Companies can’t build this kind of efficiency without understanding their customers and customizing website capabilities.

CRP and ERP integrations are critical, and most eCommerce companies integrate offsite customer service options in social media, review websites and proprietary apps. Integrating multiple channels into operations allows customers to experience consistent and targeted messages across channels. Segregating customers is an ongoing process that requires focused studies of customer demographics, buying behavior, market-structure maps, supply and demand chains, client purchasing power and strategies to engage customers in two-way conversations and interactions.

Market segmentation best practices include the following activities:

• Segmenting the market by sales revenues, number of employees and geographical data
• Curating customers by their product choices and seasonal buying habits
• Developing company opportunities for expanding sales
• Engaging customers based on their online browsing habits
• Sectioning customers based on industry-specific data
• Using product applications to target customers
• Integrating supply side data into marketing strategies
• Studying analytics data to determine what motivates sales of each product, manufacturer or service
• Using SEO and keyword strategies to target customers from key demographic profiles
• Interacting with customer call centers to mine and use segmentation information
• Targeting customers based on brand and company loyalty

B2B customers now research companies, share their online experiences and review company products in many forums, so B2B marketers need to monitor the chatter, engage customers, respond to complaints and even thank customers for both negative and positive feedback. Those customer engagement strategies take a robust and customizable eCommerce platform that offers collaborating tools, SEO and marketing features, intuitive architecture, automatic marketing and powerful functionality that delivers extraordinary user experiences.

The best strategies for meeting customers and strengthening a company’s online reputation involve embracing the new journey and customer attitudes that mirror B2C marketing and customer management. A single B2B customer can be geometrically more valuable, and wholesale companies and B2B suppliers need custom website features to deliver the kind of benefits that regular consumers enjoy. Peer-to-peer networks, social channels and explosive growth in the numbers and sophistication of other online communications channels make it critical to consumerize B2B websites with special features and functionality that allow buyers to conduct company research, read testimonials, follow formal buying procedures and request custom product options.

The best strategy for customizing website capabilities depends on choosing a development partner that offers staff and stakeholder training so that each involved party can easily take advantage of new capabilities. If all stakeholders don’t know how to use custom features, then their benefits quickly evaporate or could even cause negative results that include customer dissatisfaction, distributor confusion, vendor difficulties and employee misgivings. Best practices for training include not only training stakeholders how to use custom features but also explaining why and how the features benefit them. Key points that developers should cover in training include:

Optimizing an eCommerce website’s performance requires focused testing on multiple operating systems and devices, ensuring that the right information goes to all relevant departments and outside consultants and training stakeholders in how to implement and manage custom features. The benefits of working with developers to customize website functionality include:

Each successful eCommerce company spends a large part of its staff budget on training, so it makes sense to spend some time and resources on training websites to perform flawlessly. A reliable and skilled development partner can simplify the training process for stakeholders and company internal training staffs to enable all parties involved to access and use website custom features and learn about changes in new iterations to ensure the highest levels of performance, compliance and operations management.

Building a Custom Website to Fulfill Multiple eCommerce Needs

The smartest decision for forward-thinking B2B decision-makers is to choose a highly customizable, scalable and modular eCommerce platform that is easier to customize and upgrade as the businesses grow. There’s no better time to customize B2B websites than in the current market because statistics show that B2B sales are predicted to grow at impressive rates for the foreseeable future. Custom integrations give customers the following functionality benefits that generate sales and improve customer satisfaction:

• Customers can check the status of their orders and view supply chain details
• It’s easy to view, download and print past orders
• Options include downloading, viewing, printing and paying invoices
• Customers can access information on assemblies, subassemblies and Bills of Materials
• B2B customers can engage with eCommerce companies, provide feedback on products and access tools to perform research, read unbiased third-party reviews, customize products and speed deliveries or opt for less expensive shipping

Upgrading to an intuitive, customizable and robust eCommerce platform provides the best options for managing sustained growth and earning a fair share of rising B2B revenues. Custom features that synchronize automatically across channels also reduce operating costs, simplify collaborations, empower distributors and generate greater loyalty and customer satisfaction. However, customizing eCommerce platforms works more efficiently and costs less over time when decision-makers choose a skilled development partner that works with company programmers, outside engineers, staff and stakeholders to develop clean, intuitive and fully integrated customizations for better functionality.

Functionality & Customization Tips from B2B eCommerce Experts

Regardless of platform, industry or targeted customers, you need a team of engineers and advisors who can work with multiple coders, open source engineers, vendors and distributors to customize your website so that it offers each customer and stakeholder intuitive functionality, targeted marketing messages, custom operating system displays and appealing design features. Our services at Clarity Ventures include fielding an impressive design team that specializes in designing custom integrations so that your website fulfills all the evolving demands of B2B eCommerce, which include generating leads, driving customer engagement and loyalty, providing full website metrics and incorporating automatic marketing features and SEO best practices into your website. B2B marketing today is no longer just a matter of optimizing market spend to revenue, standardizing your market practices and scaling your business. You have an incredible opportunity to optimize all your eCommerce teams and capitalize on cutting-edge website functionality with platform customizations, stakeholder training and increased customer engagement that can revolutionize your marketing approach to satisfy enlightened, educated and discerning customers. Call or contact us today at Clarity Ventures for a consultation to see how we can ease the development process and work as trusted partners in meeting your business goals.