We recently had a #Webinar on "Scale your #B2B Business without any Restriction". The Webinar took place on 16th August at 7:30 PM - 8:30 PM IST | 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM CET | 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM ET.
The key points covered in the Webinar are:
• B2B eCommerce, how it’s different from conventional B2C.
• Key Factors when choosing right B2B eCommerce Platform.
• Advantages of SaaS based B2B Platform.
• 7 B2B selling experiences that you can unlock with ShoppingCartElite.
• B2B Sales Cycle through ShoppingCartElite (Live Demonstration).
Integrate #Business Applications like ERP, Ecommerce, Marketplace, CRM, Shipping and POS Systems under one single platform with APPSeCONNECT: https://www.appseconnect.com/integrations/
Nell’iperspazio con Rocket: il Framework Web di Rust!
Webinar: Scale your B2B Business without any Restriction
1.
2. AGENDA
• B2B eCommerce: How it’s different from conventional B2C
• Key Factors when choosing an eCommerce Platform for B2B
• Advantages of SaaS based B2B Platform
• 48 B2B selling experiences that you can unlock with Shopping Cart Elite
• B2B Feature Demonstration
6. UNDERSTANDING B2C VS B2B
IMPORTANCE B2C B2B
AVAILABILITY B2C YES
BEST PRICE YES YES VIA CUSTOM DISCOUNTS
TARGET MARKET WIDE NARROW
CHECKOUT QUICK & EASY CHECKOUT
USEFUL SHOPPING CART & EASY
WITH
B2B PAYMENT OPTIONS
LIFETIME SALES USUALLY LIMITED CONTINUOUS
BRAND IDENTITY via MARKETING via MARKETING & RELATIONSHIPS &
DECISION EMOTION LOGIC (BUSINESS VALUE)
FEAR
LITTLE, THEY CAN DO RETURN OR
CHARGEBACK
LARGE, THEY CAN’T GET BACK THE TIME
WASTED BUILDING RELATIONSHIP
59. SaaS ADVANTAGES
Software As A Service
Ecommerce Solution
Self-Hosted
Ecommerce Solution
SOFTWARE LICENSE $/month Included
PRODUCT CONFIGURATOR included extra cost
HOSTING included extra cost
SOFTWARE SUPPORT & UPGRADE included extra cost
SOFTWARE / SERVER INSTALLATION included extra cost
SOFTWARE / SERVER MAINTENANCE included extra cost
SEO TECHNICAL EXPERTS included extra cost
IN-HOUSE SEO MARKETING EXPERTS extra cost N/A
IN-HOUSE MARKETING EXPERTS extra cost N/A
60. 48 B2B SELLING EXPERIENCES
UNLOCKED BY
SHOPPING CART ELITE
61. B2B FEATURES IN SCE
Custom Wholesale
Application
Customer
Registration with
Configurable
Approval
Filtered Search
Favorite Products
Email Marketing
Mobile
Responsiveness /
Touch Friendly UI
Navigation
Sales Rep /
Commission
Management
Advanced Discounts
/ Specials
Quotes / Help Desk
CRM Integrated
with Customer
Accounts / Orders /
Engagement Data
Customer Wholesale
Dashboard
Multi-Warehouse
Inventory
Packing Validation
Wholesale Levels /
Tiered Pricing
Ship using
Customer’s Shipping
Credentials
ERP Integrations
Multiple Websites
Controlled by Single
Software
Autoresponders
Contract
Management
Shared/Private
Canned Messages
Automated Returns
Net Terms
Subscriptions /
Grace Periods
Affiliate Marketing
White Label Website
Customer Specific
Pricing / Catalog
Multiple Contacts
per Account, one
primary
Customer Account
Rules
Minimum Store
Credit / Credit Limits
Share Inventory /
Data Feeds with
Customers
Robust CMS
Employee
Permissions
Qty Discount on
Product Level
Open API
Store Credits /
Courtesy Credits /
Payment Plans
Easy Levels Sync
VIP Processing
Price Overrides
Advanced
Workflows With or
Without Approval
Checkpoints
Frequently Ordered
/ Re-order an order
Personalized
Content or Theme
Amazon FBA
Split Shipments
Product: Videos and
File Attachments
Configurable Views
Customer Choose
Delivery Date
Purchase Order
Purchasing
63. FIVE DIVISIONS
PPC Automation
(SaaS + Staffing)
10%
Staff
Consulting as a Service
(Staffing)
5%
Staff
Marketplaces
(SaaS)
10%
Staff
Ecommerce
(SaaS)
30%
Staff
Experts as a Service
(Staffing)
45%
Staff
Today we’ll present how B2B ecommerce is different than b2c, what key factors need to be considered when choosing your ecommerce platform, the advantages to a software as a service platform, and then 48 B2B ecommerce features SCE has out-of-the-box for you to grow the B2B component of your business. Finally, you’ll see a software demonstration and then we’ll have some Q & A.
Out-of-the-box or rather, cookie-cutter eCommerce platforms like Shopify and Bigcommerce may have created the impression that all eCommerce stores are pretty much the same. While a cookie-cutter approach is feasible for some businesses, its rarely successful for B2B.
It all comes down to the fact that most businesses are different and you can't squeeze your uniquely shaped business into the cookie cutter shapes available on most ecommerce platforms.
The crucial difference between B2B and B2C eCommerce is just one thing: The customer. Businesses and retail consumers purchase for totally different reasons and want to do business in completely different ways. Understanding their different mindsets is required to tailor your eCommerce offering to their requirements.
B2C customers tend to purchase with their heart, more than anything. After all, studies show we tend to buy with emotion and justify with facts. Purchases are often one-off, standalone buys unless it’s a subscription product or you remarket heavily to past customers.
Of course any customer is looking for the best price. But a B2B customer is looking for benefits to a wholesale relationship with your company as well. B2C serves everyone, while B2B serves only businesses and usually in a particular vertical. B2B needs checkout with NET Terms, Credit Line, Store Credits, and COD. The lifetime sales of B2C is often very limited while the lifetime sales for B2B is continuous. B2B requires more than marketing to build brand identity. It takes Education and relationship building. B2C buyers purchase mostly by emotion while B2B is looking for relationship value as well. A B2C customer can always do a chargeback but a B2B customer can’t get back the time they waste building a relationship with you if they later discover you are not the right vendor for them.
Based on what was shown on the last slide the Key Factor when choosing a B2B eCommerce Platform is making sure those aspects are all actionable through the logic of the software. But let’s break it down to the critical features B2B businesses need.
Here are 48 features needed by B2B businesses. Let’s quickly run through them.
Some B2B businesses need to create custom wholesale applications, and if so, they need it to be mapped to the CRM in their ecommerce. Meaning, a form is filled out online and the CRM is populated with the data.
Retail ecommerce sites often allow customers to purchase without creating an account. But for B2B sites, registration is typically mandatory. It allows customers access to the custom prices, products, and terms that they already have with you. Once customers have logged in, they can see products, prices, order-tracking information. You may want to auto-approve new sign ups or have someone from your team screen them before approving.
Site search is critical for retail sites and is no less crucial for B2B. Ecommerce platforms typically come with some type of search feature. A platform prepared for B2B will have advanced search filters built in.
Allow your dealers to set their favorite products so they can order them without searching for them.
Email marketing is a good way to drive repeat sales from your B2B customers. Send newsletters, educational materials, price sheets, pdf catalogs, promotions and giveaways, and what’s on sale.
Every website today should make it easy for mobile users to interact and purchase. The easiest way to get started is to make your website mobile responsive. Consider what devices your customers will be using and which mobile features are most important to them.
Navigation:
Plan your site navigation to assist users to find the products they are looking for. This is especially important for sites with a large number of products. Your mega menu, top and bottom navigation links should contain everything a B2B customer would need to access.
Sales Rep / Commission Management
Your B2B ecommerce platform should enable you to manage who is a customer’s sales rep. Manage all sales reps. Manage commission tracking and payouts for sales people.
Advanced Discounts / Specials
Your ecommerce platform should allow you to make discounts with or without codes or as a visible special on the site. To truly serve your B2B customers, your discounts should be able to be set up with advanced configurations, advanced restrictions, advanced options, advanced combine rules, and advanced notifications. Her’es one example from each. An advanced configuration would be making the discount only work 10 times with a maximum order weight of 20 pounds. An advanced restriction would be for only these products, or only these categories, or only these brands, or only these wholesale levels, or just these customers, or just in this geo-location, or only from this referrer. An advanced option would be to automatically apply the coupon or to activate a plugin. An advanced combine rule would be it works with these coupons but not with these coupons. Finally an advanced notification could be an initial message saying the coupon is available and a congratulations message that it’s been applied.
Quotes / Help Desk
Some products are complicated and require a quote. Some customers want to get an even better deal than you give them if they buy in bulk. Your site should enable customers to submit a request for a quote and to streamline the process. Speed and simplicity of doing business with your company are a competitive advantage. Use your ecommerce site’s quote functionality to make it that much easier.
CRM Integrated with Customer Accounts / Orders / Engagement Data:
When you look up a customer, you should be able to see every help desk ticket, email conversation, phone call log, account notes, autoresponder that’s ever been sent, login history, other contacts from that company, what pages he visited and when, how many actions he took on those pages, map a customer on the phone to a device currently on the website – allowing you to track customers across devices. Make an order based on what they were looking at on the site, or added to a wishlist, or recently ordered, or had on a quote, or instead of making an order, put it all in their shoppingcart and ask them to refresh their screen and check out. A B2B company without these features has a distinct disadvantage.
Customer Wholesale Dashboard:
When your customer logs into their account, they should have an account dashboard where they can see account status, cards on file, addresses, discount level, minimum balance required, COD terms, Net Terms, net credit limit, available balance, amount due, amount past due, and recent orders with links to change their addresses, payment methods, manage past orders, and view help desk tickets..
Multi-warehouse inventory:
If you have inventory across many warehouses, you need your ecommerce software to know where the product is to understand shipping and packing requirements. You need to be able to reassign a different warehouse for an item on an order.
Packing Validation
Never make packing mistakes. With Packing Validation all items must be scanned and processed before they are put into the box and before shipping labels can be printed. This way you always know you're sending the right items to your customers eliminating unnecessary returns.
Wholesale Levels / Tiered Pricing
B2B companies typically have different prices for different customers. There are multiple ways to structure this on an ecommerce site, including a discount for groups of customers, a specific price for every combination of SKU and customer, and quantity discounts for all customers or for groups of customers — or a combination of these methods.
Ship using Customer’s Shipping Credentials
At the customer’s request, B2B companies sometimes use their customer’s shipping credentials to send the shipments because the customer wants their shipping budget to look larger on their account so they get more discounts.
ERP Integrations
Once a business reaches a certain level, warehouse and truck logistics, advanced financial profiles, and other high level processes need to be managed by an ERP. That ERP has to be integrated with the ecommerce platform to maintain an end to end solution. And it can’t be a half-assed integration. It needs to be a full integration connecting customers, orders, inventory, CRM, Help Desk and more.
Multiple Websites Controlled by Single Software
If you are operating B2C and B2B, you may want to have them on different websites but both controlled by the same ecommerce software. You may want to have all the verticals you cater to separated as niche websites controlled by a single backend. If that’s important to your business model then you’ll need to choose an ecommerce platform capable of that.
Autoresponders
You need to be able to set up responders for customers from their customer account in the backend, on the fly, a set and forget scenario. Imagine you are a jewelry distributor and your dealer calls you up to restock and you happen to ask how his silver bracelet inventory is and he says he’s got about a month left with what he has. Well if you previously set up an order responder email containing your in stock silver bracelets, you could select that he should receive that email in 3 and a half weeks and then again at 4 and a half weeks. And it should be easy and quick for you to do so while still on the phone taking the order.
Contract Management
B2B businesses who need to provide services or paid support need contract management. Link service and support automation to customer contracts so service agents can determine the proper level of service. For the most flexibility, service rates should be able to be contracted per incident, per hour, or prepaid.
Shared/Private
Canned Messages
B2B businesses often need to have template messages they can plug into an email or held desk ticket. Shared messages are tempates that all workers can use. Private messages are templates that only a single worker can use.
Automated Returns
You should have a choice of offering the customer prepaid return labels with automated returns or
Automated returns without prepaid labels or
Semi-automated returns with or without a prepaid label
Net Terms
A majority of B2B businesses give net terms to select customers. It boosts sales because they know they have those extra number of days to come up with the money before they have to pay. Net terms needs to be seamlessly integrated into your checkout and if you operate B2C and B2B you need to designate who gets net terms on the customer level.
Subscriptions / Grace Periods
B2B businesses often have subscription products, or offer a discount to order product by regular interval rather than as needed. Grace periods allow the customer a pre-set number of days to make a payment before their subscription is suspended. These features need to work seamlessly and automatically to avoid hurting the company’s return on investment per employee.
Affiliate Marketing
B2B businesses need to run a world class affiliate marketing program right inside their ecommerce platform to track affiliate referrals and get email reports to your affiliates letting them know how their traffic is performing daily and what commissions they will expect to receive on their next payout.
White Label Website
Some B2B businesses need to offer their customers the ability to have a white labeled version of your website where they can take orders. In addition they may want to give the customer the ability to ship on their own or to push the order to you for dropshipping. And taking it to the extreme, they may wish to provide unique product data for those white label sites so that none of the pages is included in omitted search results for being duplicate content.
Customer Specific Pricing / Catalog
You may need to restrict what products a customer can order so you need to be able to set up a customer specific catalog.
Multiple Contacts per Account, one primary
Businesses have multiple workers who may need to deal with vendors and place orders. A great B2B ecommerce platform will let you have multiple contacts with unique usernames, passwords, and permissions for each business. One contact is the primary user.
Customer Account Rules
On both the contact level and the customer level, there need to be permissions. For example, this contact at this company is allowed to place orders online, while this other contact from that same company is not allowed o place orders online. Or this contact, or the whole company should not receive any newsletters or promotional emails. Tese need to be adjustable settings within your customer accounts.
Minimum Store Credit / Credit Limits
Some B2B businesses require a customer to maintain a certain amount of store credit to place orders. For the ones offering net terms you need a way to set a credit limit.
Share Inventory / Data Feeds with Customers
If you are offering dropshipping to your B2B customers, you need to be able to provide them with a live inventory feed so they don’t oversell, and a product data feed that matches the skus in the inventory feed.
Robust CMS
Your marketing department is busy making promotions so they need to make landing pages. They’re busy making article pages to perform for keywords in organic searches. They’re busy making educational pages for B2B vertical content.
They need a robust Content Management System where they can make pages by template or totally custom but fast and on-the-fly with a drag and drop tool.
Employee Permissions
Every company has different levels of workers and the parts of the software they have access to should be on a need-only basis. You have to have the ability to give employees permissions relating to what modules of the ecommerce software they have access to, what email addresses they can access, what help desk service boards they can see. You need to choose a platform where every aspect of the ecommerce is segmented for access control.
Qty Discount on Product Level
: If you’re a B2B company and you’ve got tiered pricing, discounts, and specials, but you need to also put qty discounts for certain products you have to choose an ecommerce platform that has the internal logic built up to handle qty discounts without over-discounting by combining with all those others. You need complete control of discount priorities.
Open API
Your not psychic. You can’t know the future. You have no idea what kind of integrations you’ll need one day. You better choose a solution that has an open API and is willing and able to open new API calls for you when new needs arise.
Store Credits / Courtesy Credits / Payment Plans
It should be easy to issue store credits, track store credits, issue courtesy credits, make and manage payment plans, manage multiple payments, take a payment not related to any particular order and the system should treat it accordingly.
Easy Levels Sync
If you’re using tiered discount levels for your customers, when it is time to add, update or delete products from the discount levels, you should be able to do the modifications in one central place which will automatically update all the customer accounts accordingly. You have no time to go into each customer to add, update, or delete that product or change prices.
VIP Processing
Some of your B2B clients may need urgent or expedited processing on top of the shipping cost. If so, you should be able to control how much expedited and urgent processing adds to the handling on the product level.
Price Overrides
You may have the wholesale levels and tired pricing taken care of but now you’ve got a good customer on the phone who needs a better deal on a single item or a list of certain items, you need to be able to override the tiered pricing with customer specific pricing on the fly..
Advanced Workflows With or Without Approval Checkpoints
If you allow customers to place orders by net terms, you may want an approval step where one of your teammates has to check if this order should be sent out, or if maybe its too risky. This is also related to the packing validation I mentioned earlier as packing validation would be steps in the workflow.
Frequently Ordered / Re-order an order
It should be very easy for your customers to see the items they frequently order so they can easily re-order those items without searching for them
Personalized Content or Theme
You should have the ability to provide personalized content to your B2B customers. You should be able to serve that customer a unique theme or website template just for their type of business or send them to a specific landing page when they log in.
Amazon FBA
If your main warehouse runs out of an item, you should be able to automatically push the order to have it shipped from your amazon FBA inventory.
Amazon FBA
If your main warehouse runs out of an item, you should be able to automatically push the order to have it shipped from your amazon FBA inventory.
Product: Videos and File Attachments
It should be easy for you add product videos and downloadable file attachments to your products.
Configurable Views
: It should be easy for your customer to switch to different search views on your website to soft through the products better. You need a grid view, a list view, and a table view – all controlled by the customer on the frontend, but you should be able to set a default within your backend and it should exist on the category level.
Customer Choose Delivery Date
It is becoming more and more common to find websites with this feature. This is about allowing your dealer to choose the day they’ll receive the shipment.
Purchase Order Purchasing
Finally, you need to let your customers or some customers place orders by purchase orders. Also you need to be able to send purchase orders to your factories either automatically or manually.
Automate Your Business with Integration
Save Time and Effort
Boost Productivity
Focus on Profitability
Streamlined business processes lets you focus on what matters the most: increasing customer satisfaction, revenue, and growth!
This may seem obvious but a way for a business to be more profitable is to automate. But how? By automating sales, marketing, or operations tasks, you are increasing the return on investment per employee by making it take less time to complete the processes they perform. With more time available due to automation, they can work on other processes that will make you more money. The more successful processes your employees can perform, the more money your company can make. The only way for your employees to take on more processes is to automate the processes they already do that require manual effort.
Advantages of SaaS based B2B Platform
Having the SaaS provider manage the IT infrastructure means lower IT costs for hardware, software, and the people needed to manage it all. You get Painless Upgrades Because the SaaS provider manages all updates and upgrades, there are no patches for customers to download or install. The SaaS provider also manages availability, so there’s no need for customers to add hardware, software, or bandwidth as the user base grows. Seamless Integration: SaaS vendors with true multitenant architectures can scale indefinitely to meet customer demand. Many SaaS providers also offer customization capabilities to meet specific needs. Plus, many provide APIs that let you integrate with existing ERP systems or other business productivity systems. On a self-hosted solution, all of that is your problem to figure out.
SCE came out with 148 new features in 2016 and we’re on track to beat that number for 2017. I was able to think of 48 features that will be relevant specifically to B2B. Let’s check them out.
Surprise!!! I bet you remember this slide. These are the B2B features you can expect to find out of the box in a Shopping Cart Elite software subscription.
Let me get ready for the live demo and no Igor Soshkin our CEO will take over for a minute to introduce SCE.
Shopping Cart Elite is a winning enterprise ecommerce solution that has the answer to your shopping cart limitations by completely automating your online wholesale business at a small-business price. Unlike the majority of the shopping carts on the market, we have created a system that doesn’t require you to pay thousands of dollars each month for different app partners to provide automation, marketing and SEO tools for your business.
Now that APPSeCONNECT and SCE are integrated, you can use SAP, Dynamics, and Netsuite with SCE. This integration means you can extend the true ERP functionality with SCE to automate your operations.
We currently have 5 divisions within our company.
We have Shopping Cart Elite which is our full ecommerce software platform that includes all features for your website and back office
OmniChannelHub is want to push your products to Amazon and eBay this software offers the Marketplaces and Inventory modules of the software which is sold a la cart
TEA is our Predictive analytics software which is also sold a la cart for anyone who wants to have their pay per click advertising managed with powerful insights into the engagement of their website visitors
Hire Once & Forever is our Experts as a Service division where our customers hire our staff to do daily/weekly/or monthly tasks
Rek9 handles consulting as a service ranging from Brand Identity to Marketing Strategy if you want to revamp your brand or reorganization
We want to be your partner, not just your vendor. Our competitors sell you websites, we help you build a business. We have the largest staff to client ratio in our industry making us over staffed to support to our clients. Just imagine that you can hire our one of our teams as your own staff that will be solely focused on growing your company, Imagine that your account managers will know your company as if it was their own, and will work for you as if he is your employee. You don’t have to imagine because thats exactly the kind of relationship we will have.
SCE B2B FRONT-END FEATURES
(Igor gives back to Jason)
Some antiquated platforms claim to be advanced by allowing you to have separate desktop and mobile templates. To the search engines that matter, that’s old school now. The ability to resize for any device is what Google's looking for in websites today. We are fully compliant with all aspects of seo –especially being mobile friendly.
Every page on your website has this unique Web Customer ID. So if a client calls you on the phone, you can ask for the id to match him or her up to the visitor behavior data recorded by the TEA software. This way you can see every page the customer looked at, how long they looked at each one, how many actions they took on the page, move the items they are interested into their shopping cart, wishlist or a quote, or just take the order over the phone.
Frequently Ordered. Notice there’s 3 items in the cart. Now I’m going to the frequently ordered tab which this store has activated. Then I click to add this one to the cart. Then I noticed I want these other ones too and selected them and moved them all to the cart. Now you can see those items are in the shopping cart.
This is a screenshot of a checkout on a SCE website which allows this user to use net terms when he or she orders online.
The account Status section shows if their account is active, their last order date, how many cards on file, how much store credits they’re owed
If you are offering wholesale customers net terms it will say net 15, net30, 45, 60, or 90 or whatever terms you give that customer,
Also what their credit limit is, how much of that credit is still available, how much is past due, and how much is due now.
Wholesale: levels/tiers, landing pages, assign products to tiers, show wholesale details, erp tag
Customers: CRM integrated with customer accounts, Custom Wholesale Application sends info to crm fields, multiple contacts per account, financial account rules, minimum store credit, credit limits, courtesy credits, autoresponders, ship using cust creds, account price overrides, vip processing, tax exempt and attachments, expedited processing-(fees in product>surcharges), price overrides,
Settings: General –manual approve signups, disable new sign ups – custom registration form, Multi-warehouse inventory, must login to view, allow access to assigned products only, Product>behavior – must be logged in to see prices, Payment methods>settings: automatic net approval, minimum order required for net terms to activate, credit line, allow dropshipping
Design: Multiple themes, white label websites
Sales Rep Commission/Affiliates: set up rep in employees then create new commissions, profiles, payouts, tag manager (then show discounts>wholesale levels and referrer - ?referrer=Affiliate111)
ERP: Settings>CRM configuration- make custom fields to show up in contacts/company/orders/suppliers depending on what is needed to pass back and forth with the ERP. Marketplaces>ERP-acumatica ERP tag mapping for warehouse and items or map it on the product marketplaces tab.
Purchase order to vendor: asset account-make order-email to vendor
Workflows: Settings>wholesale>workflows – pick scanupc pack ship
Inventory: New- use upc scanner, Import file, Existing, feeds
Share inv/data with dealers: set up API, check boxes needed for data or inventory, use EDF to put the csv’s on a url the dealers can access both manually and automatically.
Let me turn it over to Igor now for Q&A.