The numbers are jarring: a $2 trillion global business-to-business (B2B) eCommerce market where 83% of all B2B buyers have made an online purchase at least once in the past year, signalling that digital is not just part of our future; it’s table stakes.

This switch from offline purchasing (in real life and by way of the telephone) to web-based purchasing is a momentous adjustment. Consequently, we detail throughout this guide how a robust B2B eCommerce website development platform and thoughtfully crafted website design can enhance the buyer journey ground up, grow with time scalability as well and streamline backend processes (warehousing & fulfilment) resulting in actionable business intelligence.

Key Takeaways

• B2C platforms are inherently different in specifying B2B business requirements.
• Cloud-based, headless architecture), enabled by modern technology allows companies to open up a wealth of opportunities as B2B eCommerce players.
• Those are some of the quick wins, however successful and seamless CXM requires planning a clear picture, from beginning to end (i.e.customer journey) makes all the difference in this game.

Are you in search of a well-experienced technology partner with extensive experience in developing strong B2B ecommerce websites for top brands? Get in touch with Net Solutions to discuss your e-commerce project.

What Will B2B eCommerce Website Development Reflect?

The term B2B eCommerce website development represents the activity of creating an online store dedicated to businesses that sell goods and services.

While B2B eCommerce buying is increasingly driven by consumer experiences, most B2B web stores are far more intricate than their e-commerce counterparts. A full-featured B2B eCommerce site needs to cater to the high-level business ops of B2B sellers, such as supply chain management or: corporate account management multi-store architecture and so on more business ones; On top of that it has to take into consideration how they serve their clients like having negotiated pricing invoicing bulk buying multiple cost centres different in which union hates them etc.

The most sophisticated design and development firms are obsessive about learning your unique B2B business needs to create a fully functional, aesthetically pleasing eCommerce site designed for long-term success.

B2C vs B2B eCommerce Website Development

While B2C eCommerce websites are those that sell directly to personal consumers, the other way around is for B2B eCommerce website development where an E-commerce platform engages with businesses or wholesale buyers. Some of the B2B sellers are suppliers, wholesalers and distributors as well as Sales by Service-based businesses or Software-as-a-service – SaaS.

On the surface, this sounds like an easily defined line however there are few buying processes and profiles in B2B vs B2C. Therefore, contrasting B2C websites with the benefits and means by which they solve their customers’ problems with that of a b2b website is:

• From simple website builders and out-of-the-box eCommerce solutions to more comprehensive headless commerce solutions ideal for multi-store, multi-brand as well as omnichannel retailing
• Tends to be a highly volatile field of eCommerce trends

B2B eCommerce Website Development

These are some of the key distinctions between an E-commerce B2B site and a consumer-grade eCommerce platform, more things differentiate these sites.

Keep reading to find out about a number of the core functionalities that should come bundled in high-end enterprise B2B eCommerce websites both for their existing customers and for seamless scaling up over time.

Step1. How to Build a B2B eCommerce Website Development

A well-designed eCommerce website starts with a plan that covers everything from understanding your objectives and selecting the correct technology for running an online store to designing a user-friendly website accommodating all requirements of future buyers. These are 5 steps at a high level, taking you from ideation to live B2B selling.

• Business Model: This is dependent on the type of business you are, for example, a manufacturer to wholesaler will use different B2B ecommerce platforms compared to an exporter. B2B, B2C or possibly even marketplace help (for example your strategy may require support for marketplaces) and multiple sites, localization etc.
• Set Business Goal: Determine Business Directives Before developing your Website to target KPIs, or when migrating to a new B2B eCommerce Platform you should already have clearly defined goals. Search engine position, traffic volume, lead capture conversion retention sales volume referrals or more are all valid examples. While the website strategy must reflect these objectives, it also needs to take into account where things stand in terms of competition.
• Understand the target audience: Meet face-to-face with key stakeholders who are closest to your customer — e.g. in marketing and sales roles, or even directly with customers themselves — to learn how you can reach them better while enabling their purchase process. This, in turn, will help us define what the eCommerce platform needs to offer and then inform all of the website content (tone), design theme & key CTAs

Understand each of these areas completely before learning what is needed from your customers, as well as your business model in a given website.

Step 2: Select the best eCommerce platform

Before you can even begin choosing your platform, you need to have a clear idea of what it is that will make up the goals and objectives. Although eCommerce platforms are typically much simpler at the lower end of the scale, when you start to look at best-in-breed B2B e-commerce capabilities responsive behavior and user experience will be a key differentiator.

Considerations to support your business needs

• Hosting: self-hosting + SaaS / PaaS (see more here about SaaS vs PaaSCloud Prince blog [could you hyperlink this?
• One of the keys: here, as a matter-of-factly by-product with-3-primary-flavours (affecting their strength on customisations & performances across channels) at an architect level — to which you shall adhere(i.e. stay compliant).architecture model that affects how well-customized they can be and perform on various channel types in scale)indexed/fast racked up into one_putstr(JS should drink more Coffee :​p )
• Traditional/Monolithic: Integrated front & back-end as 1 platform, responsive web design — deploy content to several channels (Web/ Mobile / Social Media and wearables..etc.)

A strategy often promoted by ecommerce sites, headless commerce separates front-end and back-end business operations for better scalability performance across channels (more about this below in the guide)

Composable commerce takes this further, including microservice-based APIs grouped by functional capabilities (reviews example)

• Key Features: Compile a wish list of key features you would like for your B2B business in an eCommerce platform (e.g. personalized pricing, bulk ordering, approvals, inventory management and catalogue management to customer relationship management up until payment options), self-service or localization).
• Integrations: Make sure the platform can integrate with your existing backend systems (e.g. ERP, CRM, inventory management system or payment & FinTech providers for settlement), and also offers a great set of third-party integrations theory that can be leveraged to extend the capabilities on your site/app itself as well expand into various channels if necessary depending upon marketplace strategy you would like to construct it around.
• Scalability: With cloud architecture, the ability to scale through global content delivery networks (CDNs) and a resource pool that can expand as e-commerce picks up sales. Enterprise eCommerce platforms typically come with SLAs that outline uptime and scaling standards.
• Cybersecurity: Must be secured and should have absolute eCommerce security for any B2B eCommerce. It must have the most essential security features, including compliance certifications (e.g., GDPR compliant or ISO certified), payment processing security related to PCI DSS, strong authentication + role-based access control processes built in for your use case, encryption at rest/encryption during transfer, supportable firewalls/intrusion detection mechanisms; SSO integration may be required as well — either way feel comfortable that real-time alerts/logs/reports which generated will provide hints when more investigation is needed.

By taking these into account, we can optimize internal workflows and business agility (and therefore customer satisfaction).

Step 3: UX Design

• UX Design: When a customer reads your website, he must feel an intuitive experience and make his time with joy. And that goes back to UX: A good User Experience will help you make the experience feel as natural and seamless as possible, making sure your customers convert at a greater rate now and stay loyal over time. It starts with ensuring you have the correct user research to identify what customers are looking for and how they behave.
  
  What are some other eCommerce UX design practices that you should think about when developing your website?
  
• Understand the target audience: Help your web visitors find what they need with strong products (such as a well-positioned search bar or AI-assisted searches), navigation menu design, promotion callouts and product catalogue organization.

• Account management: This is one the top priorities for customers to have a robust self-service portal that allows them to create or manage their accounts, see order histories and track shipmentsView orders — view open orders provides an overview of what has been ordered from a store in the FastTrack shipmentsManage payments shopping listsSupport re-orders Accounts can also be role-based with sales rep access facile.INTERESTED!!
  
• Tailored experience: Just like personalization lead scoring tailored your eCommerce site ought to also suggest as well by having the products and content merchandise presented, based on their behaviours or identity (industry/role/customer tier/org size..etc), within which offer should include within what people might find this solution most useful. A lot of strides have already been made in terms of AI in this space.
  
• Streamlined procurement and checkout: The B2B buying journey can vary based on the types of organizations that are selling to other businesses, calling for optimization through more than just standard shopping carts and secure checkout processes but exist across typical enhancements like custom orders/quotes, invoice processing discounting along with wholesale orders mobile accessibility reordering capabilities among others. That said, it is the job of UX designers across all platforms to shave down as many steps in the process and give each one a particular look and feel.

How UX designers use prototypes to test design options: Professional UX designers will also do A/B testing and based on feedback refine or completely re-design. Once your site goes live, it is important to instrument and measure user behaviour — you’ll constantly want to experiment with new designs/ideas/presentations to maximize what your website can do for you.

Step 4: Create the Backend Functionality

All these things are not visible to the end customer but are necessary for order, fulfilment or all other crucial steps in your purchasing process in back-end functionality. These are often built into the B2B platform you choose or can be added on with third-party integrations. B2B backend processes are mission-critical

• Order Management: Order management is the flow from an order to payment and fulfilment including return support or refunds. Order can be easily handled on the commerce platform or order management software, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and manual mode as explained in a “not recommended” way. It provides businesses that manage multiple brands, stores sites or locations with effective order management practices.
• Inventory Management: The process of managing the availability and movement of products in a storage facility, including maintaining an accurate real-time record of inventory levels, notification when stock is below pre-set thresholds for restocking purposes as well and making sure that fulfilment optimizes its placement.
• Integrations: Full integration with existing, standalone order management solutions, enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), payment gateways and financial systems as well as supply chain or logistics is necessary to optimize typically cumbersome business operations processes across a central inventory/omics/interfaces.
• Pricing management: The ability to customize prices — down not only at the product level but also across customer and market segments (segmentation) — is a critical dependency for most B2B organizations.
• Business intelligence: The most robust systems today use BI tools and analytics not only to understand customer behaviour, trends, and preferences that drive better marketing/sales as well as inventory management but also to maximize the value of their supply chain through dynamic pricing.

Most likely you have some kind of backend operations tied to your website as well because most business models have the front end speak to a corresponding back-end. This list is just to scratch the surface but should get you thinking about what your needs are.

Step 5: Test, test and finally deploy

For any eCommerce store, testing is as important as making a website go live. You want to test the following before deploying each release.

This includes the full functionality of every feature that has been introduced (to both customers and the subscriber)

• Quality Assurance: Get the website tested by real users to verify whether they will be able to understand/ if it’s user-friendly or not
• Compliance: Run security testing and patch potential vulnerabilities to prevent your company from getting caught in a debilitating cyber attack.
• Performance: Perform UAT( User Acceptance Testing) and Load testing to ensure the website works under all circumstances even if the site is loaded with heavy traffic.

This is so you can have fewer bugs and have no catastrophic bug to ruin your business.

MUST-HAVE FEATURES OF B2B E-COMMERCE

B2BeCommerce website development is a competitive space and to remain distinct, you need to motivate convenient purchasing for your purchasers. You require versatile technology that can simply evolve with this constantly fluctuating terrain.

Here we will check the essential 11 features a full-fledged modern B2B Business Website should have to help you grow your business in future.

API-first & headless design as well as API Features

Composable commerce is based on MACH architecture (M — Microservices, A- API-first, C- Cloud-Native). Composable commerce gives you more freedom to select the services or feed that will favour your business. This will allow you all the advantages of a headless commerce approach: scale services independently, and constantly optimize for UX performance and predictability while enabling high-performance omnichannel retailing.

Advanced search functionality

Make searching more effective through re-queries of search queries with strong advanced full-textual searches and automated reasoning. Searching by everything from product categories to very specific SKU numbers; utilizing a predictive search box to speed up the time it takes consumers to find what they are looking for and making sure that all searches work well across your actual site and any portal / FAQ/help areas.

Clear navigation

NavigationClear navigation is where a logical structure meets usability, and it begins with understanding the journey of your customer from beginning to end. Designers can plot these flows by doing customer journey maps and testing the prototypes to verify that their website is easy for users and lives where they live.

Fast page loading

Today, fast-loaded web pages are a great key for any e-commerce company because nobody would like to wait for the status of your page. I guess maybe cause we have a sense of immediacy and on-demand ordering.

For B2B websites, where buyers may have dozens of pages to navigate through (buyer guides and demos leading straight to the self-service portal — e.g. purchasing or inventory manipulation), having a fast-loading site is even more important than for a typical B2C website.

Mobile Optimization

The length and frequency of B2B buying journeys are high, but they still reach significant use within the sales process (40% care or touchpoint) & also have 20% SHORTER cycles. Mobile optimized websites, buyer portals (responsive-public front end and progressive web apps pwa-complete app), frontend only channels(headless) that may or not be wrapped IOS mobile applications(requirement UX/UI direction. (Read more about mobile-ready web design)

Detailed product information

B2B buyers often need more information than B2C shoppers for numerous reasons. For example, the order value for B2B transactions will usually be significantly higher. So when it decides Mill item or Crafter, that is extremely fine-tuned and their lives depend on it.

B2B — Include detailed product description pages (also for SEO purposes) and provide additional info via the product guide, demo or interactive experiences as needed.

Order tracking

In the end, it was all related to transparency which is important in converting customers and still will keep them satisfied. Pre-Purchase: the expected delivery date should be visible pre-purchase, once the order has been completed Post Purchase / Delivery Tracking Available (real-time or push notification) on all orders

Numerous secure payment methods

For business clients — ideally including the ability to pay with also safe credit card payments, virtual cards, purchase orders (P.O.), buy-now-pay-later functionality like Afterpay and others, wire transfers, ACH payments or however they choose. Global brands must have localized payments

Streamlined checkout process

A friction-free B2B checkout experience is not just about incredibly flexible and fast payment processes that are secure (although important) — it means removing as many steps from the checkout process as possible: Pre-filling customer info, simplifying repeat orders, remembering payments /and using automation wherever we can(Billings options like invoicing or scheduled reminders).

User Interface/User Experience and the importance of creating a Customer Journey Map with Sharayah Poirier

An attractive, highly usable website draws upon best practices (that are constantly changing) to simplify every customer interaction. This is something you can deliver by not only employing seasoned designers who know the best practices & UX trends in designs but also executing a lot of user tests for their design approaches and flows.

Easy new channel addition

The best eCommerce platforms today are omnichannel experiences meaning an average B2B buyer uses a dozen digital sales channels to engage with brands including email, in-person or storefront, phone, website, and portal (source: Gartner), mobile app live chat social like LinkedIn B2B marketplace etc. As channel interactions grow at an exponential rate, you need a single place to be able to manage and support extended engagements with customers.

B2B eCommerce Store Development Best Practices | How Can You Choose?

What works for a B2B website (and site visitors) will differ greatly from most eCommerce examples, but there are some general best practices to help you optimize your design and development of said sites. These are a few.

Be sure to Showcase That You Are a B2B

If you are selling to B2B buyers, your website Copy should specify that and draw a strong line under this fact. Leave no room for query there, or else you will get all the wrong customers none of whom you deserve.

Double down on UI/UX design

Design thinking must be the starting point, not deceptively appearing as an afterthought. In reality, poor design could effectively kill your B2B sales so do not hesitate to spend on user testing and high-quality designs of different kinds. This will enable you to identify what your customers are looking for and factors to make the buying process faster.

Keep consistent branding on your website. Ensure company colours, font preferences and brand voice are maintained throughout your property management website (also matching the existing branding you have in use for marketing collateral such as logos).

Customer reviews and Recommendations

It is not just the B2C online stores that have customer reviews and recommendations. You can also use customer reviews in the form of star ratings (on-site), third-party review integration from sites like G2, or case studies to showcase some current customers happy with their purchase.

While thinking, do not miss your multi-language support options.

This shattered one of the virtual walls to international commerce from the B2B business segment as well. When entering international markets, be sure to use a platform that helps with localization and ensures the website accommodates any regional design practices (which still reflect local preferences) your processes involve for sales experiences on your site not to feel predatory.

How to Select a B2B eCommerce Website Development Company?

The key is in picking the correct partner to design, build and support your B2B eCommerce site. Your B2B business needs an external eCommerce development service with a proven track record in tackling the complex issues of large-scale companies.

The biggest difficulty in outsourcing your project is finding the best technology partners, who can work with you hand-in-hand to develop software that aligns perfectly with your needs.

• They have years of history in designing and B2B eCommerce website development, with case studies backing their words.
• Great fluency in English (when outsourced outside of the country)
• Excellent communication skills (No matter where you decide to outsource)
• Good product manager with a strategic mindset
• Knowledge and expertise in cyber security

Do a deep check when you have discovered some good candidates. When assessing partners, feel free to be tougher in your questioning.

Looking to start a modern B2B eCommerce site?

Whether you are planning to create a new B2B website or re-platform your current B2B site, Net Solutions is backed up with 20 years of experience working for global brands such as American Golf and Xerox. We have also built a B2B eCommerce proposition for the likes of Euro Car Parts and Bonds of London.

Reach Out To Net Solutions For Free Consultation. We will be combining our expertise to strategize and take your B2B eCommerce business to the next level!

FAQs