What Type of Ecommerce Offer Does Your Business Need?

Ecommerce is big business. In the UK alone, B2B ecommerce has now passed £95 billion a year. If you want your business to profit from the rise in online buying, how are you going to optimise the rewards? Choosing the right ecommerce offer is pivotal to keeping costs down and improving profit margins.

Most B2B ecommerce brands want to get their products to market in the fastest possible time. They also want to deliver personalised marketing, benefit from omnichannel support and be able to access in-depth analytics. At the same time, they need to provide B2B buyers with a B2C experience that offers richer content. While every online business should have a checklist of what they require before investing in a tech solution, it is surprising how many don’t.

The right ecommerce solution will serve the needs of your business and meet the expectations of customers. It will support your online brand and help it to grow, while saving you time and introducing your products to a wider audience. So, what are the options?

B2B order management system

If you already have an ecommerce website, you may be tempted to use a B2B order management system. This type of solution can reduce administrative tasks and help you cope if your back end system is struggling to keep up with additional sales channels. As well as tracking orders, your inventory and fulfilment, it brings together the different elements that form a product’s journey to the customer.

Dani Attard, commercial director of Comgem, says: “Most B2B businesses investing in this type of solution are struggling with multi-channel selling because their legacy systems are not equipped to cope. It is seen as a way of overcoming a challenge. However, choosing the right system can be hard if you don’t know exactly what you want to achieve beyond integration.”

Full B2B ecommerce website

The benefit of investing in a full B2B ecommerce website is that it will put you in control of every aspect of your business. A well-developed B2B website will provide the personalisation you need to cater for different audiences and let you publish online catalogues. It will also help you remain competitive by integrating with suppliers and using real-time data to automatically update prices.

This solution should simplify complex processes and offer a flexible approach to everything from payment gateways to marketing and inventory management.