Dealers, distributors and even customers have higher and higher expectations when it comes to being able to do business digitally, and while traditional customer service features such as developing personal contacts and relationships remain important people like to perform their own product research today and make their B2B purchases quickly and digitally without the need for human interaction.
Customers want to be able to use their own choice of device for the purpose of self-service and gain quick access to information about products, supporting communities and other important data. It can be hard to find the right B2B portal but doing so is vital as there are five ways in which B2B ecommerce is being changed by web portals and all B2B companies need to be able to keep up.
Table of Contents
1 A modern digital experience for self-service and B2B purchasing
A B2B web portal allows a business to manage their relationships with distributors, partners and customers from the same platform, offering support for a number of complex product configurations in addition to the complete company catalogue of services and products. A web portal provides customers with the ability to be in control of the management of their own accounts as well as to place orders and set purchasing budgets and limits.
2 Less errors and admin effort through the elimination of manual processing
Web portals allow employees to become more focused on ongoing and strategic relationships with dealers, distributors, partners and customers because they are spending less time on day-to-day administration tasks such as responding to purchase enquiries and product requests.
3 Better stock management and planning via real-time insights
A B2B portal allows a company to be able to manage their content and their whole catalogue from just the one platform, making for easy and fast order processing over all channels, including activities such as order renewals, omni-channel fulfilment and bulk ordering. A B2B portal also allows for the creation of an online community that can assist customers to increase their product understanding and make the correct purchasing decisions for them.
4 An easy start and quickly going live
Setting up a B2B web portal can sometimes seem like a time-consuming and intimidating prospect, but most B2B portals can actually be set up very quickly. B2B portals can do all the hard work of setting up the entire company catalogue, integrating the platform with other systems and promoting every sale or promotion being run for you. Just a few clicks will be all that is needed for set-up and it is easy for the portal to be adjusted in the event of any changes such as getting in new products.
5 Inexpensive setup costs
The biggest way that B2B ecommerce is being changed by web portals is that the portals are so inexpensive to set up. Budget is all-important, particularly for smaller B2B companies that do not have thousands of dollars to spend on multiple platforms and managers. The initial outlay of a B2B web portal will be quickly compensated for, making it a budget-conscious choice.
B2B web portals are helping businesses all over the world run their everyday operations more quickly and efficiently than ever before.
