B2B eCommerce Strategy for Growth — Chapter 9

Improving User Experience —

Helping customers save time equates to better relationships (and more sales) 

So how can you help save your customer’s time?

The business-to-business buying experience is quite different than the typical business-to-consumer one. Instead of just browsing products and placing orders, the buyer is managing purchase orders for many different scenarios, multiple projects and end users. To make this buying experience faster — and easier for the buyer — the right B2B eCommerce site has multiple built-in tools to optimize their experience. Below are several examples of how these tools are used.

Saved Carts, Favorites, Templated Carts, and Quick Order Entry

Customers need the flexibility to build multiple orders — over a period of time — and not lose their work. Imagine a buyer is making purchases on behalf of multiple recipients. Perhaps they’re a construction company buying materials for several on-going projects and need to build multiple carts to include materials required for many different projects and at different points in those project timelines.

Saving your cart for a future purchase

Let’s continue with the scenario in which a buyer is purchasing materials for the building projects of their construction company. It would not be uncommon for the buyer to log onto the site and begin adding required products to a cart but not be ready to process the purchase until a future date.

With the Saved Carts feature, a customer can build one — or many — saved carts to their profile. This means that they can add multiple items to a cart, then save that cart (or carts) to their profile with any name that they choose.

Using the construction company example, the buyer at the company could build multiple carts that represent current or upcoming jobs. Over time they can continue adding items to their saved carts. Once they are ready to place the order they simply log into their account, go to their Saved Carts area, activate the cart they are ready to purchase and process the order.

Saving Favorite Items

Having the ability to save “Favorite Items” is extremely beneficial for customers and for increasing your repeat orders, a staple of any successful business. If your catalog includes thousands of products, your customer can simply add individual products to their “Favorites List.” These could be products they will need often, or items they don’t need at the moment but will need in the future. At any time, the customer can log onto the site, navigate to their “Favorites List” and add items to their cart.

Templated Carts

Some customers buy the same exact items every month, quarter or year. Can you imagine how frustrating and time-consuming it would be if this was your job, and you had to place the same order of 100 products every month!? We do, too. The right B2B eCommerce solution is up for this challenge.

Your customers must be allowed to build “Templated Carts.” This is similar to the Saved Cart feature in that the customer fills their cart with products and saves the cart their profile. The difference is that “Templated Carts” can used time and time again. In the future they can log into their account, navigate to their “Templated Carts” and activate one of the saved Templated Carts. This will fill their shopping cart with their saved products and the standard quantities. At any time, they have the ability to add or remove products from their cart or modify quantities before checking out. Imagine how much time this will save your customers. A process that could have taken several hours is reduced to a couple minutes.

Quick Order Entry

Not everyone is looking for a glamorous experience in the B2B eCommerce world. Sometimes you just want to quickly log into your account and process an order as fast as possible. For these use cases, a “Quick Order Entry” product list in the eCommerce system works.

Instead of showing product pictures and descriptions, the user simply sees a long list of products. This can include the entire product catalog, a templated cart, or a saved cart. Then the user has the ability to tab through the quantity boxes and update the amount of products they need. The system processes these updates using AJAX¹ which does not require the page to refresh during every change (what does this mean? it’s really FAST for the customer). As soon as the order is ready, simply check out and move onto the next task. You’ve just made your customer’s buying experience extremely fast, efficient and painless.

¹ AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. In a nutshell, it’s the use of the XMLHttpRequest object to communicate with server-side scripts to speed workflow. It can send, as well as receive, information in a variety of formats, including JSON, XML, HTML, and even text files.

Helping Customers Save Time Equates to Better Relationships

An important point to note: providing these tools will improve your customer’s buying experience. Not only are you saving your customers’ time, you are also building a better relationship. Your goal (as well as ours) is to improve your business and increase revenue.

By offering these eCommerce tools to your customers, they will begin to associate buying from you as a pleasurable experience. This leads to sharing information about your company to colleagues, return purchases and visits, referrals and new conversions all without spending any extra marketing money. This all starts by thinking about your customers’ pain points, then working to solve those challenges.

By placing yourself in your customer’s’ shoes, you can better understand their needs and build a solution that makes buying from you a painless and even enjoyable experience.

“From optimizing marketing to customizing purchasing, B2B eCommerce can save your customer’s time and provide them customizable options. It helps make the entire experience of dealing with you as smooth as it possibly could be.”

• Executive Summary
• Introduction —
• Are you generating the greatest value for (and from) customers?
• The times they are a-changin’
• What’s your return on investment (ROI)?
• Three Ways B2B eCommerce Benefits a Manufacturer
• How Can You Meet Customer Demands for B2B eCommerce?
• Chapter 1 — Sales Growth
• Chapter 2 — Pricing Schedules
• Chapter 3 — Marketing or ERP Content
• Chapter 4 — Customer Engagement
• Chapter 5 — Multiple Locations
• Chapter 6 — Omnichannel Customer Experience
• Chapter 7 — Sales Reps and Vendors
• Chapter 8 — Customer Complexity
• Chapter 9 — Customer Service
• Glossary of eCommerce Terms
• Conclusion