Affordable Saas-Based B2B eCommerce for Distributors
B2B ecommerce for distributors is now table stakes. Your customers’ success in their own business is contingent on finding and ordering the parts they need quickly, efficiently and on their own schedules. If you can’t meet their expectations they’ll look for a distributor who can. Fortunately, that’s a risk you can avoid.
Start Your Transformation
With Saas, B2B eCommerce is easily Affordable and Attainable
Many distributors believe that building an B2B ecommerce is unaffordable and time consuming. According to a 2018 B2BecNews survey, 41% of distributors say costs is the biggest inhibitor to developing a B2B ecommerce site. This is unfortunate because ecommerce doesn’t need to be a costly endeavor.
Market-tested technology can make quick work of building a site, which lowers your costs and speeds your time to market. For instance, SaaS-based delivery models allow for fast deployment, and B2B ecommerce platforms, like BigCommerce, come with a host of pre-built tools that streamline the build process.
In fact, we can build your B2B ecommerce site for as low as $20,000, from design to go live, in just 10 weeks. Hosting and managed services can be as low as $400 per month.
How eCommerce Helps you Drive Revenue
In 2019, 40% of all distributor and wholesaler sales — some $2.3 trillion — were placed electronically. You can’t tap into that revenue if you don’t support eCommerce. But that’s just the start of the revenue potential.
- Take Sales 24/7. A B2B eCommerce site is always on and omnichannel, which means your customers can place orders at any time, place and channel that’s convenient to them. The easier you make it to buy from you, the more sales you get.
- Better Experiences. B2B eCommerce sites offer the best of both worlds: unparalleled self-service and white glove treatment. Your customers can place their orders, request quotes, place bulk orders, manage their accounts using a host of self-service features. Or, tools like sales masquerading allow your sales reps to place sales and managing shopping lists on behalf of your customers.
- Reach New Customers. A B2B eCommerce site can help you build your upper funnel. For instance, you can analyze and segment your existing customers’ behaviors, and use those insights to model, target and engage wholly new prospects for your brand. It can also help find new customers by enabling you to sell into marketplaces.
- Boost Average Order Value. With a product catalog of 100K SKUs or more, chances are your customers don‘t know everything you carry. Many purchase from multiple distributors for this very reason. B2B eCommerce sites offer robust search and filtering capabilities, enabling your customers to discover what’s in your catalog so that they can simplify their lives by consolidating all of their orders with your brand. The result is higher average order values.
- Convenient Reordering. B2B eCommerce sites are built around the customer’s need to reorder products as quickly and conveniently as possible. You can allow them to create, maintain and share shopping lists, order from past orders and even upload a spreadsheet for bulk orders. This convenience encourages repeat business and drives lifetime value.
B2B eCommerce and Operational Efficiencies
Higher revenue is just part of the story. A B2B ecommerce site will also drive operational efficiencies.
Product Information Management
Manage your entire ecommerce product catalog’s content from within your centralized PIM system.
Automate Communications
A B2B ecommerce will automatically generate and send transaction communications, such as order confirmations, invoices, shipping notices and status updates.
Free up Your Sales Team
By enabling your customers to self serve, your sales team will have more time to find new customers and build your sales pipeline.
Automated Synchronization
Because B2B ecommerce sites may be fully integrated with your ERP system, all inventory and pricing by customer are synched automatically.
Custom Catalog and Pricing
When your customers sign on to your B2B ecommerce site they see the pricing they’ve negotiated with you automatically. They have no need to call their sales rep to ensure they pay the agreed upon price.
Key Features of Silk’s SAAS-Based B2B eCommerce Solution for Distributors
Using a combination of BigCommerce’s ecommerce platform for B2B and our proprietary BundleB2B solution, we can build you a site quickly and affordably. Some of the key features are:
Present to each customer a custom catalog along with prices you’ve pre-negotiated with them.
Enable your customers to manage their corporate account and set up multiple tiers of buyers who have specific roles and permissions.
Buyers can manage and save multiple shopping lists within the app, allowing them to retrieve these for future use and seamlessly purchase previously saved products.
All users can create a shopping list; a Junior Buyer is the only user who will have to submit an approval for purchase as Junior Buyers do not have user permissions to make purchases.
Shopping lists may be approved by Senior Buyers or Company Administrators.
Allow your customers access and shop your store without leaving their internal systems.
Generate invoices from the BigCommerce site or from within your ERP system. The Invoice portal supports multiple payment options: PayPal, Braintree or any other payment gateways, purchase order, credit card.
Support for purchase orders and net payment terms. Add, edit, show, or hide approved payment options for customers including purchase orders and payment via credit card.
Your sales team can log in on behalf of a company, access shopping lists created by buyers in the company, add products to the cart, and complete placement of the order.
They can also create a quote for their customers, and provide additional discounts when appropriate.
Silk Software will integrate your B2B ecommerce platform with your internal ERP, OMS and CRM and PIM systems, including Salsify, Akenea, inRiver and so on.
The Silk Commerce Edge
Not only can Silk build your B2B eCommerce site quickly and affordably, we’ll bring our host of best practices, gained through years of experience and thousands of implementations, to your project.
- ERP Integration. When your customers order from your B2B site, they want to know if the products are in stock and what they’ll pay. They also want to check on their order status at their own convenience, without calling your sales rep. Our integration experts have extensive experience with all major ERP systems, including SAP B1, Acumatic, Epicor, Microsoft Nav, Netsuite, and Sage. We can work with a comprehensive integration solution such as eBridge, Jitterbit or MuleSoft, or we can leverage our templated solution to sync product, customer, order, price, inventory between your ERP system and B2B ecommerce site.
- We Bring Order to the Content Maze. With thousands upon thousands of SKUs in your product catalog, content management can seem daunting, but it doesn’t need to be. There are excellent market-tested product information management (PIM) systems that eliminate bottlenecks, and we have extensive experience integrating with them, includingAkeneo, Jasper, inRiver, and Salsify. Additionally, our in house content development team (both for product info or market info) can create product and market website copy if you lack those resources in house.
- Amazon Marketplace Strategy. Amazon is a fact of life, but with the right strategy, you can use it to expose more buyers to your brand, and build long-term relations with them. We’ll help you develop an Amazon strategy or fine tune your existing one so that the Amazon B2B marketplace works for, not against, your business.