Affordable Saas-Based B2B Ecommerce for electrical Components Distributors
As a distributor of electrical components, you serve a vital role in the multi-trillion dollar electronics industry. Companies like yours are an essential link between the manufacturers of electrical components and the millions of businesses that need precise delivery of those components to ensure their supply chain is optimized and their operations run smoothly.
B2B ecommerce for electrical components is now table stakes. Your customers’ success in their own business is contingent on finding and ordering the electric components they need quickly, efficiently and on their own schedules.
If you can’t meet their expectations they’ll look for an electrical distributor who can. Fortunately, that’s a risk you can avoid.
Start Your Transformation
With SaaS, B2B eCommerce is Easily Affordable and Attainable
Market-tested technology can make quick work of building a B2B eCommerce site, which lowers your costs and speeds your time to market. For instance:
- BigCommerce’s SaaS-based B2B eCommerce platform allows for fast deployment of your eCommerce site. It can easily handle product catalogs with hundreds of thousands of SKUs, and it comes with a host of pre-built tools that streamline the build process.
- Silk has designed hundreds of B2B sites for electrical distributors, and we thoroughly understand the way the industry operates. We‘ll bring a host of best practices to the project which will ensure success.
- Silk’s proprietary product information management (PIM) solution can ingest, normalize and deliver product information and images from Trade Services and others and deploy it to your product pages, so that your customers have accurate and up-to-date information when they purchase from your site.
- Seamless integration with your ERP means your customer and sales data may be accessed from your eCommerce site, ensuring your customers see real time inventory availability and are presented with pre-negotiated pricing.
As for affordability, 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 Protect Your Customer Base
The rising generation of electrical components buyers have little interest in placing orders via phone. They’re digitally native, and want to do business via digital channels. By meeting their demands, you can ensure their loyalty.
- 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’ll 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, upload BOMs, and manage their accounts using a host of self-service features. Or, tools like sales masquerading allow your sales reps to place sales and manage shopping lists on behalf of your customers.
- Commercial Project Management. Managing a commercial construction project is a difficult and stressful endeavor. A B2B eCommerce site that allows users to create, save and reuse shopping lists, upload BOMs, order from past orders and verify shipping preferences goes a long way in easing the stress levels of a commercial project manager.
- 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 business. It can also help you sell to contractors, builders, electronics repair companies, engineers and architects who purchase electrical components from marketplaces, such as Amazon Business and Ebay.
- 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 electrical components 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.
- Boost Average Order Value. B2B ecommerce sites are built around the customer’s need to reorder electrical components 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
In addition to making it easier for customers to buy from you, a B2B eCommerce site will drive significant operational efficiencies and lower your operating costs.
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.
Product Information Management
Manage your entire ecommerce product catalog’s content from within your centralized PIM system, enabling customers to get price product information without calling your company.
Automate Transactional Communications
A B2B ecommerce will automatically generate and send transaction communications, such as order confirmations, invoices, shipping notices and status updates.
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
Contract Pricing
Present to each customer a custom catalog along with prices you’ve pre-negotiated with them.
Easy Quotes + Orders
Streamlined, end-to-end order management process lets your customers request a quote, convert quotes to orders, check inventory availability, expedite orders, view and re-order from past orders and verify shipping preferences.
User Roles
Enable your customers to manage their corporate account and set up multiple tiers of buyers who have specific roles and permissions.
Shopping Lists
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.
Upload BOMs
Busy purchase agents can upload a spreadsheet of their BOMs, enabling them to order all of the materials, sub-assemblies, intermediate assemblies, sub-components, parts — along with the desired quantities — in just a few minutes. They have no need to hunt for SKUs in a product catalog, or to call their sales reps for assistance.
Punchout
Allow your customers access and shop your store without leaving their internal systems.
Invoice Portal
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.
Flexible Payment Options
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.
Sales Rep Masquerade and Quoting
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.
Sales Rep App
Silk can create a mobile sales rep app for your field reps that map to your backend workflows, enabling them to respond to customer requests or place orders on their behalf, wherever they are.
Integrations
Silk will integrate your B2B ecommerce platform with your internal ERP, OMS and CRM and PIM systems, including Salsify, Akeneo, 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 won convenience, without calling your sales rep. Our integration experts have extensive experience with all major ERP systems, including SAP B1, Acumatica, 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, and inventory between your ERP system and B2B eCommerce site.
- PIM Solution. With thousands upon thousands of SKUs in your product catalog, content management can seem daunting, but it doesn’t need to be. Silk’s proprietary PIM solution can ingest and normalize detailed product data and images from Trade Service, Affiliated Distributors, IWD , and deploy it to your B2B ecommerce site, as well as to your stores on third-party marketplaces. As a result, your customers always have access to up-to-date product information and images, ensuring they always order the right products the first time around.
- Amazon and eBay Marketplace Strategy. Many electronics repair shops, contractors, engineers and architecture purchase electrical components from marketplaces like Amazon Business and eBay. With Silk’s marketplace services, you can create a store on these platforms, complete with your detailed product data. 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.