A Guide to Using Shopify Plus for B2B: Maximizing Sales Potential

Many eCommerce businesses fail to battle customers’ increased expectations, especially with the customer experience expectation being more comprehensive, unique, and convenient.

With the global B2B eCommerce market estimated to be worth $17 trillion by the end of this year, the opportunities are enormous. This guide aims to help you improve your sales figures using Shopify Plus – a detailed platform created for Business-to-Business merchandising. In this guide, we will discuss how Shopify Plus can revolutionize your B2B eCommerce operations and help you capture more business and meet your new and existing clients’ needs.

Let’s know what the modern B2B buyer expects from an online supplier.

B2B consumers today have high expectations and are looking for the kind of experience that B2C offers. More to the facts, data show that 67% of online business buyers have even changed their supplier in a bid to get a feeling of being a consumer. As for the B2B aspect, personalization is a matter of identifying the specific needs of customers and delivering solutions that meet those needs effectively.

A B2B customer communicates with its suppliers via several modes. Purchasers employ at least 10 different touch points throughout their buying decisions, emphasizing the need for a multi-channel strategy. Being able to consistently and cohesively deliver the same level of service from one channel of contact as another is imperative not only to the successful completion of the sale but to the consumer’s satisfaction even while interacting with a web representative or browsing an actual physical store.

Being aware of these expectations is the first way to develop an efficient business-to-business eCommerce strategy. If your business is to meet these demands, you have to engage Shopify Plus as a way of delivering a personalized as well as an omnichannel solution to your clients.

The following features of Shopify Plus make it a great pick for B2B retailers.

Data management is a significant issue for B2B companies, this is the case with customer data. Customer profiles and all the information related to them are easy to maintain using Shopify Plus where all of this information is gathered in one place. It improves customer data accessibility and analysis to assist businesses in offering unique products and services to meet customer requirements.

B2B customers value having the opportunity to interact with the company and its products through self-serving mechanisms. It is worth mentioning that 86% of customers prefer self-serve shopping, making it one of the most crucial features to have. Shopify Plus customers can make their business available for 24/7 ordering with a self-serving platform. This means that the customers can make their orders at their convenient time and not much intervention is required.

Options for making payments and guaranteeing safe transactions are vital to all B2B businesses. One of the best features of Shopify Plus is that it has multiple payment gateways and ways like credit terms, and most importantly, purchase orders. Such flexibility creates opportunities for businesses to accommodate for payment selection of their buyers, making the overall payment process seamless and secure.

In the B2B business, inventory control is critical in ensuring that stock details are accurately documented. Shopify Plus has features that assist in giving proper information about the stock of products for sale in various channels. This ensures retailers are aware of the correct stock status and can avoid instances whereby they give out more stock than is available or there is no stock available.

B2B businesses rely on a buyer being able to locate a particular product as quickly as possible. With Shopify Plus, retailers can ensure that the customer can search and make the right choices of products to buy. This is important as a majority of B2B buyers, at 68% use the internet to find information about the products before making a purchase.

When it comes to B2B eCommerce, coordinating your marketing department, your sales team, and how your warehouse is set up is critical. In this way, a consistent operations strategy aims at unproblematic communication and cooperation between the departments to maximize output and satisfaction among customers.

The customers’ buying process is an important thing to consider. Create buyer personas and determine which channels are most important to them. Make sure that you place your products in these channels to popularize them and sell them more.

While it may seem tempting to create a full-fledged eCommerce store for your B2B retail business, it is advised that you start small and scale big with time. What it means is that for starters, you can have the Shopify Plus store with minimal features and more focus on the core functionality. You should put effort into making sure that your store has the necessary features to accommodate the B2B buyer journey. Moving forward, you can invest in having the greatest user interfaces.

Brand consistency between the B2B interface and the direct-to-consumer (DTC) platform matters. Consumers are assured of a harmonized brand experience and would hence remain loyal to your business. It is also important that your written material, products, and customer service communications are coherent.

Determining the right wholesale discounts is never a simple affair as one has to weigh things very carefully. As much as we must be competitive in the prices that we offer, we also need to be profitable. So, it is important to keep the discount level reasonable based on some parameters such as the cost of production, target market demand, and competition from other products.

Reliability in supplies cannot be underemphasized. Growth strategies including nearshoring and multisourcing should be put in place to deal with interruptions. This eliminates the risk of a particular source of supply let alone obtaining an individual manufacturer’s products.

Shopify Plus provides an opportunity for B2B retailers to optimize processes, offer customized experiences, and secure inventory management. To improve customer experience and increase sales, retailers need to have centralized data, flexible payment options, and self-serving order options that Shopify Plus provides.

If you’re interested in optimizing your B2B sales strategy, then you should definitely embrace Shopify Plus. Its integration capabilities make it possible for you to capture the dynamic needs of business customers hence remain relevant in the growing B2B eCommerce space.

At Techtic, we have developed expertise in providing eCommerce solutions to B2B and B2C retailers. Let’s connect with our seasoned Shopify Plus team today and find out how you can optimize your operations effectively and efficiently. Are you ready to discover what’s possible for your B2B eCommerce? Get in touch with Techtic today.