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The digitization of shopping is growing every year. This applies not only to individual customers, but increasingly to the business customer as well. Moving sales processes online helps control individual steps, optimizing and automating the entire process.
The B2B platform will cope with greater order complexity, supporting the digitization of sales of manufacturing companies, distributors and wholesalers.
What is a B2B platform / system?
B2B Platform / B2B System - software for trading, in which the counterparty is an enterprise (business to business). It differs from the classic B2C platform primarily in:
- limited access (e.g. registration possible after signing a contract),
- the possibility of inquiries and product personalization,
- advanced financial or logistical functions (credit limits or deposit of funds, dedicated price lists, delivery schedule, etc.).
Order processing is not handled by the Customer Service Office, but by a specialized staff of Salespeople supporting customers in the more complex purchasing process. The B2B platform is designed to support the activities of Salespeople allowing them to optimize and automate their work.
Which B2B platform features are worth paying attention to?
Flexibility of the order process
When introducing the digitization of B2B sales, process flexibility is a particularly important aspect, as it is often intended to complement traditional stationary sales, e.g., picking up goods directly from the warehouse and paying in cash.
The tool should allow order flow to be tailored to the customer's needs by offering different approval steps, e.g. depending on product category, cart value, country, overall size.
Ease of integration with systems
B2B platform integrations are not just about downloading contractors and products. The number of links with other systems can be considerable: ERP, product information management (PIM), data management (MDM), production planning and scheduling (APS), customer relations (CRM), digital asset storage (DAM), pdf generation, workflows, payment systems, courier and logistics sytems. In addition to the ease of integration, it is good that the B2B platform can partially or fully replace some of the above systems.
B2B with embedded PIM
B2B platforms often need to have the ability to handle thousands of multilingual products with hundreds of features and relationships. It's good if the products have a defined structure in a system such as ERP. However, if they don't have it, there may be a problem with color filtering because this information is in 3 features.
It is worthwhile for the B2B system to have built-in modules for product information management (PIM) to counteract such situations or meet specific needs, e.g. for an order containing 5 bulky containers to be assigned a delivery schedule. With consistency and a jendolite structure, the presentation on the site will be clearer to customers.
Advanced price management
B2B sales are characterized by numerous pricing rules, e.g. a discount depending on annual turnover. A good B2B platform should provide real-time pricing capabilities, taking into account a number of factors: individual price lists for customers, for different assortment groups, time-based promotions and many others. Special rules may also be required for products that are complex, need to be configured or are made to order.
Marketing Automation
Modern web technologies offer dynamic customization of site content according to the visitor's needs. Such systems improve the user experience, so we call them Digital Experience Platform - DXP. In e-commerce, this is a very important module, allowing to increase sales, for example, by implementing up-sell or cross-sell strategies.
Pimcore
One of the tools in which the B2B Platform can be realized is the Pimcore system. Technically it is a PIM/MDM system, so it is very well equipped to store a large amount of data in different formats, of varying complexity with many relationships between objects. Its flexibility in data modeling allows it to give any structure or use an already existing one within the standard, such as the ETIM classification system. Pimcore can consolidate multiple data supporting data management such as mass change of descriptions.
Pimcore has e-commerce modules to support sales processes including order management, customer profiling, complex category pricing logics, customer-specific price lists and assortments. The Pimcore system, thanks to its high customer ratings, has been repeatedly recognized by the Gartner Grandmother Institute. Learn more about the Pimcore platform.
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