B2B companies know they need e-commerce capabilities. Globally, the B2B e-commerce marketplace has surpassed B2C in sales. According to Statista’s trend report from 2017, businesses that serve other businesses have created a sales arena worth $7.7 trillion. There’s no denying the value of incorporating more selling power on your website.
While an increasing number of companies know they need online sales capabilities, many of them make common mistakes that end up costing them a lot of wasted time, money and energy.
There are many e-commerce platforms and tools out there, but unfortunately, it’s easy to make the wrong decision too quickly and learn too late that the option you’ve implemented doesn’t fulfill your needs or justify your investment.
When you’re looking for the best e-commerce platform for B2B sales, marketing and management, make sure you avoid these common pitfalls.
Mistake: Choose An Open Source Based Platform
There are many B2B e-commerce platforms that are open source, which means you are paying to license and use the platform, usually without a monthly fee. That seems like a key advantage, but there are a lot of costs you may not be anticipating.
You’re on your own when it comes to hosting, adding additional e-commerce features, hiring developers to create additional modules, and investing the time and money when transitioning your changes every time the platform needs to be updated.
Mistake: Try To Fit Your Practices To The Platform
In our experience at WebJaguar, our clients have described e-commerce platforms they’ve adopted in the past that have required them to modify their practices to suit the limitations of the platform.
Even if the platform’s setup wasn’t beneficial to the company or the customers they served, they felt they had to adapt to whatever was available to make e-commerce work for them. They ultimately ended up abandoning those previous options after quickly learning they weren’t doing much to serve their specific needs.
Mistake: Keep Your E-commerce Platform Separate From Your Marketing And Management Resources
It’s too easy to start compartmentalizing different applications when they all do different things. There are applications that are dedicated to accounting, marketing, customer relations, inventory management, order fulfillment processes, etc., and these separate apps don’t connect and communicate with one another.
The result is more manual input work and more redundancy with less automation. There’s usually extra costs when it comes to maintaining all these business essentials as separate apps and trying to incorporate them into your unique workflow.
How Do You Avoid Them?
Of course, these are just a few of the problems we hear about from our clients. Fortunately, our platform can help you avoid all of them by providing you with comprehensive, connected e-commerce capabilities that enable you to sell more efficiently, as well as market and manage multiple aspects of your business—and in a way that enables you to accommodate and acquire more customers.
Everything is built-in and Cloud-based, so staying updated is easy. There are no unexpected fees for additional coding or hosting and integration of various modules is seamless. This setup allows you to avoid the expense and frustrations that are common with open source e-commerce platforms.
The modular features of our platform mean that everything is suited to the specific needs of your business. You don’t need to change your operations to get the most from e-commerce capabilities.
You can also reduce your reliance on multiple apps and systems that don’t communicate with one another. We’ve developed our platform to do the heavy lifting for B2B companies and give them the most useful, up-to-date automated tools. You get a single cohesive system that suits your workflow and enables you to keep everything organized and accessible across one platform.
If you want to learn more and see a demo of what we can do, contact us to arrange an appointment.