Business-to-business (B2B), also called B-to-B, is a form of transaction between businesses, such as one involving a manufacturer and wholesaler, or a wholesaler and a retailer. Business-to-business refers to business that is conducted between companies, rather than between a company and individual consumer.

9 Key Features of B2B Ecommerce Site:

1. Scalability – An effective B2B ecommerce platform will enable your organization to grow and scale easily to meet market demand and customer needs by opening new sales channels and continuously reaching new market segments.

2. Improved efficiencies – Through integration to the enterprise resource planning (ERP) and other back-end business systems, ecommerce provides marked efficiencies for B2B organizations. Customers are able to order online at their convenience, customer service can focus on actual customer service functions rather than simply being order takers, and the need to rekey data in independent systems is eliminated, thereby eliminating the possibility of errors and improving shipping processes and increasing order throughput.

3. More customers – A B2B ecommerce site with public-facing catalog pages is a powerful way to reach new B2B customers. Your future buyers not only prefer to shop online but will demand it. As B2B buyers head online to find the best prices, manufacturers and distributors can leverage the power of the search—and therefore, ready to index—pages of their site to locate new visitors and convert them into customers.

4. Improved brand awareness – Improve brand awareness in the market place. Developing pages that can be indexed by search engine crawlers is a fast way to improve your site’s search engine optimization and improve the likelihood that your target audience will know who you are.

5. Increased sales – Not only will you reach new customers, ecommerce also allows you to easily implement an automated cross-sell and up-sell recommendation program, offering relevant suggestions to customers on the site and encouraging them to purchase related items or items with more features and functionality.

6. Analytics – B2B ecommerce provides the perfect platform for an organization to launch a comprehensive analytics campaign. Through ecommerce, organizations can more easily measure and evaluate marketing campaigns, sales effectiveness, product mix, inventory turns, customer sales effectiveness, and customer engagement. Google Analytics offers ecommerce tracking, but integrating analytics with your ERP as well gives you much more valuable data with actionable insights.

7. Exceptional customer service – ecommerce provides an exceptional opportunity for the B2B organization to improve its customer service initiatives. ecommerce sites can provide access to self-serve portals with account, order, history and tracking information. Through integration with an organization’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, a robust ecommerce site can display customer specific products, services and pricing based on customer log in credentials.

8. Improved sales engagement – Your physical sales team will also benefit from the launch of a comprehensive ecommerce effort. A B2B ecommerce site or portal will improve your sales teams’ visibility into customer orders, pricing, and history while on the road or working remotely.

9. Multi-site capability – Launching channel-specific or co-branded ecommerce sites is easy with the right B2B ecommerce platform. This capability allows you to offer co-branded websites or microsites for each of your distributors or key clients as well allow for sites that cater to a specific international audience by presenting content in alternate languages or currencies.