Fre­quent­ly Asked Ques­tions on B2B eCom­merce Platforms

The biggest chal­lenge is not to find the right answers, but to ask the right questions.

Peter Druck­er

If you are con­sid­er­ing using an eCom­merce plat­form for your B2B busi­ness, you are prob­a­bly over­whelmed with ques­tions. In this blog post, we will be address­ing some FAQs about B2B eCom­merce plat­forms, so the process of adopt­ing an eCom­merce plat­form does not feel like try­ing to catch a fish with your bare hands: slip­pery, frus­trat­ing, and more dif­fi­cult than it seems.

FAQ1: Sell on a B2B eCom­merce plat­form? Why?

This is an easy one: A B2B ecom­merce plat­form can open many doors lead­ing to many good places. It could get you new busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ties, expand your mar­ket reach, low­er your over­all costs and help you make bet­ter sales. In oth­er words, more chances, more time and more money. 

A B2B plat­form will make your prod­ucts more dis­cov­er­able, and that will enable you to attract more poten­tial clients to your mul­ti­ple sales chan­nels. A good one will offer a bet­ter cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, and that will encour­age cus­tomers to buy, and to return. It will also help opti­mize your sales process­es, allow­ing buy­ers to place orders round the clock and allow­ing your team to for­get about repet­i­tive man­u­al tasks involv­ing orders and invoic­es and quotes.

The icing on the cake is that it gives you more knowl­edge, that is, more pow­er, because its more effec­tive ana­lyt­ics can allow you to iden­ti­fy what works and what doesn’t. Def­i­nite­ly worth considering.

FAQ2: Should a retail com­pa­ny go wholesale?

Ah, to whole­sale or not to whole­sale. Great ques­tion, but dif­fi­cult answer: It depends. 

Sell­ing whole­sale can have its perks, espe­cial­ly when it comes to brand aware­ness, which can spread like wild­fire, though not in a cat­a­stroph­ic act of God kind of way. Why? Because your new whole­sale clients can help you tap into new mar­kets and audi­ences you hadn’t even con­sid­ered. It could also unlock new busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ties like drop­ship­ping and get you loy­al, long time cus­tomers. That can’t hurt.

What might hurt is that you might dilute your brand iden­ti­ty, espe­cial­ly if you’re a retail­er sell­ing DTC (Direct-to-con­sumer), because although your prod­ucts remain yours, cus­tomers might asso­ciate them with your retail­ers, and not you. Not nec­es­sar­i­ly a down­side, but cer­tain­ly some­thing worth con­sid­er­ing. The oth­er pos­si­ble draw­back is that you may lose touch with con­sumers, as they will be engag­ing with your retail cus­tomer and not with you. This can lim­it your abil­i­ty to get direct feed­back on your products.

FAQ3: Do whole­salers, dis­trib­u­tors and man­u­fac­tur­ers need dif­fer­ent functionalities?

Most cer­tain­ly yes.

Dis­trib­u­tors will need cus­tomized pric­ing, account login, and net terms for almost all their cus­tomers, because they are the con­nec­tion between man­u­fac­tur­ers and whole­salers. The same will apply to some man­u­fac­tur­ers who need to hide B2B pric­ing for their con­sumer prod­ucts, mak­ing it vis­i­ble only through account login. 

Although whole­salers who sell direct­ly to retail­ers will need these fea­tures too, they also need to offer one-off pur­chas­es, so they will need fea­tures like vol­ume pric­ing and guest check­out too. Some man­u­fac­tur­ers may need busi­ness­es to sub­mit files to get the right prod­uct, and sev­er­al options per prod­uct, not just a SKU.

The ide­al B2B plat­form should be able to give to each their own, and it shouldn’t be a nightmare.

FAQ4: Is a SaaS solu­tion bet­ter than open source software?

A SaaS solu­tion implies all the tech­ni­cal aspects of run­ning a B2B ecom­merce site, includ­ing host­ing, secu­ri­ty, and main­te­nance are tak­en care of. You won’t have to wor­ry about breach­es, bugs, or down­time. New ver­sions are released often, so your plat­form is con­stant­ly improv­ing and you don’t have to do a thing, except focus on grow­ing your business. 

The beau­ty of Open source is that you get com­plete con­trol and flex­i­bil­i­ty, but that comes at a price, and it may be quite high, both in terms of actu­al cost and tech­ni­cal resources required. 

But there’s a mid­dle (or should we say high­er) ground: Open SaaS plat­forms com­bine the host­ing, secu­ri­ty and upkeep fea­tures of SaaS solu­tions with the free­dom to cus­tomize offered by Open Source platforms.

FAQ5: How can you ensure your B2B ecom­merce plat­form is secure?

A key ques­tion. Secu­ri­ty is a seri­ous­ly seri­ous issue. A B2B eCom­merce plat­form is a revolv­ing door for sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion like cred­it card and per­son­al data, so you and your cus­tomers must be able to trust that infor­ma­tion is pro­tect­ed at all times. Some vital fea­tures of a secure B2B eCom­merce plat­form include PCI com­pli­ance, ISO/IEC cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, SSL cer­tifi­cates, and DDoS pro­tec­tion. You can imple­ment mea­sures like fire­walls, IP restric­tions, DMZ, TLS, and data redun­dan­cy to ensure your plat­form is safe, and sound.

FAQ6: How do I choose the right B2B ecom­merce platform?

We love this ques­tion. We’ve writ­ten about how to choose the right B2B eCom­merce plat­form before. Ulti­mate­ly, the best plat­form for your busi­ness is the one that caters best to the par­tic­u­lar needs of your com­pa­ny, so the first step is to con­sid­er the kind of busi­ness you have, and the one you want to build. This includes your team and their tech­ni­cal exper­tise, and your budget.

That’s about you. When it comes to the plat­form itself, key aspects to con­sid­er include B2B func­tion­al­i­ties like RFQs and pay­ment options, inte­gra­tions with busi­ness soft­ware, ease of use, and, of course, secu­ri­ty. You should also look into cus­tomiza­tion options, UI/UX, and scal­a­bil­i­ty. An ide­al plat­form should leave you room to grow, and make that eas­i­er for you as well.

Anoth­er thing to look at is cost. We’re cov­er­ing that in our next question.

FAQ7: How much does it cost to imple­ment a B2B eCom­merce solution?

We’ve saved the trick­i­est for last. The pric­ing range for eCom­merce plat­forms varies great­ly. Cur­rent­ly, it could be any­where between $0 to $50.000. You may think it’s a no-brain­er: if there are any free (or very cheap) options avail­able, why both­er pay­ing (more)? Well, you see, some plat­forms claim to be free because they are free to down­load or don’t charge licens­ing fees. Oth­ers may have very low month­ly fees. How­ev­er, if you try them, you will soon real­ize expens­es begin to pile up — devel­op­ment, main­te­nance, host­ing, secu­ri­ty, trans­ac­tion fees, sup­port, and the list goes on. 

There are aspects more wor­thy of con­sid­er­a­tion than pric­ing when it comes to cost. One is TCO (Total cost of own­er­ship), which refers to the com­bined cost of the ini­tial pur­chase plus oper­a­tional costs, which may include imple­men­ta­tion, host­ing, license, third par­ty-inte­gra­tion, and the cost of mak­ing changes.

Ulti­mate­ly, the answer to this ques­tion will depend on the rela­tion between acronyms: TCO vs ROI/ROTI (return of invest­ment and return of time invest­ed, respec­tive­ly). In oth­er words, the rela­tion between what it costs, and what you get. 

If you have oth­er ques­tions we haven’t cov­ered, or would like to share your thoughts with us, just get in touch.