Choosing the right platform for your B2B business has never been more important. Many B2B companies are counting on their ecommerce platform to help them increase revenue, attract new business and encourage customer retention, so what is the best option for your company?

According to a survey commissioned by Magento, the top 5 most popular criteria for choosing an ecommerce platform for mid-sized B2B companies are: 

  1. Performance and reliability –  how will a new ecommerce site work for you and your brand?
  2. Solution completeness – does your new platform offer everything you need? 
  3. Support for both B2B and B2C requirements – can your new ecommerce platform serve both of your potential customer bases?
  4. Integration with existing systems – what other software do you use to manage customers? 
  5. Ease of customisation to meet my needs – how simple is it to add additional features?

So How Do You Choose?

Your ecommerce platform of choice will likely be used by multiple departments within your business, so it’s important to consider your needs from different perspectives.

Having initial conversations with your key stakeholders and different departments can ensure that you are confident when it comes to your requirements and expectations.

Here at IGOO, we run consultancy workshops to determine which solution is right for your needs. Headed up by our talented team of designers, developers, marketers and project managers, we work with you and your colleagues to determine what you’ll need from your ecommerce site and how we can make sure that all your key objectives are met.

And when we’re running our workshops, we think about your short, medium and long term strategy. Personas are created to reflect your key customer groups, and we use your existing data and your personal, invaluable customer knowledge to inform your site structure and marketing strategy.

What Questions Should You Be Asking?

  • Who will be using your ecommerce platform? If this is strictly other businesses, your requirements will be slightly different than if you were selling B2C. Will you staff use the platform to input customer orders? Think about their needs too
  • What is your usual sales process? It can help to map out your typical customer journey and find out where the potential pain points could be
  • How complex are most orders? If your process starts with quotes or detailed specifications before moving onto another part of your business, it’s important to be clear on the best way to support customers throughout this process 
  • What important capabilities are being missed from our current solution? If you have an existing ecommerce platform, what do you struggle with and what does it not allow you to do? If you don’t have an online offering at the moment, explore what your key aim is for moving into ecommerce
  • What tools do you currently use? Whether that’s to manage sales or marketing, it’s important to have an idea of what you utilise at the moment (and what’s working) to ensure this can be translated into your online solution

Options Available:

When it comes to the software we offer, we work predominantly with three ecommerce platforms; Magento, Shopify and WooCommerce. Each platform has its own benefits and we discuss them all in full detail over in our earlier blog, which you can find here.

If you’d like to explore ecommerce options for your B2B company, we’d love to hear from you.