Best Practices & Strategies for B2B eCommerce Dominance in 2024

1. KEY STRATEGIES OF B2B ECOMMERCE
2. BEST PRACTICES FOR B2B ECOMMERCE: WEBSITES AND PROCESSES
3. BEST B2B ECOMMERCE PRACTICES INDUSTRY LEADERS USE
4. FUTURE-PROOFING YOUR B2B ECOMMERCE STRATEGY IN 2024 AND BEYOND
5. CONCLUSION

The general strategy companies use can be split into two types: some companies aim to build their B2B business that will disrupt the market and bring more profit over the spending, while others accept their B2B business as the way to reduce their spending while keeping the same level of sales. Let's see what is the difference. 

B2B business as a market disruptor. 

The main goal of such B2B ecommerce strategy is to provide enough convenience and the best customer experience so the customers become loyal and always choose a particular business over competitors. All this means that this business should always develop to keep up with B2B ecommerce trends. If you are aiming to grow constantly, you are going to need the capability of constant innovation. This leads to choosing a platform that is adaptable and flexible enough to support any innovation you need.   

B2B business that aims to grow bigger to reduce spending. 

If you have chosen this B2B ecommerce strategy, this means that you care a lot about the assortment, pricing, and selling capabilities. The main goal of these companies is to find a way to optimize their processes. They spend little on personalization and custom client opportunities but need the software that allows them to optimize and automate processes and grow the revenue as the spending reduces. 

While we talk about these two main strategies here, in reality, there are combined, environment-based strategies and more. In the real world, a lot of things depend on the industrial specifics, business goals, and budget. 

Talking about the ecommerce best practices (B2B), we often mean only business practices or only marketing, or automation. This approach can lead to the wrong understanding of which strategy to choose. So, let's see the difference in the example of two essential spheres: website optimization and process automation.  

The website plays a crucial role; let's say it is kind of a "Front end" of the whole B2B e-commerce business. So B2B ecommerce website best practices offer detailed product information, personalization of offers, robust search, and convenient filtering. To reach these goals, we will inevitably turn to internal "Back end" processes that customers don't see.  

From the side of the processes, we are going to need more optimized speed, greater support and services, integration capabilities, and more. These things seem to have no relation to the front end, but as we go deeper, we will understand that businesses should care about implementing ecommerce best practices for B2B both inside and outside.  

All these ecommerce best practices for B2B used by the market leaders are inevitably bundled. This means there are no separate "marketing" or "business" best practices; there are general insights into how to make everything better, and all B2B ecommerce marketing strategies are linked to overall success. 

Let’s see which best practices lead market first players to success. Here, we show only several of them. Nevertheless, you can always find more examples among Virto Use Cases. 

1. Prioritize the buyer's experience. 

This is the first best practice that became popular not long ago: businesses realized the importance of customer experience when the boom of B2B marketplaces and online shops happened after the pandemic. To beat the competition, you have to offer a B2C-like experience while providing essential B2B tools like allowing bulk ordering, simplifying reordering, and so on. For example, if you streamline the checkout process, you will definitely eliminate unnecessary friction and lead your customers to a better experience and higher loyalty. The buyer-first approach brings more profit than the company invests. 

2. Personalize customer experiences and customize offerings. 

Sounds alike, though it is an entirely different task for B2B businesses. Personalization is a complex task that involves reworking all processes and the platform with capabilities to split literally everything. Your B2B buyers should be able to get customized offers, flexible shipping options, and personalized customer catalogs and pricing. This includes more than simply crafting comprehensive product descriptions; it also requires businesses to provide know-your-client analysis, base all decisions on data, and be able to support it all technically. 

3. Leverage customer insights.  

As we speak about customers a lot, you should also work on building trust between your company and your customers. There are plenty of ways to do it, from robust operations that make customers feel cared for to empowering insights through social media marketing and blogs. People do not want to purchase whatever they see first anymore; they need demos, shows, social proof, and more. So let the people know more insights into your product. 

4. Embrace B2B portals and marketplaces. 

Once we have gained the trust of potential customers and the loyalty of the existing ones, it's time to think about more convenient B2B products that can, at the same time, deepen your customer relationship and bring more profit. Here, we mean building separate marketplaces, customer B2B portals, or personalized customer portals and winning over the competitors urging to grow in the assortment only. The only thing you need is trusted software for B2B marketplace.   

Besides the apparent technological trends like the use of AI and blockchain, B2B businesses are strongly heading to better customer experience, deep consumer insights, and innovation. This means that Digital Commerce 360 was correct in its stats: businesses aim to overrun their competitors by choosing the best B2B ecommerce platforms that are able to enhance all these spheres and gain more loyal customers. Let's see what you can do entering 2024.   

1. Synchronize with the upcoming industry changes: always keep an eye on analytics and forecasting.  
2. Care more about your customer experience and personalization: choose the software that can enable you to add any feature your customer needs in a B2C-similar way but with valuable B2B capabilities. Implement B2B ecommerce marketing. 
3. Implement modern, adaptable platforms that can support easy innovation, simple integration via APIs, and easy building of new B2B ecommerce features. 

All this is possible with the B2B ecommerce platform that was chosen based on your real needs, and not only the “Big Name” of the vendor. Let’s see what Virto Commerce can offer: 

1. The solution is cloud-native, which means that it is highly adaptable to growing. Once your business expands, the solution will easily expand after. 
2. The platform is adaptable to any changes due to the modular architecture (Virto Atomic Architecture). You can change any feature or add a new one in days, and seamlessly, without interrupting the work of other modules. 
3. The platform is headless and open source. This means you can create basically everything and connect the head (your website) to all the solutions you need or use already. 
4. It offers API-first technology, which means that it can interact with everything you need in your project. 

Another good point: Virto Commerce deeply supports multiregional and multicurrency marketplaces and portal building. This means that in the world of globalization, you'll be the first to move to new regions easily.  

In concluding our exploration of B2B eCommerce best practices, let’s look at the main trends and insights once again: 

1. Businesses aim to gain more loyal customers by enhancing CX. 
2. Companies spend more on high-quality B2B ecommerce platforms. 
3. Globalization grows. 
4. The B2B ecommerce market is evolving. 

While showing many challenges, the B2B ecommerce market continuously grows, and so does the level of competition.  

To win over the competitors, today's ecommerce businesses have to invest in the perfect instrument that will enable them to reach all the ecommerce best practices for B2B easily. In this context, Virto Commerce emerges as an essential partner. With its expertise and innovative solutions, Virto Commerce enhances B2B eCommerce operations, offering customizable and technologically advanced platforms.  

In case you want to learn more from our experts and gain some insight that we have, reach out to our team. Virto Commerce offers great experience, as shown in our case studies and our B2B ecommerce blog, so do not hesitate to request a demonstration of what Virto can offer to your business. 

1. — Three years ago, almost 65% of all B2B businesses were offering online services, — McKinsey.

2. — In 2023, businesses make the biggest investments in the customer experience, B2B e-commerce platforms, and digital marketing, — Digital Commerce 360.