magento-b2b-development

Magento B2B Development: A New Approach of Business Starters

by Robin Tran

Magento B2B Commerce is one of the best platforms to build a wholesales business. No doubt. B2B web development goes up with Magento Commerce’s popularity.

And this is contributed by the beauty of Magento – its scalability.

magento-best-feature-magento-b2b-development

However, to tap into and make full use of these potentials, you need a plan. And we here to build it with you.

In this post, we’ll review the map for a Magento B2B building with a focus on phases one and two of such a journey. Noted that we will make a different approach from the common ones about Magento 2 B2B web development, not focusing on technical concerns but exposing business aspects of the process. 

Stay tuned!

Magento B2B Development – The Full Map

So, this is going to be a little bit academic-y but bear with me. 

For anyone who wants to start an online wholesale business, you need to climb on this ladder steadily. Here is how you apply Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs for Magento B2B development.

magento-b2b-development-map

Let’s quickly go through each stage.

Presence

Start with your presence. No matter what, your online store is essential to your business, just like water is essential to humans. 

As a means of survival, your Magento website design needs to be clean and crips all around the edges. 

Safety

Next, your business needs to have a safety net. And by that, I mean a flow of purchase that is easy to:

  • Find the product of need
  • Configure
  • Buy
  • Re-order
  • Access to other attached services
prevent-front-end-complications-magento-b2b-development

INSTANT KNOWLEDGE: Magento 2 B2B quick order – importance and how to set up!

Keep all of the bunky and nasty at your backend and make sure your frontend is impeccable. 

Love

Loyalty and customer lifetime value are crucial to the success of your B2B development process. So far, we’ve talked about crafting an experience of purchase but what after that?

Your loyalty-building project! There are two rules:

  • Make it simple to access + easy to understand.
always-be-cleared-magento-b2b-development
  • And make the rewards count.

Esteem

We’re moving towards how to maximize order values and conversion rates. 

And the answer is simple: Make your Magento B2B website design fills with personalized options!

amazon-as-example-magento-b2b-development

You can see this sentiment echos in the arguably biggest wholesales business – Amazon. They reinforce the idea of personalization with their product recommendations, shipping-and-payment preferences, and many more.

Self Actualization

“New is always better” – you can disagree with the statement but can’t do the same thing with the message. 

Any responsible Magento development agency will tell you that their result with your business is temporary and you need to be aware of the curve. In other words, keep yourself in-check with new updates, new trends to apply and improve your business.

Now, let get to the main discussion of this article: How to build the perfect phase one for your Magento B2B website.

#1 Phase One – Presence: Basic vs. specialized

It’s a bit of a dilemma for any new business, let alone, wholesales. For any given ecommerce setup, there is a debate between what you need for starters and what you need to stand out.

Here is how you figure it out: 

set-it-free-magento-b2b-development

Magento is no different. That being said, Magento website design takes into account both easy-to-do features and time-intensive customization.

Essentially, the ratio between these two will depend on your ambition for the business. However, when it comes to purchasing experience, hassle-free is indispensable.

keep-it-easy

Every single product and service that ever been created all but from the demand for making life more comfortable. And you want that for your Magento B2B store. Empty the road to purchase, make it smooth, make it enjoyable, make it opened for updates. 

#2 Phase One – Safety: Strike For Simplification

Once again, let’s talk about Amazon. 

Do you know that they have a 1-click order option available? And how it affects your goal for the whole purchase experience?

1-click-option

Now, that should tell you the current bar for ecommerce simplification. Now let’s project that to the customer journey and find out what you can do at each stage:

customer-journey

Awareness – Capture leads

This might sound completely unrelated to the core value of simplification. But remember the earlier guideline we laid out? Yes, easy to find was one of the criteria.

And you need to perfect this characteristic of your site to:

  • People searching for your type of product/service
  • People maneuvering on your site for product/service  

How you are going to do it? SEO! And here are over-simplified best practices for SEO for every Magento B2B eCommerce website.

seo-best-practices-b2b

FULL VERSION >>> Magento SEO checklist – From A to Z Criteria to get higher rankings!

Consideration – Diversify options (especially pricing!)

Now that you have the visitor’s attention, it’s time to put it to work.

The number one rule for any Magento B2B eCommerce website is to keep the visitor occupied. In other words, extend the time on page with engaging information/options to increase the conversion rate. 

Previously, we’ve talked about how cross-linking is a data-proven successful tactic (case in point Amazon), now, let expand on that. 

How about allowing side-by-side comparison. Like this?

allow-every-pricing-options

By offering every available option upfront, you create a seamless purchasing experience that all happens on one single page.  And that’s how you simplify the process to maximize the outcome. 

Conversion – Perfect the checkout flow

Let just cut to the chase. Here is what you need to do with your Magento checkout process:

  • Make it fast.
  • Allow complex orders.
  • Enable reorder options. 

While the first one holds true to any type of transaction, the other two are supported by the Magento B2B buyer persona.

b2b-buyer-persona-difference

As a Magento wholesale business, you’re working with a company/a collective of buyers. This type of customer has a more complex demand and a very imprinted pattern of purchase. 

That’s why you need to put extra effort into smoothening the checkout process. 

Loyalty – Enable post-sale program

There is a reason why Magento B2B customization starts and ends with the buying account.

At the get-go, you want to control the stream of wholesale buyers with force login. That way, you can separate to offer exclusiveness. 

seperation-is-important

Here, after the purchase is placed, you want to provide an interface that is easy to:

  • Track order
  • Pay invoice
  • Check report
  • Monitor reward points/credits

Once again, this is adaptive to the characteristics of B2B buyers with the aim of a long-term relationship.

So that’s how you jump-start your Magento B2B with a perfect phase one. Now, let’s quickly cover what will be your next step afterward.

Phase Two – Maximize Order Value And Keep on Update

Lift up your average order value

The key strategy here is to learn your customer preferences and develop bespoke offers for them.

After phase one, you’ll have a solid database of previous customers. It’s time to put it to work.

Start to look for a pattern in their purchases. It could be their product attributions, their preferred payment/shipment, or even the time of purchase. And that’s on micro-managing your customer persona.

improve-your-magento-b2b-development

This works phenomenal for a small B2B business, but if you have a bigger sample pool, it gets trickier.

The challenge for your business here is to develop a protocol that allows you to automatically group customers based on order frequency, monetary value, and recency. This way, you can handle the volume of customers by segmentation and matching the best offer for each type of customer.

At this stage, I highly recommend you to hire a trusted agency. You’ll have the best of both worlds – a great plan of action and an amazing experience to move forward.

Use a head to stay ahead

Now that you have a system that works excellent, the only thing left is to stay ahead of the game.

One might argue that the B2B market isn’t a constant flux. Yes, you’re absolutely correct. But it’s not an excuse to stay still and be unaware of the technology changes that happen every single day.

 

keep-yourself-updated

Once you decide to go digital, it’s extremely dangerous to ignore its trends and updates. Moreover, you can capitalize on them to make your turnover bigger.

Therefore, keep an eye on changes in SEO, in market demands, regulations, technology. Question how you can incorporate them into your e-commerce.

Pay attention, the business that is faster to adapt always gets the longest end of the stick. 

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Wrap up

We’ve just learned about the basic building block for a successful Magento wholesale startup. What’s next? Turn on your post notification and wait for the next blog on filtering through the marketplace for a partner, aka choosing Magento B2B extension!

BSS Commerce is one of the leading Magento extension providers and web development agencies in the world. With experienced and certified Magento developers, we commit to bring high-quality products and services to optimize your business effectively. CONTACT NOW to let us know your problems related to B2B web building. We are willing to support you every time.

 

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