Order management software (for B2B eCommerce companies especially) isn’t just something that sounds nice, something that could be a good idea to look into five years down the road, something that you talk about around the office from time to time, something where you say, “Hey, you know, maybe we should get that someday.”
This is beyond critical for wholesalers, manufacturers, and distributors—your customers expect it.
In fact, many key wholesale customers won’t even bother with a wholesaler who doesn’t have an online ordering portal with inventory, pricing, and complete account history.
Wholesalers have great expectations set on their shoulders
- You can’t just provide quality products anymore.
- You can’t just compete for the lowest prices anymore.
- You can’t just get products where they need to be, on time, right on time, or just in time.
- You can’t just provide great customer service anymore—not if you want to outperform the competition.
Because these days, it’s more than that—your customers demand online order processing. That’s just a part of providing great customer service in the digital era.
Order management software for B2B eCommerce is a necessity
There are ways of doing this that can cost quite a bit more than simply getting something like Now Commerce and setting up a dedicated B2B customer portal.
You could have someone build an entire web-based system from scratch. However, setting up a B2B eCommerce platform is no small task. Building one from the ground up generally costs thousands of dollars, and it’s filled with potential pitfalls. If your product descriptions aren’t just right, if your existing customers aren’t made acutely aware of the new ordering process, if your team isn’t taught how to use the portal, how to process the orders, how to get the information into QuickBooks, how to update inventory, how to communicate clearly with reps about inventory levels or order statuses, etc., it can all fall apart.
You could end up with an extremely expensive product that doesn’t deliver what you expected.
But online ordering capabilities aren’t something you can avoid. The days of phone, email, and fax for order processing are fading fast.
There is a better way—and your customers expect this these days not as a luxury but as a basic level of service.
You can try to do all this by hand. You can buy a wholesale website, customize it to sell your products, and then process every single order by hand.
Or, you can invest in order management software that already has a built-in B2B customer portal that can be easily customized to fit your and your customers' precise needs.
But it must be a potent piece of software to do this effectively.
Order management software for B2B eCommerce has to be robust
The software has to be able to function 24/7/365. Your customers have to be able to put in an order any time of the day or night.
Robust software has to integrate seamlessly with many other pieces of software. If your order management software cannot integrate with something like QuickBooks, you have a problem.
Robust software also has to work seamlessly under any circumstances, not break down or have errors.
They expect it to be available at certain times, that things will work smoothly and quickly, that there will be no snags, and that nothing will be confusing.
Without B2B order management software, processing wholesale orders can be a HUGE time suck
But you probably already know this, too—maybe you’re experiencing it now.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
Learn more about how Now Commerce can make the online ordering process simple, straightforward, cost-effective, and can be customized to your customers' needs.
