Many established B2B businesses are stuck in a rut. They’ve offered the same things, in the same ways, for years—sometimes decades—and they don’t see why they should change.
When someone at the office, a colleague in the same industry, or even a competitor discusses incorporating B2B eCommerce into their current business model, your management team scoffs.
“It’s too complicated, and our customers like placing orders directly with us.”
“It would be too difficult to actually set something like that up. How would we integrate it with QuickBooks?”
“We’ve already got QuickBooks set up; we don’t want to duplicate all the products for a B2B eCommerce storefront. That’s too much work for not enough reward.”
“Our customers all have different prices and different tiers. Setting that up for online ordering is more trouble than it’s worth.”
Do any of those sound familiar? If they do, read on – there’s a solution for you.
One of the major reasons that Now Commerce exists is to help businesses like yours take their offerings online.
Before I discuss that, we need to discuss the major hurdles to setting up B2B eCommerce in the first place.
One of the biggest reasons people hesitate about offering a B2B eCommerce option for their clients to place their orders is that they think they’ll have to set up a whole new system for accepting orders.
You can’t blame a business for not wanting to spend days or weeks inputting all the product codes, discounts, descriptions, and pictures into a new online system for a dubious return on investment. It might be nice to think about offering an online ordering portal for clients, but the reality is that it’s not possible if you have to duplicate all the work you already put into setting up QuickBooks.
Except… you don’t have to duplicate all that work.
Since you’ve already spent the time creating detailed product descriptions, setting up custom pricing for each customer, and maintaining all of the associated information in QuickBooks …why not use that information to set up your B2B eCommerce capabilities?
Using a tool like Now Commerce isn’t like setting up an online shopping cart since what you offer doesn’t suit shopping cart-style shopping well.
Instead, what you need is ideal for a business like yours: something where customers can essentially fill in orders for what they want, and then those orders go through your fulfillment and invoicing processes.
It’d be great, wouldn’t it, if your customers all wrote their own invoices, and your team just had to review them – rather than typing it all in all over again?
You can also offer your customers the ability to place orders online for a simple reason unrelated to eCommerce.
Why not have your customers input their own invoices? They’ll know exactly what they ordered and be able to check up on tracking information any time they need.
It’s what they’ve always wanted but never realized they could have.
Why wouldn’t you offer that to your customers?
No one in your industry offers online ordering options, so why do you need to? It’s not something that your competitors are doing, so you don’t have to worry about it yet.
That’s precisely why you need to worry about it now.
You could be setting the trend among your colleagues.
You could be the industry leader. And not the bleeding edge type of industry leader, where innovation is a high-risk, high-reward scenario.
This isn’t particularly revolutionary technology—it’s well-established, thoroughly adopted technology with minimal risk but maximum reward.
You don’t have to change your entire business model. But something as simple as offering B2B eCommerce to your current (and prospective) customers now, especially if your competitors haven’t, shows that you’re a company that’s willing and able to adapt.
You’re a company that has your buyer’s needs in mind.
Do you want to increase your revenue? Take better care of your employees. Have improved profit margins?
That’s where offering online ordering through software like Now Commerce is so helpful.
It’s a really, really easy way to accomplish multiple strategic business goals with minimal effort.
Talk to one of our team members and see exactly how the Now Commerce ordering portal would work for your business.