8 min read
While many B2B companies know and understand the benefits of having an eCommerce website, there are still some who prefer older methods of transaction (i.e. phone orders or email).
The truth is that it’s much easier to process wholesale and re-seller transactions with an eCommerce website than it is to do everything over the phone or via email.
Not only is it easier for the B2B organizations to sell more products and save time, but it’s also easier for the customer.
Not every eCommerce platform is built to handle every B2B transaction, so choosing an eCommerce platform for your company store is imperative to the success of your B2B online venture.
We identified top 9 features that you must need in your ecommerce system to efficiently manage the employee purchasing programs.
Payment ProgramHere are the top 9 features specific to Uniform Purchasing Programs:
- Payment Program
- Quota Management
- Approval Management
- Designer Tool
- Punchout
- Bundles and Kits
- Auto Re-order
- Master Profiles
- Custom Business Fields
As you are very much aware, picking the correct strategy for your online store is an important step for accomplishing productivity among the available eCommerce Payment Programs.
Different payment carriers charge varying rates, however; the fundamental systems they use to make payments will significantly impact the manner in which you work together and collaborate with clients.
Our main checkout methods for eCommerce payment programs are:
- Employee Allowance
- Credit/Debit Cards
- PayPal
- Purchase Order
- Payroll Deduct
- Points
Each of the options listed above is used to effectuate payments.
Some businesses provide their employees with certain parts of their uniform that is paid for by the company
The quota tool is how a company can control this. An example would be every 6 months an employee is afforded a shirt and every 3 months they are allowed two pairs of pants.
The quota tool allows you to set this up so that the shopper can purchase these using a specific ledger (allowance, company CC, etc) on the basis they are allowed.
In the case above, the shopper can log in once within the 6 months time frame and purchase their shirt and twice everything three months for the pants (although they can purchase both pairs in one transaction).
Approval Management is one of the key factors you should look for in an eCommerce platform.
We can create an approval set with one or more approvers (managers). These approval groups can be tagged to employees.
Whenever an employee places an order, the order will go to the approver form the tagged approval set.
However, there are some scenarios where an order might require more than one approval at the same level or at a higher level.
The platforms should have the ability to set the hierarchy levels. Look for platforms which enables you to configure complex rules within the approval management such as:
The designer tool allows you to add a personal touch to your professional uniforms.
Shoppers will be able to personalize any products on the website, using any device in just three simple steps:
Whether you’re decorating apparel or promotional product, the designer tool can accomplish it with absolute perfection.
Customers won’t have to leave your online store while making a purchase and the designer tool is embedded into the shopping cart.
Punchout is a B2B eCommerce term that defines the electronic communication protocol between the buyer’s eCommerce platform and a vendor’s web store.
The buyer “punches out” of their eCommerce application and goes to the vendor’s online store to locate and add products to their shopping cart, while their eCommerce platform stays connected to the vendor’s web storefront and gathers the proper information and submit orders via EDI (Electronic Data Interchange).
Some benefits of Punchout:
- 1. It reduces operational costs
- 2. You won’t have to manually enter purchase orders
- 3. Enables purchases to interface with other organization frameworks
- 4. Guarantees adherence to arranged contracts
- 5. Management can control all budgets
- 6. Conveying the correct data to clients
B2B online businesses that encourage punchout make the process of making a purchase simpler for their clients.
Each retailer should make certain their clients locate the exact products they are searching for, in the quickest time conceivable.
Including eCommerce kits & bundles is a straightforward answer to help grow your product offering, and increase sales for your online store.
Gone are the days of managing your supply chain with a one-size-fits-all approach. With ongoing competition, eCommerce continues to follow suit.
Providing your customers with access to as many products as possible in the quickest time is the method for the future, so why not use it to your advantage?
In case you’re curious about these kinds of items, a ‘bundle' or ‘kit’ features various items, sold as a set or group, otherwise known as product bundling.
That’s the thing that makes adding kits & bundles to your product so easy; As opposed to offering each product individually, you make another offer by gathering comparable products as a set.
Benefits of Utilizing Kits & Bundles:
The concept of auto reorders is to eliminate the need for a company to build out orders for something they need on a recurring basis.
For example: If a company knows they need a certain amount of a certain product every 3 months they can set up auto reorders so that when the 3 months has passed since the previous order, another order is processed for the customer without needing them to continuously build out a cart with the products they are ordering. The frequency can be set on the order level.
Auto reorder allows the buyer to schedule their orders at regular intervals without worrying about restocking his or her products.
With high volume sellers no longer having to rely on outdated methods of inventory tracking and spreadsheets, auto reordering becomes an important function for uniform purchasing programs.
Without legitimate control of your inventory, you risk under-stocking, overstocking and overselling your inventory - which can have a negative effect on your income and warehouse space.
A good inventory management system that allows you to reorder and auto reorder products will give you better control of your stock in your warehouse.
Furthermore, inventory management software can help you estimate your stock prerequisites, so you have an idea of product inventory. Auto reordering based on these projections will help make sure everything runs efficiently.
Master profiles are used to auto-populate fields that would normally need to be manually set.
Within the shopper profile, there are fields that wouldn’t mean anything to the shopper (product set group for example).
A master profile comes with an associated master profile code so that shoppers can still self-register directly on the site, and the field that an admin would normally have to fill out are auto-populated based on the master code profile.
Custom business fields are a way to capture and track fields that may be specific to your business.
There are certain fields within a shopper record on the platform that are common across most setups, such as username and email. (The main things you would want to keep track of, regardless of your business requirements.)
Let’s say on top of the standard fields you need to also know which plant a particular shopper works at. You can create a custom field called Plant Number which captures this info and ties it to the shopper - so that it shows up on reports.
This enables customers to gather info related to their business without us needing to custom build fields into the platform for them.
These fields can be in the form of an open text box or a drop-down which is pre-populated with options for the shopper.
In order to launch a B2B eCommerce website, your company will need to make some changes such as investing time and money, thinking differently about customer interactions and relationships, as well as choosing the right eCommerce platform for your business.
This article should have provided you with a basic understanding of key features specific to uniform purchasing programs for your B2B site. Now, let us help you get your B2B eCommerce site going.
