The wholesale business is successful in a way but why has it not acquired a place in the online market? Almost every one of us is aware of the benefits of taking a business online that give a 24 x 7 opportunity to do business beyond geographical limits.
So, why do we still see fewer wholesale retailers opting for B2b ecommerce?
If you discuss with the B2B experts, you can gain an insight into the reasons which stop the wholesale retailers from being a part of the online business. Anyone and everyone who knows about the wholesale market would agree to the fact that the sales cycles are longer, complicated and involve multiple decision makers. This makes the wholesale business more complex than the simple ecommerce sites.
Handling the multiple product lines and processing numerous orders simultaneously becomes a hectic task for the wholesale business owners. Due to such challenges involved in the wholesale business, the owners find it difficult to adapt the B2B platform and take their business forward.
Let’s take a look at these issues faced by the business owners in detail and get the best possible solutions for the same.
Managing single brand and multiple product lines
Problem: For a wholesale business, there may be a single brand with a variety of product lines which are handled separately. The entire flow to manage the marketing, sales, customer relations and profit/loss for each of these stores is done individually. With such a business process, the main concern of the wholesale owners is managing all the product lines collectively.
One of the most common solutions tried for this issue is by creating an individual store for every product line. This solution may sound simple but is not feasible due to the complexity of handling inventory, orders, customers and delivery process of each website separately. This would further require additional resources for coordinating and managing the entire store line. So ultimately, this solution would lead to a new problem.
Solution: The B2B eCommerce platform have analyzed this issue and introduced a practical solution for the same. Depending on the requirements of the wholesale business, the multi-store functionality is provided by the B2B platforms. This functionality allows the creation of multiple storefronts and helps in managing them efficiently with a single dashboard. With the help of the common dashboard, managing the products, deals, inventory etc. becomes easy. No additional involvement of resources is needed at the same time.
Customer specific pricing
Problem: The requirements and sales volume of each client of a wholesale business may be different. Hence, the wholesale businesses have different contracts with different clients. Depending on these contracts and demands of the clients, they end up offering different prices to their customers. This helps in retaining customers as well as making out profit from the business.
Wholesale business owners often doubt using an online portal as they are not sure how to offer specific pricing to selective customers.
It can become tough to manage when you need to offer variant pricing to numerous customers.
Solution: The solution offered by B2B ecommerce platforms for this issue is customer-specific pricing. Considering that there may be individual or international customers, the pricing can be provided accordingly. With the B2B platform, the pricing can be offered on the basis of customer logins along with multiple payment currencies based on their geolocation. This can be extremely helpful for the business owners targeting the international market. The B2B platforms can thus provide the best solution by providing features like price overriding, IP or login based pricing, multi-currency payments and wholesale as well as retail pricing option. This will ultimately meet the complex requirements of the business.
Retaining the customers
Problem: Retaining the existing customers’ need efforts but acquiring new customers is always a more challenging task. A loyal customer would not just return to a store repeatedly but also recommend others to do so. One of the best ways of marketing is word of mouth and your loyal customers do it for free. The wholesale business owners can be apprehensive of losing the personal touch with their loyal customers once they switch to an online platform. This is because the B2B relationships are challenging to maintain as it involves multiple decision makers. Wholesale business owners think that it may affect the personal interactions with the wholesale clients and affect the bond that they have established with their clients.
Solution: B2B ecommerce platforms are designed in such a way that the customer retention is never an issue. Features like unified notifications ( emails, SMS, mobile and web push) keep customers engaged with the various offers and deals provided along with the sales process. To gather specific information from the customers and offer them particular deals, inquiry forms are available. You can also get integrated with various mailing and customer engagement software which helps you to stay in touch with your clients.
Hence, all the common issues faced by the wholesale businesses are solved by the B2B platforms that come with rich features and B2B and B2C capabilities. If you own a wholesale store and you wish to turn it into an online store, then you can pick among the several B2B ecommerce platform available in the market and start serving your clients instantly.