Keeping your customers happy is one of the greatest frustrations your B2B business faces. From troubleshooting orders to offering flexible payment options, you are bending over backwards to provide the best customer service you can offer.
But, if we’re being honest, this customer service can take up a lot of time.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could solve some of those problems faster?
With e-commerce solutions like Sana Commerce Cloud, you can mitigate and even completely solve some of the more common B2B frustrations that bog down your Customer Service teams.
B2B customers are increasingly wanting a B2C-style shopping experience.
What’s that look like?
They want to see:
products specific to their needs
real-time inventory
stock levels
unique pricing
E-commerce solutions, such as Sana Commerce, solve this challenge through customer segmentation. With customer segmentation, you can create segments as broad as “buyers in the EU” or as granular as “buyers in Florida who have purchased $30,000 this calendar year.”
Through segmentation, you can show catalogues, products, and imagery that are unique to certain customers. For example, buyers from certain countries may have access to specific products that aren’t available in other regions. Through segmentation, you can make sure that the right products are shown to the right buyers.
Frustration 2: How can you grow your D2C channel?
We’ve heard from many B2B businesses that expanding into D2C is a top priority. However, they’ve run into a major problem. The traditional route for their D2C expansion is through online marketplaces. These marketplaces can charge high fees – upwards of 30% — which eats into their bottom line.
The question is: how can B2B businesses grow their D2C channel without paying high online marketplace fees.
What’s the solution? Integrated e-commerce with Sana Commerce. Unlike mainstream e-commerce solutions, Sana Commerce integrates directly with your ERP. This tight integration means that your web store always has real-time accurate data for SKUs, inventory, order tracking, and order history.
D2C customers can purchase products directly from your website, while B2B buyers can confidently and easily place complicated or recurring orders directly through your e-commerce solution.
No marketplace fees – just one, integrated e-commerce solution.
Frustration 3: Your customers keep ordering the wrong parts
Let me paint you a picture. You sell furniture, as well as furniture replacement parts – screws for chairs, drawer slides, hinges. Many buyers choose to buy replacement parts to repair their furniture.
There’s just one problem: they keep ordering the wrong parts.
Maybe it’s because they don’t have a manual handy. Maybe they have the part, but part number isn’t available. Regardless, they end up calling and emailing you to get clarity – tying up your phone line. Worse, they’ll end up ordering the wrong part, and end up initiating an expensive return.
The whole process takes weeks, and it ends up frustrating everybody.
Luckily, there’s a solution: we call it Lookbook.
Lookbook is an out-of-the-box Sana Commerce feature that lets you upload photo or a diagram where customers can hover over products in the image, view descriptions, and add directly to cart.
Now, you can upload a diagram of that drawer and enable your customers to add the needed parts to their cart – directly from the diagram!
Frustration 4: You want to set up promotional bundling and mix and match discounts.
I’ll be honest: when I see buy one get one free, I can’t help but “add to cart.”
Deals are enticing! But setting up promotional bundling or mix and match discounts can seem daunting.
Luckily, Sana Commerce installs table structures directly into your ERP that easily allow for these features.
You can create deals like:
mix and match discounts that take a flat percentage off each product
deals where different items get different discounts.
You can further refine these discounts by offering them to only certain customers, such as members of a mailing list.
Frustration 5: Your customers want payment flexibility
In the B2B space, it’s pretty common to offer customer invoicing with net 30 or even net 60 day payment terms. Your e-commerce site needs to offer the payment flexibility that your offline systems (email, phone, fax) provide if you want to maintain those critical customer relationships.
Sana Commerce has a variety of payment options. Customers can pay invoices online and view past invoices (even invoices not paid through the e-commerce solution). Customers can take advantage of a dozen different payment service providers, including Sana Commerce’s own, in-house PSP: Sana Pay.
E-commerce solutions like Sana Commerce solve B2B frustrations
Providing stellar customer service to your B2B buyers is a continuous challenge. However, by adopting an e-commerce platform like Sana Commerce, you can solve and mitigate many of the problems that take up the bulk of your customer service bandwidth.
Thanks to our tight integration with your ERP, Sana Commerce provides real-time accurate data, payment flexibility, and a B2C-style buying experience that is ideal for B2B buyers and D2C customers.
