3 Best B2B eCommerce Stores and What you Should Learn from Them

The B2B eCommerce market is growing with all leaps and bounds. However, shipping delays, supply chain disruption, and labor shortages during the past few years have changed how businesses work. 

While it is difficult to tackle all the challenges associated with running a B2B eCommerce business, you need to keep up with evolving consumer demands because your competitors are already doing well with proper planning and resources. 

If you plan to start a B2B eCommerce business in 2023 or already have one and want to scale it, this blog is for you. This content will look at some of the best B2B brands to learn more about their secret success ingredient. Let’s get started, shall we?

How to Define a Good B2B eCommerce Website

Before seeing examples of successful B2B brands, let’s find out how we can define an excellent B2B eCommerce platform. Successful B2B digital solutions handle everything from showcasing the company’s services and products to creating seamless commerce operations and everything in between. 

A good B2B eCommerce website is built by keeping consumers’ evolving needs in mind. And its goal is to provide consumers with an experience that converts into sales.

Thus, before developing a B2B eCommerce store, you need to understand your target market first, identify actions you would like them to perform, and define key performance indicators that you will track to measure the success of your venture.

Here are some of the key features of an ideal B2B eCommerce website:

• Appealing modern designs
• Mobile responsiveness
• User-friendly UI with easy navigation and well-structured site map
• Good catalog management
• High-quality product images and detailed product descriptions
• CTAs for each step of the customer’s journey
• A personalized customer experience

3 Best B2B eCommerce Brands and What Can You Learn From Them?

Setting up the right experience for your B2B consumers requires the right planning. However, you can accomplish this task by learning from others already doing it well. Here are some examples:

1. Amazon Business

Amazon is one of the biggest eCommerce platforms in the world. But do you know it has a B2B side as well? Amazon Business is a truly unique platform that hit $25 billion in annual sales in 2020, just five years after its launch. While it took Amazon’s B2C marketplace ten years to reach this number, Amazon Business achieved it in just five years. This is an incredible success; budding B2B eCommerce businesses can learn much from it.

Amazon Business is an engaging and robust platform with all possible features that a B2B eCommerce business needs; for example,

Smooth Checkouts: Amazon Business provides a fantastic suite of features that make it seamless for consumers to buy for their businesses. They can add multiple addresses and use their preferred payment option to pay. This way, buyers have more time to invest in other priorities. 

Custom Quote: B2B buyers differ from B2C buyers and expect more personalization. Thus, Amazon Business has a custom quote feature for better sales and conversions. Also, B2B buyers can enjoy bulk discounts on eligible orders. 

It Innovates Continuously: The platform keeps launching and testing new features to make the experience better on the platform. That means it becomes easier to use every day by continuously adding value to consumers’ lives.

Also Read: 6 Tips to Grow Your B2B eCommerce Startup in 2022

2. Alibaba

Alibaba is one of the world’s largest B2C and B2B companies. It offers products for more than 40 industries and serves 18 million+ buyers and sellers in many countries worldwide.

This Chinese juggernaut believed in innovation from the beginning, and that’s the key to its success. It started creating an ecosystem with a global marketplace and Chinese manufacturers. What’s more impressive is that Alibaba did all this in 1999 when the internet was not very popular in China. It built a system that scaled automatically with success by continuously focusing on the needs of the consumers.

These days, many companies’ models are not “B2B” – they are “B-whatever-the-analysts-want-you-2-B.” If you stay focused on members, then you will succeed in the long run – Jack Ma, Co-founder of Alibaba Group.

The platform also succeeded by providing the same products for different markets in a customized manner. It launched three different portals to offer a personalized experience for each segment – Alibaba (for B2B sales), Taobao (for small B2C and C2C sales), and Tmall (for B2C sales). The business believed that one size does not fit all and that consumers’ needs vary. Each of these portals provided the same product; however, the product has been customized to the needs of the particular market. 

The lesson is that personalization is the key to success in every eCommerce market – B2C, B2B, D2C, and others. To target different markets, you need to make slight changes to your offerings or provide products through various portals to deliver what consumers want. For example, a cloth manufacturer can offer white and plain linens for the hospitality market and colored ones for the retail market. You can even launch two different stores and manage both with the same backend for hassle-free processes. 

3. Arteriors Home

Arteriors Home, developed by Envision eCommerce (a Netsmartz Company), is a unique B2B eCommerce website selling art & interiors in the USA. It is a leading name in the market because of its commitment to high-quality craftsmanship and artisan products.

There is a lot that budding B2B eCommerce businesses can learn from the success of Arteriors Home. It is built on Magento, and the platform possesses all the features that a B2B eCommerce store needs to stand out in the market, including:

A Robust Search: Website product search is said to be the unsung hero in B2B commerce. The reason? B2B buyers feel the need for speed, and nothing can help you provide it more flawlessly than a seamless product search experience in your store.

Powered by Adobe Sensei’s AI capabilities, search functionality on Arteriors Home’s website is top-notch, 100% accurate, and helps accelerate the product purchasing process – a necessity to convert B2B website visitors.

Multiple Digital Payment Options: B2B buyers are very specific about their preferred payment methods, and that’s why supporting a wide range of payment options is a main B2B eCommerce feature. It helps the Arteriors team set up a great checkout experience, leading to more conversions and satisfied consumers.

Launch Your B2B eCommerce Store Today!

Now that you know some of the best B2B eCommerce brands, you must understand what it takes to succeed in the B2B eCommerce industry. While it is a complex domain to scale, every effort you make will pay you more than you expect. Here is a quick summary of features that you need to pay attention to if you want to scale your B2B eCommerce brand:

• Well-planned UI/UX and top-notch performance
• Personalized customer experience
• Mobile & user-friendly designs and themes
• Custom pricing and catalog
• Quick reordering
• Easy on-site search and filtering
• Readiness for global sales
• Reliable and 100% secure environment

There are numerous ways to achieve all of the above cost-effectively. But, you must start with choosing the right eCommerce development platform to launch a robust B2B store, and you are all sorted. Let our experts help you convert your eCommerce business dream into reality.