What is the best B2B eCommerce Platform
Do you provide services to help businesses grow, hire and manage teams? Do you supply products specifically for companies? Do you offer items for sale wholesale?
If you're in B2B or want to be -- you may very well be able to benefit from an eCommerce B2B platform. It could simplify the processes of your clients and your team as well as help you expand quicker and with greater efficiency.
Let's take a closer look at how an eCommerce store can help businesses in B2B as well as how to select the right store.
What is the reason to create an eCommerce B2B store
The majority of online stores you've heard of are B2C (Business to Consumer), supplying your dog's meals, birthday present, or perhaps your preferred specialty food items. Beware of believing that eCommerce shops are only intended for businesses that cater to the consumer. They are a powerful tool for B2B companies as well.
According to a recent study, 41% of B2B shoppers said that the self-service feature could make it easier for them to doing business on the web. That's a big percentage! The ability of customers to manage their accounts and perform other related tasks is a highlight of eCommerce functionality.
For example, instead of calling to request an estimate A Sourcing Manager can send a request via the web and get the information promptly, regardless of moment of the day. You can also place an order or sign up to have the products you offer delivered to them every month. Also, if you supply lawn maintenance services to retail shops, a store manager could login to their account to adjust the frequency of services or check out the next day when you're due to stop by.
B2B eCommerce stores contribute to automating processes. They could take the strain off of customer service representatives and sales team members through some of the self-service tasks that we have discussed. They can sync information between different distribution channels, making sure that all information is up-to date and correct. And they can take away the painful steps involved in manual sending invoices and quotations in the process of following up with any potential customer.
Finally, an online store is your brand's face and the hub of all your marketing strategies. You can link directly to products and services in your emails to customers and in advertising campaigns. It is possible to create material that helps prospects navigate your sales funnel. It is also possible to monitor the effectiveness of your efforts to steer the future direction of your business.
A few things to think about when selecting an B2B eCommerce platform
The eCommerce platform you pick will be the basis of your online storefront. We'll look at some of the factors to think about when choosing one, and examine why is the top solution for B2B online stores.
Types of products that you're offering
There is a wide range of possibilities for B2B companies. Here are a few items you may sell, along with some examples:
- Physical products. Consider equipment, printed booksand cleaning products. Storage and handling equipment For instance, Storage and Handling Equipment supplies eco-friendly shopping carts to retail and grocery stores.
- Digital items. Things like online classes including eBooks and eBooks available for download, as well as software licences. TipoType For instance, provides font licenses for businesses as well as freelancers.
- Services. Offerings such as graphic design, accounting, and legal advice. Your Benefit Store is a service-provider providing healthcare benefits for companies to include as part of their plans for employees.
- Wholesale products. Selling large volumes of products to retailers, effectively acting as their supplier. Porta Pro Chem is one example. It sells portable restroom products to clients around the country.
- Members. Access to a variety of benefits and sources, such as a training video library, or an online forum. The Interactive Advertising Bureau, as an example, has the membership program, which includes tools including courses, invitations to events and more, geared towards marketing and media firms.
- Subscriptions. Regularly scheduled products or services such as a year-long license, weekly cleaning service and monthly boxes of coffee pods to use in the break room. Designs Modo offers digital subscriptions for design tools but subscriptions can also involve physical items as well as even newsletters.
These all vary widely in comparison to one another. However, there may be the possibility of overlap. You might sell both wholesale and retail products. It is possible to sell physical and digital books side by side. You could also offer a monthly subscription which includes an office clean-up every week, along with a bag of cleaning products.
The point here is, it is possible to conduct business through a myriad of methods -- ensure that your chosen platform is compatible with every one of them.
provides selling functionality for each of the items and services listed above, plus more! In fact, all of the sites listed above use . Selling one product or several side-by-side. Let anyone purchase or restrict capabilities to specific wholesale or retail customers.
What ever you'd like to market, make it possible.
Design Flexibility
As your goods and services are distinctive, your brand is, too. Naturally your website needs to reflect the character and distinctive characteristics of the brand.
A reliable B2B eCommerce platform will allow users the complete freedom in the design and development of whatever you want and not have the ability to alter code or engage developers even if you don't wish to.
As it's an add-on to WordPress it is able to harness the capabilities that comes with the Block Editor to create all of your blog posts and pages. The Block Editor lets you drag and drop components -including headings, paragraphs video, images, and columns -- to create your very own layout. It is then possible to toggle the options to alter the colors, font styles and other design characteristics so that the layout is unique to you.

Content ownership
In the world of online business, ensuring that you own the content you publish is essential. Your website is a source of revenue -- you can't risk that it will disappear. There are many exclusive eCommerce platforms could remove your website with no warning if they find that you've violated their terms and conditions. It could mean losing money, time, and hard effort!
However, WordPress is a software instruments to assist you in achieving your objectives. Your website is hosted wherever you'd prefer it to be, and you are in complete control and control over the site. It's not necessary to think about taking down your site. Because it's just that -- it's yours.
Payment gateway integration
Payment gateways allow you to collect money from customers and clients securely, then transfer that money into your account at the bank. There are pros and cons to each tool, and certain functionality you'll need depending on your particular business. For example, you may have to take recurring payments or accept multiple currencies. integrate with express pay tools like Apple Pay, or offer financing options.
You'll want to make sure that the platform for eCommerce you pick works with the platform you'd like to use -- especially if your business already uses some sort of payment processing or billing.
integrates with a wide array of payment processors, such as:

Shipping
If you sell physical products and shipping will be to be an important element when picking an eCommerce site. Shipping can be complicated so you need a tool that allows you to set up fees the way you want, and that integrates with any shipping carriers you deal with. This is particularly true when you are able to ship large quantities of products at once, or have special requirements like refrigeration.

User experience
The user experience is crucial to any company, and for many reasons. For instance, if a prospective client or customer visits your website and finds it difficult to use, they'll most likely give up and shop at a competitor. Second, search engines consider the experience of users when ranking.
Your task, right now is to locate a platform that makes creating an excellent user experience possible. Here are some factors you should consider:
- Content management. Look for an eCommerce system that lets to organize your menus by categorizing posts and items as well as add functions such breadcrumbs to help with navigation. Because WordPress was built for blogging from the beginning the tools for content can't be beaten.
- Mobile-friendly design. Your site must look stunning across devices of every size including tablets, desktops, and phones on mobiles. WordPress is responsive by default, and there are lots of great themes for mobile that you can select from.
Customer service and marketing
Marketing, of course, assists you in reaching new customers and encourage more sales from current customers. A good customer experience can help you retain customers and encourage them to spread the word about your business. Both are essential to running the success of your B2B eCommerce site.
The platform that you work with must make your marketing and customer service strategies possible, whether that means integrating seamlessly with existing tools or making it simple to incorporate tracking codes.
Here are some of the marketing and customer-service capabilities that come in :
- Integration with CRMs. Connect to the CRM of your choice with the help of extensions for Jetpack CRM HubSpot, Salesforce, and many more.
- Integration to support forums and ticketing platforms. Integrate live chat into your site, create a support forum, or integrate with other tools such as Freshdesk and HelpScout
- Content creation capabilities. Make frequent beautiful, powerful blogs, landing pages, and others to help with your other marketing strategies and help educate prospective customers.
- Integration with an extensive array of marketing tools. Monitor traffic with Google Analytics, connect to platforms for social media such as Facebook and TikTok as well as make Google ads directly on your dashboard, and send emails messages, follow up on abandoned carts, and many more.
- Simple for members of your team. You can give each member of the team a separate account that has the appropriate permissions for their roles. Approved accounts can respond to support questions, view and manage orders, handle refunds, write blog posts along with other.

Extra functionality
The functions you want for your B2B eCommerce store is specific to your company. Consider any specific requirements that you have. These are some of the examples:
Scalability
A B2B eCommerce platform you select will never hold you back. Watch out for ones which base their fees on sales, number of customersor site visits. Your website should load quickly, whether there are 100,000 visitors on one time or 100,000.
can scale with you to any size. It's not limited to the amount of products or variants you could have (in actual fact, this test site included 1 million!). It's designed to handle huge quantities of orders as well as traffic increases. It's a completely free platform, though you may want to use paid extensions, as the price isn't dependent on customer sales or sales.
The most appealing part? You can choose any hosting provider that you'd like. That means that, while you might be on a shared hosting plan right now, you can always upgrade to a VPS or dedicated server when your traffic increases without impacting your online store.
Management and ease of use
In the world of business there's a saying that time is money. And you can't afford to spend time with a system that's hard to use or difficult for new staff members to learn, and that demands a developer to implement any changes at all.
If you're able to employ a web developer to handle your store if you'd like but you don't need to in order to make the most of your online store. As we mentioned earlier, Block Editor Block Editor enables you to move, rearrange, and remove elements simply by dragging and dropping. Want to revise your products? You can do so by clicking buttons and changing fields. No codes required!
Store managers are able to access all of their inventory information, from the site's analytics to information about orders all in one spot. If you're using tools like Jetpack CRM, Shipping and Payments, you can handle label printing, payments invoices, refunds, quotes and much more via your dashboard.
If you're interested to hire a professional to create, maintain or modify your store, check out our list of WooExperts. They're high-quality, well-vetted companies willing to assist!
Create and expand your B2B eCommerce store with
Whether it's an existing B2B company or beginning your journey, it provides all the features and flexibility you need to expand. Plus, it can improve the user experience for your clients and even increase the efficiency of your employees.
Ready to grow? Get started with the top B2B eCommerce platform today.