Understanding The Growth of B2B E-commerce in 2017

Along with the growth of the Internet, a lot of other entities have grown drastically. The world has started to seem like a small place, and almost everything has shifted to the cloud. One such thing is e-commerce.

E-commerce, that used to be the thought-child of wholesalers, has now turned towards B2B mode. B2B e-commerce has been a part of our society for over two decades, and yet the pace is ever-growing. You can understand this by the statistics of B2B e-commerce becoming twice as huge as B2C by 2020. The continuous growth of B2B e-commerce has reached to an extent that even retail sector has switched to this form of sales.

The emerging B2B E-commerce trends to look for in 2017

Integrations assists Implementation

With integrations and automation as intrinsic nature of the internet, the development of e-commerce platform takes not more than a few weeks to be ready. This speedy implementation digs out time for deciding sales and marketing paradigm to improvise the platform.

E-commerce and M-commerce walking hand-in-hand

Today’s generation has manifested itself into the smartphone era, and hence, the availability of a platform on mobile (specifically apps and not ability to open in mobile browser), has become critical in reaching out to more and more people. This trend has changed the face of B2B e-commerce completely.

The Search engine and Traffic

As per research, around 73% of total traffic (globally) on B2B e-commerce sites, stems from search engines. People prefer to search for their requirements through search engines, and rarely go beyond first page results. This has, in turn, increased the need for SEO optimization and is a source of living for many.

Personalization attracts buyers

With improvisations in AI (Artificial Intelligence) and Machine Learning, the term, ‘Personalization’ has become a key to attract and retain buyers on the platforms. A tinge of personalization, always acts as a strong point of making the buyers feel good, and hence they hang around the platform, a little longer.

Text vs. Visual content

The content is the pre-requisite for any e-commerce platform to lure buyers towards itself, and to retain them. This becomes even more important in the case of B2B model.

Textual content is important for reaching out the buyer, using SEO, and hence improving the position on search results page. Once the user has landed on the platform, visual content compels him/her to stay, and this trend seems to be skyrocketing in 2017.

B2B vs. B2C

As per the recent study, the B2B model is expected to grow beyond B2C within three years. That being said, it should be duly noted that B2B and B2B2C model (also called direct and marketplace model), both are emerging at a very fast pace, owing to the requirement of buyers to look for options constantly. The B2B e-commerce model works closely with sales reps and hence, making it even better when it comes to parallel workflows.

Configuration as a tool to elaborating B2B e-commerce

With severely increasing competition the components of B2B have become quite complex to manage it manually. The configurable platform hence provides options for changing pricing, specifications of the products, available discounts, change in language, and much more.

With the configuration, SEO, integrations, availability on all platforms (Android, iOS, and the web) and personalization in place, the ability to retain buyers strengthens, hence the growth that 2017 is witnessing with respect to B2B e-commerce, becomes splendid.