B2B Cyber Monday

Cyber Monday continues to set records for consumer ecommerce. Meanwhile, B2B ecommerce remains largely underdeveloped.

Essent is publishing a series of articles that examine how B2B ecommerce can perform more like B2C.

Installments include:

Series Overview

10 Areas to Improve

Deals and Promotions

Carts and Catalogs

Customer Self-Service

Enhanced Self-Service

Guest Checkout

Leveraging Mobile

Everybody loves to get a bargain. Does B2B ecommerce offer enough of them?

Various online articles with advice for Cyber Monday suggest B2B sellers use the shopping holiday to generate leads. People are already searching their emails for deals, the reasoning goes, so B2B should slide into the mix to get a sign-up to a newsletter, webinar, white paper or something else that might lead to a sale later.

The advice presumes B2B sellers can’t compete like B2C sellers, so they might as well go for a peripheral win like a sign-up. "Clearly," one B2B Cyber Monday blog reads, "a B2B brand won't close a deal over a weekend."

Talk about setting the bar low.

Business ecommerce should go for sales like the rest of the ecommerce world. And again, everybody loves a bargain. In order to make the B2B ecommerce experience more like B2C, sellers need to offer deals and promotions.

B2B ecommerce software needs to handle promotions

The first step is having ecommerce and business management software capable of generating, processing and tracking promotions.

The software should generate promotions codes, and make it easy to send them to prospective buyers. But managing deals doesn’t stop with mailing the code.

Strong ecommerce and business management software tracks the code and its price break all the way through the critical path, from quoting through accounting and beyond, so there aren’t errors or confusion about price changes later in the process.

In other words, the promotion engine should be integrated with an ecommerce solution so that once the customer punches in the code, the price change stays with the order.

Business ecommerce can emulate consumer ecommerce

Deals and promotions are near and dear to any B2C ecommerce experience. They can be near and dear to B2B ecommerce experiences as well.

Common consumer ecommerce deals include simple price breaks, or free shipping for meeting a spending threshold. You’ve seen them in your own consumer ecommerce experiences (and probably wondered why you so rarely find them in your business ecommerce experiences).

Consumer ecommerce has already shown these strategies to be highly successful, especially on Cyber Monday. So business ecommerce already has a successful model to emulate.

Unique challenges for business ecommerce

Business ecommerce introduces some price changes that are trickier than deals and promotions.

For example, contracts can dictate different prices for different buyers. So the ecommerce store needs to be able show different shoppers different content while the back office software needs to account for the varying prices.

Business ecommerce is also more likely to deal in varying volumes that trigger price changes. The back office software needs to account for that, too.

Integrated software is a solid start

Say you have a price that’s affected simultaneously by a contract, volume and a deal or promotion. Now it’s clear why it’s important to have software that can carry price changes all the way through the critical path.

Having integrated ecommerce and business management software that can handle pricing changes of all kinds is a solid start to making the B2B ecommerce experience more like B2C. It’s also a solid start to managing all the pricing intricacies that come up aside from deals or promotions.

Take the next step

Essent business solutions provide a B2C experience for B2B ecommerce.