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

Many B2B shopping carts can hardly be called that. They’re more like order forms, presented in rudimentary, fill-a-field ways without many images or product details to represent what the buyer is actually buying.

B2B catalogs are worse. Not only do they also tend to lack images and product details, but they’re cumbersome to search. Features that make it easy to shop -- search filtering, product comparisons, and item grouping, for example -- are rigid or non-existent. It’s hard for buyers to find what they want.

Those who’ve experienced the following B2B ecommerce scenario fully understand the difficulty:

To buy the product, you need to punch in mandatory information like a product ID number (which is a poor user experience in its own right). But it’s almost impossible to find the information on the B2B website because of the lacking features. So you use Google to find the ID on another website, then go back to the original website, then finally punch in the information. The buyer winds up using a third party to find information that the seller should have provided in the first place!

The scenario illustrates a fundamental problem for B2B ecommerce carts and catalogs: The onus is often on the buyer to find the product information and products, and they’re not easy to find.

Compare that to consumer ecommerce. There, you just click the item you want a couple of times and it goes into your cart. The website even goes the extra mile to show you similar or comparable items. When you click those, they also go into the cart.

Carts and catalogs form the nexus of ecommerce. So it’s critical to make them as user-friendly for business ecommerce as they are for consumer ecommerce. Otherwise, B2B ecommerce will miss sales and continue to lag behind B2C ecommerce not just on Cyber Monday but throughout the year.

Here are some tips to make B2B carts and catalogs act more like B2C carts and catalogs and drive more sales:

Quality images

People want to see what they’re buying.

The bare minimum is to have an image that appears in the cart and the catalog. But robust imaging provides zoom features, galleries of images that can show multiple angles, and mouse-over effects.

Check out what Amazon does with images and mouse-over for a product as simple as a broom.

Providing quality images is user-friendly because it shows people what they’re buying. Perhaps just as importantly, it makes a B2B ecommerce website feel more like B2C.

Rich product details

People want to know what they’re buying.

The product description doesn’t need to be 1,000 words. But it should be more than copy-pasting the manufacturer’s technical specs.

A few bullet points that say the prominent features in laymen’s terms, and also provides all product information the user may need to punch in, is fine. To go the extra mile, say more about the product on a blog page and link to it from a bullet point.

As a bonus, rich product details provide more information and keywords for your search engine to grab, in effect making your search engine more flexible.

Product grouping

How are products arranged in a department store? Similar items are near each other, of course. If a store just placed thousands of products randomly with no cohesion, no one would be able to find what they came for.

But that’s what B2B buyers face when ecommerce catalogs have underdeveloped product grouping. Buyers are just wading through thousands of products arranged in ways that make little sense.

Products need some basic labels so they can be grouped -- so that similar products stick together in search results. Adding simple labels like product type, supplier, manufacturer, size, color and price is a good start.

Search multiple fields

But product details and labels won’t do much to help shoppers find items if the search engine doesn’t know how to look for that information.

Too many business ecommerce search engines are handcuffed because they query only a few fields, name and SKU for instance. The search engine should query much more, including alternate SKU, UPS, ISBN, descriptions, keywords and really any information assigned to a product.

For example, Essent lets users attach customized, searchable properties to products. So shoppers can query anything from color to price to country of origin to safety compliance – virtually any information a seller decides to attach to the product.

Search filtering

Continuing with our department store theme: Would buyers want to search the entire store for a blender? Or would they want to search only the kitchen appliances?

Filtered or parametric searches let buyers add specific criteria so that they effectively browse only portions of a catalog, instead of thousands of items at once. Some search engines even let you search within the results of a prior search. Any number of filters can be added to narrow searches. A common filter might be price or color.

This is where your product details and product grouping come into play. The more information attached to the products, the more adaptable and user-friendly the search engine can become.

Save carts and follow up

Abandoned carts don’t always mean the buyer got sticker shock and backed out. It’s common for people to fill up their cart on a mobile device then checkout later on a desktop.

So the ecommerce store at a minimum needs to remember what buyers put in their carts. Filling the B2B ecommerce cart is often rigid and cumbersome, and the buyer is sure to be aggravated if the store wipes out that progress.

When it comes to saving carts, the extra mile includes automatically emailing shoppers to remind them of the items in their cart and to urge them to take action.

Summary

One of the fundamental problems posed by B2B ecommerce is that the onus is often on the buyer to find product information and products, and they’re often not easy to find.

Since a catalog and cart are the essentials for any ecommerce website, improving them is a fundamental way to improve the buyer experience. Business ecommerce can take some tips from consumer ecommerce by including more images and product details, grouping products, using intelligent and filtered searches, and saving and following up on abandoned carts.

Essent is publishing a free series of articles that reject the notion that show how B2B ecommerce can perform more like B2C ecommerce on Cyber Monday and throughout the year.

Take the next step

Essent business solutions provide a B2C experience for B2B ecommerce.