With the changing business dynamics, gone are the days when B2B and B2C businesses used to stay in their own arenas.
Today the channels are merging and technology has given birth to different solutions.
One of them is the B2B2C marketplace - the business-to-business-to-consumer set up!
Well, the B2B2C ecommerce model helps businesses transcend crazy growth
Is it the same for you? Or are you struggling to keep up with the basic sales ratio?
If so, it's time to revisit your growth strategies.
Wondering what and how?
Let us first have a look at a few insights on B2B2C ecommerce solutions:
- 25.49% of enterprise brands have already shifted to a B2B2C model
- 39.22% of manufacturers are currently making efforts to adopt the B2B2C model
- 42.3% of brands’ second main sales channel was B2B2C
Source: Copperberg
More and more brands are adopting the B2B2C ecommerce model to keep up with the customers’ demands. The above data clearly shows that NOW is just the right time to take up new ventures for your ecommerce business that combines the goodness of both B2B and B2C models.
How B2B2C helps grow business
The business-to-business-to-consumer model helps brands offer highly personalized and engaging user experiences by combining the elements of B2B and B2C business models. It differs from the traditional idea of selling. With the B2B2C ecommerce model, brands facilitate other businesses with the right technology and platforms to offer the products/services to the end customers simultaneously.
Below are the reasons why customers engage well on the B2B2C platform:
- Provides a one-stop shop with a vast product catalouge
- Offers a competitive pricing structure to compare with multiple sellers on the platform
- Provides an assured quality of products and services
- Comes with a quick customer service model to help with grievances and complaints
With a strong B2B2C ecommerce strategy, brands can propel their business for greater success. The B2B2C ecosystem enables brands to reach an optimum level where the operational costs are at a minimum and the profits reach a maximum, the ultimate goal of any business.
7 Tips to grow your B2B2C marketplace
To orchestrate a successful B2B2C marketplace can be a challenging task. However, by keeping up with winning strategies, brands can grow their ecommerce business and attract customers to their ecommerce platform.
Go for hyper-personalization
With more than 60% of the customers willing to do a repeat purchase if the brand offers a personalized shopping experience, you require personalization at all levels of operations. The hyper-personalization age has made it tough for brands to cater to the needs of diverse audience groups. Wondering how to go for personalizations on your B2B2C ecommerce platform?
The StoreHippo ecommerce platform is built on a decoupled headless architecture that helps you implement multi-level personalizations. You can create multiple store-fronts for various locations or audiences. StoreHippo also helps to offer multi-level discounts with its powerful inbuilt discount engine. Brands can also customize their shipping solutions, logistics partners, digital payments etc to implement extreme personalization in your marketplace. With the go-global solutions from StoreHippo, you can also enable your global customers to purchase in their native currency and interact with them in their local language.
Chart an omnichannel strategy
The market dynamics have brought tectonic shifts in the buying behaviour of customers across the ecommerce industry. Buyers even on B2B2C marketplaces prefer to connect on at least 4-5 different channels before making a purchase. The sure-shot way to grow your ecommerce business is to interact with your customers on all the channels loved by them and offer them a seamless buying journey on every platform.
The StoreHippo ecommerce platform offers a ready-to-use omnichannel ecommerce solution to help you reach your customers on various platforms. With 300+ API points, brands can quickly add new customer touchpoints using the same backend logic and APIs. The inherent flexibility from StoreHippo helps you create consistent buyer experiences across multiple channels. You can use the channel-specific insights from your B2B2C ecommerce platform to leverage data-driven strategies and grow your business.
Provide a seamless user experience
A seamless and smooth user experience works towards building a conversion-oriented marketplace, which is essential for a successful ecommerce business. Customers come flocking to your brand as you offer convenience and simplicity along with easy navigation and smooth transactions. Prioritizing your customers is the surefire way to achieve increased loyalty, boost sales, and grow your B2B2C ecommerce business.
Wondering what makes your website loved by your customers? We would say a simple user interface and easy navigation. The site performance and the page load speed should also not pose a hurdle in seamless shopping for your customers. Accessing your orders and transaction details, getting in touch with your customer service, etc should be easy and aligned toward quick conversions. StoreHippo comes with peak load tolerance even when your site scales to millions of users and products offering a smooth user experience. It offers guided navigation and faceted search for better conversions on your B2B2C ecommerce platform.
Leverage m-commerce
What’s one way to increase conversions? Well, just follow your customers. Be where they are, which translates into having a solid mobile commerce presence for your brand.
Up to 80% of online orders happen through smartphones. If your B2B2C brand is not on mobile phones, you are certainly missing out. Customers today are inclined towards making a quick purchase on the go, and as you facilitate ease of shopping from anywhere at any time, you win.
StoreHippo B2B2C ecommerce solution is built on the mobile-first principle that offers a variety of mobile-ready solutions. You can build multiple B2B2C apps for different locations or audience-based stores. The inbuilt mobile apps builder helps you to build Android or iOS apps directly from the admin dashboard at zero additional costs. You can also enable your business partners to manage their business on the go with a variety of mobile apps for admins, vendors, etc. The stores built on StoreHippo are PWA stores that look, feel, and work like mobile apps even on entry-level devices.
Market your brand to the end customers
Marketing a B2B2C marketplace can be tough. Both B2B and B2C sales require different marketing strategies and approaches. The B2C ecommerce segment will require more real-time interactions, continuous offers, promotions etc to keep the flow of orders coming in. The B2B segment on the other hand looks at the parent brand for support with running, managing and growing the business. The parent brand has to cater to both audience segments and create policies and strategies that keep both the segments happy.
StoreHippo ecommerce platform comes with a multitude of in-built marketing tools to create strategies and promotions that work best for a B2B2C business model. You can send personalized notifications and emails, recover abandoned carts, offer personalized discounts and coupons, leverage SEO to rank higher on SERPS etc with StoreHippo’s gamut of tools and features. You can also create an astounding brand image for your B2B2C ecommerce business with the in-built blog engine from StoreHippo.
Scale the business on multiple fronts
To grow your business-to-business-to-consumer brand, you might also want to look at the growth of business verticals. Wondering how that helps your business grow? Well, suppose you are selling clothes and merchandise, you can expand your product line to fashion accessories and footwear to cover a wider audience base. To scale up your business and grow your customer base, you need to add more sellers or business partners on your B2B2C marketplace and need a platform that will support various business models like multi store, multi seller etc.
StoreHippo ecommerce platform offers a secure and inherently scalable cloud infrastructure that supports your business in its growth on various fronts. As you are able to scale your business to any number of users, products, pages, locations, or vendors, you know you are winning at the ecommerce game. StoreHippo also offers peak load tolerance and is designed to support the growth of your B2B2C business.
Offer multi-channel customer support
Be it a B2B, B2C or B2B2C ecommerce customer, each of them wants their loved brands to be available for them and to understand their needs and grievances. The art of growing your business is synonymous with keeping your customers happy and satisfied. A multi-channel customer support that keeps a constant touch with the customers and attends to them helps you offer the best-in-class shopping experience. Also, for the B2B buyers, self-service and self-exploration is an added advantage.
StoreHippo helps brands connect with their customers on multiple platforms with the help of automated tools and features like abandoned carts, email notifications, SMS, push notifications, live chat, chatbot etc. You can also integrate with the customer service software of your own choice.
Conclusion
The B2B2C business model has become the way forward for many enterprise brands in today’s economy. If you are willing to hack the growth of your B2B2C marketplace by expanding your prowess, you now have access to battle-tested tips and tricks.
Brands however need access to robust, future-ready ecommerce platforms that help them aim for exceptional growth. StoreHippo comes with a 360-degree B2B2C ecommerce solution that offers enterprise-grade inbuilt features to align the strengths of both B2B and B2C models offering a rich customer experience.
All set to grow your B2B2C ecommerce platform with StoreHippo? Explore the 300+ features by starting your 14-day free trial now.
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