As one of the most disruptive years in recent history has ended, it is just the right time to look at the upcoming trends and adopt them for our good. 2020 has surely been an interesting year for everyone, especially for B2B ecommerce businesses.
Online wholesale industry has undergone great changes and as technology is getting smarter, more trends will evolve in 2021. There was a time when enterprise customers used to prefer handheld experience with sales representatives. But now they expect high-level convenience with mobile shopping, personalized experiences and ease of shopping through digital channels. It clearly indicates a drastic change in the B2B ecommerce industry.
Now, it is the time to understand the wholesale business outlook for 2021. Before we explore the top trends of the online B2B industry, consider the most important and unavoidable trend in this industry is “Digital Transformation”. As most of the industries have shifted to digital when the global pandemic struck in the early 2020, the wholesale industry has also accelerated towards digital transformation.
Are you also willing to keep up with the emerging industry trends and experience the new heights of success? Read on to discover top trend predictions for 2021 and prepare yourself for the glorious future of ecommerce. After you’re done reading, you should be able to use these insights to build and manage your online wholesale business successfully.
Here are Top 8 B2B ecommerce trends to adopt in 2021 and beyond
1. B2B Marketplaces and niche marketplaces will grow
With the entry of top online business-to-business marketplace players like Amazon Business, everyone expects a single convenient place to buy several products at once. This has given rise to the trend of multi-seller business models in the wholesale business space. The multi-seller business has created a market buzz from the time it has arrived in the ecommerce arena. One of the most important things for its popularity is tremendous growth opportunities. And the best thing about this model is that it helps manage vendors, sellers, distributors at multiple levels. The top features of marketplace model includes easy vendor registration, seamless payment transactions, automated shipping solutions for distributor and sellers, hassle-free taxation management, and a lot more.
Apart from this model, multi-store sales have also boosted like never before in the B2B ecommerce segment. For example, sales of construction equipment, paper goods, janitorial supplies, landscaping tools and other categories are now being done through a multi-store business model. The primary reason for this trend is to boost customer convenience and best-in-class shopping experiences. With an enterprise ecommerce solution like StoreHippo, you can leverage several business models and switch between them according to your changing business requirements.
2. Omnichannel selling
Embracing multiple channels for sales is one of most trending things in large-volume businesses. If you are still wondering why consider multiple channels, ask yourself if you buy each and everything you need from one place? Not possible, right?
Let’s check out some interesting statistics about omnichannel sales.
Over 46% of online searches start from marketplaces
Over 37% of users use social media to research about products and brands
It clearly indicates that customers go through several profiles and channels before making the final decision. And it is important to consider the needs of today’s modern customers. It’s the right time to embrace omnichannel selling in the online wholesale industry. It includes web stores, social media, and any other different online channels. If you think that omnichannel sales is pretty hard and you need to login here and there again and again? The headless concept has come to your rescue. It saves all your time and efforts while ensuring an awesome shopping experience to customers.
The B2B ecommerce solution of StoreHippo comes ready with the inbuilt headless ecommerce solution. It helps you to integrate social media channels to provide a user-friendly experience and boosts conversions. The headless ecommerce solution and advanced features help large businesses to drive repeat purchases and loyalty at different customer touchpoints.
3. Greater Shift Towards B2C
Do you still believe that B2B digital space is supposed to be a plain vanilla experience? Not anymore? With the B2C experiences, customers expect the same beautiful and dynamic experiences on wholesale marketplaces as well. A latest report indicates that over 76% of the enterprise buyers consider the design of the site to be the most important factors while making the purchase decision.
Although the trend of beautiful business-to-business online marketplaces has entered way back, 2021 is going to be a whole new revolution in this context. With the B2B ecommerce solution of StoreHippo, it is super easy for you to choose from 100+ beautiful website design themes, change the look and feel of your website, and personalize your pages for your customers.
In addition to this, you should also be able to switch your wholesale business in the B2C segment if you wish to expand in near future. Why to leverage one platform when you can take the benefit of a combination package. With the extensive features of StoreHippo, you can handle B2B as well as B2C requirements at one place.
4. Personalized shopping experiences
Making customers feel special never goes out of trend. In fact, this trend has become inevitable in the recent years. As everyone says, “Customer is the king” in the retail world, the same stands very true in context to B2B ecommerce too. The personalization features, customer-centric deals lead to a special bond with every customer and ultimately, more business profits.
And who does not want that?
When you have a right ecommerce platform, it gets very easy to delight your customers with extreme personalization. A powerful dashboard helps you to analyze the activities of customers, their order frequency, purchase history, order volume, and other details to craft perfect personalized deals. It not only satisfies the customer at that moment but also keeps them loyal to your brand in the long term. The enterprise ecommerce platform offered by StoreHippo ensures that you have a clear business overview along with advanced reports and analytics. Along with that, it also provides a powerful discount engine and marketing tools to offer special discounts and deals to your enterprise customers.
5. M Commerce and PWA
Today, it is impossible for almost anyone to leave our mobile devices. Well, it is not only because of entertainment, calls, and social media. Most of the work today is done on the mobile. In this era, more than 60% of the B2B ecommerce purchase decisions are made on smartphones. Just like m-commerce is driving B2C, it is one of the most interesting trends in the wholesale business segment too.
There is no better time to adapt this trend. With the immense growth of mobile shopping, the large businesses should also choose the ecommerce platform that has a mobile-first approach like StoreHippo. It provides seamless customer experience on all mobile devices along with PWAs so that the store looks, feels, and functions like a mobile app on all devices. What’s more here is you can build your mobile apps (Android/iOS) right from your dashboard without any additional cost.
6. Agile Payment options
Today’s customers expect everything to be super quick and hassle-free. Especially in B2B ecommerce, the order volume and payment transactions are huge and customers always look for the most convenient payment method. It doesn’t matter if the payment is online or via mobile phones, the customer should be able to make quick payment through their preferred mode of payment.
To fulfil this purpose, your enterprise ecommerce solution needs to support excellent payment gateway integration. With StoreHippo, you can get an exhaustive list of payment gateways like debit card, credit card, net banking, COD, subscription-based payments like Razorpay subscription, Stripe billing etc, marketplace payments like Paypal Adaptive, pay-later options and lot more on your B2B ecommerce platform. You can also offer seamless payment experience to your customers with native payment methods with StoreHippo like payment wallets, UPI etc. on your wholesale business website. Don’t wait anymore to adopt these agile payment options if you want to be on the ecommerce radar in 2021.
7. Better Delivery
Shipping remains the backbone of ecommerce business, whether it is retail or wholesale. A perfect shipping and delivery module will remain as important as it was decades before. Now is the time of automated shipping solutions. With the enterprise ecommerce solution, B2B retailers can work with diverse shipping partners, keep a real-time track of the shipping channels, provide discounted shipping, offer international shipping without any hassles. It can help them win the trust of local as well as global customers.
The integrated shipping solution offered by StoreHippo ensures that your wholesale business has a hassle-free logistics system while keeping the customers happy and satisfied with the services. What’s more, you can also manage your own fleet with a dedicated delivery boy management module of StoreHippo.
8. Sell D2C, reach direct to customers
The Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) strategy is becoming one of the most popular routes for manufacturers and brands to enter into the market. The core reason behind its popularity is the elimination of middle-man entities. To name a few benefits, going D2C eliminates the barrier between the consumer and producers to provide greater control over brand, marketing, reputation, and sales.
With enterprise ecommerce solutions like StoreHippo, it enables quick setup of online stores along with a plethora of tools and features to support better marketing and sales. With a faster and more controlled approach, the D2C strategy has greater possibilities to leverage online channels to reach consumers and make sales.
Conclusion
How StoreHippo can help you adopt B2B ecommerce trends?
All the trends presented here provide a clear picture of the bright future of the online business-to-business industry. Given the massive changes that B2B ecommerce is slated to undergo, it is recommended to adopt these trends with the right technology before it gets too late. If you are already an online seller or planning to become one, keeping these trends in mind can help you create a robust online business. However, you need to use the advanced enterprise ecommerce platform to make this happen.
And StoreHippo has everything you need to leverage these trends. And the best way is to find out yourself. Try the rich features of B2B platform and understand the results on your own, Start your free online store trial now.
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