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Post Pandemic Surge – Ecommerce Challenges

Many ecommerce businesses servicing the B2B market are seeing a post-pandemic surge. While we are sure the revenue boost is welcome, we also know that it comes with challenges as well. As the world begins to open up and B2C post-pandemic customer buying habits begin to level out, we are now seeing more B2B ecommerce businesses take the brunt of the challenges faced with supply chain management issues to extreme market competition. 

B2B ecommerce business sellers have been previously faced with more challenges than the B2C market sellers.This is due to factors such as larger deals, longer buying process, and even complex buying decisions. With the additional stresses, business owners are looking for solutions to help ease the stress and continue to scale as the B2B market is not slowing down any time soon. In fact, the B2B market is expected to grow to 1.8 Trillion by 2023.  Making sure to have your operations and inventory optimized is becoming more and more important. 

Here are some post-pandemic surge tips to help This is due to factors such as larger deals, longer buying process, and even complex buying decisions.Communicate out of stocks

B2B buyers say communication of product delays is more important than price when  it comes to deciding to purchase from a vendor. With backed-up manufacturing to shipping delays, out-of-stock items are a problem for many. Supply chains continue to be a bottleneck for many ecommerce businesses post-pandemic. While we have talked about the harm that out-of-stock inventory status can bring to your business and how having an inventory management system can massively help,we still encourage you to communicate your out-of-stock statuses to your customers.There are various ways you can communicate to your B2B buyers while nurturing your B2B relationships too 

Communicating out-of-stock items is more than just marking an item on your website. It’s best if you also consider offering a date you anticipate your item to be back in stock.Another key component of communicating out-of-stock items is by making sure you are diversifying your product offerings or are able to refer them to someone else offering the product. This helps build trust and credibility when you’re prepared for these delays with additional resources for your customer.

Digital First 

We have said it before, and now it’s becoming critical if your business is still on paper- it’s time to go digital.If there’s one thing that has been made clear in this pandemic – it’s that businesses are globally shifting to more digitalized processes for a good reason. Not only does digital technology help make our processes more efficient, but it can also make the processes we do more effective without human error. We also can help improve our customer experiences by asserting more digital workflows to help move our team’s attention to tasks that need the highest level of touches.

In the ecommerce industry, we are also seeing how digital cloud-based applications and integrations have united teams globally as well. From fulfillment transparency to marketing services, we are able to reach further and faster without using paper. 

Self Service Ordering 

Do you have a portal to allow your B2B customers to purchase directly from? If not then, you should be consider offering a direct access point for your business customers. Not only does this help reduce human error from writing orders manually, but it also can increase loyalty, can increase customer satisfaction, and has even been seen to improve customer order value over time. 

Streamline Customer Service with an Inventory Management Platform 

Customer Service is the leading B2B differentiator for companies competing in the space. With amazon providing faster, clearer, and more accurate data for customers to view in a matter of seconds on a product, they have made for the fierce competition on the customer service level for small business owners. Competing with Amazon for B2B customers can be intimidating, especially when it comes to optimizing your customer service strategy.One way to improve your customer service and experience is through inventory management platform integration. This helps unite your business’ multiple departments on one streamlined system.
When you integrate your different departments on one streamlined system not only is your customer service able to see more transparently on partially fulfilled items but, you are able to give the customer more autonomy in answering their own customer service needs which in turn can reduce your costs of answering hundreds of time-intensive, repeatable questions. In addition, your team has the leverage to make business-critical decisions faster and more accurately without cross-department communication occurring. These inventory management platforms can help scale your business by providing workflows at the highest level as well as financial data to assist in streamlining efforts operationally and in your marketing.