Managing one to many SKUs becomes increasingly difficult for B2B ecommerce companies. Management becomes unwieldy when there are custom pricing tiers, multiple sales channels and a regular influx of new products. Discounted and discontinued inventory also generates some challenges. The user experience becomes inadequate when customers can’t find the products they’ve previously ordered or new products that they want to try. Handling the complexities of multiple variant SKUs, product options and custom ecommerce SKUs can prove overwhelming without integration. Customers can also become frustrated when they don’t understand the process. For example, multiple variant SKUs identify the variants of key products such as size and color. Product options have only one SKU but may have special situations such as engraving, custom framing, gift wrapping, different colors and sizes and literally thousands of options. In a platform that’s not integrated, or designed for the product variants, it’s easy for mistakes to occur. Why is it so important to create an appealing user experience? There are many reasons that range from higher sales conversions to greater customer loyalty. Consider this statistic: Over the last 10 years, an investment in design-centric companies would return an average yield 228 percent greater than investing in the S&P. [1] The top priorities of B2B marketers include nurturing and converting leads, attracting new customers and building revenue from existing customers. [2] these are all benefits of UX design and integration. Automation and the User Experience The user experience, or UX, plays an important role in sales conversions and customer loyalty. The right design for a B2B UX is essential to enable customers to find products with multiple variant SKUs, customized searches and products from their previous purchases. The UX requires an integrated system that knows where the products are regardless of catalog changes. Integrated automation provides consistency without requiring customers to jump through hoops to find what they want. Other Key UX Strategies There are many strategies B2B companies can use to improve their UXs, and most of them depend on integration, strategic design and regular monitoring. For example, it’s important to monitor customer behavior continuously to fine-tune the user experience based on analytics. Customer engagement might prove even more important than monitoring, so it's important to integrate Google Analytics insights to measure customer engagement. At times, out-of-the-box Google Analytics won’t provide what you need, you’ll need to add Google Tag Manager to get the on-page activities of your visitors. Some of the UX strategies that improve product performance, sales and customer satisfaction include: Satisfying Unique Customer Needs integration enables companies to satisfy the special needs of their businesses and customers. For example, the company might want to use a special payment option for key clients or generate a custom report on all items sold to a customer during a specific time period. Security is always an important concern, so companies should connect securely to third-party security support to stay on top of new security threats. Integrating with Back-end Software Integrating with all business applications is essential to deliver a great user experience. integration enables customers access to all their account information 24/7. Providing welcome Pages welcome pages can point customers to summaries of company products, introduce information about getting started, review customer security protections, display subscription forms and provide information about registering for an account. Closing with a Farewell Message Regardless of whether the customer buys right away, B2B companies need to nurture site visitors for an extended sales process. Thanking customers for a sale or requesting information about why they decided to abandon a product or category provides information that can be used for targeting bounce-back marketing messages. Understanding Time-to-purchase Stats The time to purchase provides valuable information about site design and customer behavior. Integrated platforms can collect data about time-to-purchase intervals to improve their conversion strategy with more relevant UX applications. Fostering Product Engagement Great user experiences come from customer engagement. A well-designed experience fosters greater product engagement. Common platform features to encourage engagement include testimonials, reviews, customization options, detailed product information, supply chain data, how-to videos and other content. Automated platforms can provide customer-specific content based on buyer personas and personal preferences. Delivering Effective Contextual Messages UX writing is critical--even as microcopy--to help customers finish various website and ordering actions. This is the writing used in CTAs, navigation buttons, modal dialogs and other website features. Custom ecommerce SKUs Using custom ecommerce SKUs can provide faster connections and simpler management of many processes such as identifying custom product options, products for customers with special shipping requirements and faster connections with suppliers to restock products efficiently. These are generally used by B2B companies. integration and Design Regardless of your business strategy, you need professional design services and seamless integration to deliver the right UX for each targeted customer. Clarity provides the kind of design, coding and B2B experience that’s essential to work collaboratively with your in-house IT staff to deliver a tested, affordable and effective UX. The Clarity team can help your company manage one to many SKUs seamlessly while still providing a world-class user experience. References: [1] Invsionapp.com: 13 impressive statistics on user experience https://www.invisionapp.com/inside-design/statistics-on-user-experience/ [2] V3b.com: 6 Insights (And One Inspiring Conclusion) from 27 Beneficial B2B Marketing Stats and Facts https://v3b.com/2018/06/stats-facts-b2b-marketers/