Best Practices B2B eCommerce Checklist

Best Practices B2B eCommerce Checklist for Development

Developing a B2B eCommerce website becomes easier when planners structure what they want to do ahead of development instead of adding features randomly. To make matters easier, Clarity Ventures, one of B2B eCommerce & Integrations’ top business associates and a leading eCommerce developer, compiled the following checklist for expanding business-to-business eCommerce capabilities to optimize a smooth launch of new capabilities live. The checklist includes the following key tips for planners:

• Deciding on sales tax collection strategy and sharing the relevant information with the development team
• Getting information on existing and desired carrier accounts and sharing it with the developers
• Defining the shipping process comprehensively for both existing and desired abilities
• Determining customs and duties for each country where sales are made
• Preparing lists for products, cases of products and other shipping weight dimensional information
• Registering merchant accounts and configuring them for B2B sales
• Choosing the right PCI DSS validation process for the company
• Following the PCI DSS website’s guide to get certified
• Setting up automatic auditing needs for an effective eCommerce platform
• Deciding which information on accounts and customer stakeholders to keep and which to revise for greater access, better security and greater access on more channels

• Gathering content materials and variations for each customer, partner and marketing application including product descriptions, content and website iterations for specific profiles, images, product demos, images and videos
• Executing an audit of customers and their personalized content needs
• Optimizing current metadata to align coding with the latest SEO trends and algorithms established by Google and other search engines
• Coding each new kind of content, feature, image, video and application with the latest metadata best practices for SEO
• Creating a spreadsheet that tracks all existing and desired pages and features and the pages, features and third-party applications to which they will connect
• Defining default prices, customer-specific prices, differential pricing incentives, pricing tiers and prices for business partner partners and close associates
• Defining in-house account credit rules and criteria
• Developing inventory management rules and other management-capability wishlists

Improve Efficiency with Auditing Automation

An automated auditing tool for B2B eCommerce platforms offers many advantages, but each eCommerce operation is different and requires custom integrations and features to enable auditing applications to manage and audit the business intelligently. Planners need to determine what areas to audit automatically, and these might include:

• Providing a unified view of separate integrations of accounts, cross-channel customer experiences, customer service, order management, merchandising, marketing and the POS system or third-party payment processors
• Delivering personalized marketing message based on customer service, buying behavior, customer profiles and customer touch points
• Supporting scalability and adding custom integrations as needed
• Providing compelling Web experiences on mobile devices, website visits on regular PCs and in-store experiences
• Monitoring and integrating inventory counts in real-time
• Centralizing order management

Content information needs careful curation to assign particular types of content to established customers, new prospects, customer company stakeholders, secondary decision-makers and products that require steeper educational materials and resources for decision-makers. Some companies might target just one high-volume client while other focus on many customer profiles. Content information includes articles, descriptions, white papers, vendor-supplied materials, images, product demos and outside marketing content. Only 44 percent of B2B marketers have a documented and differentiated content strategy, and only 42 percent of them consider their strategies effective.

Executing content strategy depends on conducting an audit of available content to see what can be used as-is, what needs fine-tuning what new content needs to be developed to match persuasive information to various customer profiles, targeted prospects and general marketing strategies. Honoring personalized content doesn’t just involve the website but should follow customers across multiple channels to deliver a consistent experience to reduce confusion. That’s why a content audit is so important in B2B inbound and outbound marketing. Only 51 percent of B2B companies try to align content with their customers, and 47 percent use branded content strategies. These trends are rapidly evolving into SOP, so completing a content audit is critical to assess content for social media, branded apps, website and Web page content automation, blog postings and custom product videos and demonstrations. A content audit will enable a customer to start an order or product research on a mobile device and finish it on the website while receiving the same personalized information across all channels.

Determining the rules for granting credit include setting terms for payment, establishing credit limits, authorizing customer stakeholders access to lines of credit, setting dollar limitations to each authorized buyer in a company, assessing interest charges for late payments and other details. B2B companies have to decide whether to relax their rules for new companies to develop long-term relationships or to secure business from companies that have complex purchasing requirements or no obvious need for credit. For example, Walmart typically uses trade credit as a source of capital, which effectively uses its suppliers for increased cash flow more often than borrowing money from banks and eight times the amount that shareholders have in the company. B2B companies choose to comply with Walmart’s practices because it’s the world’s largest retailer.

Building management capabilities affects every aspect of dealing with customers, integrating with third-party associates like distributors and updating inventory figures in real-time based on needs, priorities and other criteria. Inventory management should connect with multiple points in the supply chain to foster faster information on drop-shipping, split-shipping and backordering. Other key features that B2B companies may want for internal management include analyzing customers and prospects that have been retained or lost. Building long-term relationships requires developing greater knowledge of customer behavior for segmentation, so B2B companies need the management tools to gain behavioral insights. Tracking cost efficiencies, fraud and theft are also key abilities for better management. Defining these needs and the connections they must make are essential to designing the right inventory management capabilities and other back-office tools.

Best Practices eCommerce Solution Checklist

Designing an enterprise-level B2B eCommerce platform can overwhelm decision-makers and IT teams, but B2B eCommerce & Integrations’ skilled engineers live, breath and dream code. Our development team has vast experience working with leading eCommerce developers to customize software for your needs. We can provide development tools and tips and templates, work with multiple third-party associates and simplify the planning and development of customizations that create responsive user experiences and better management capabilities while training your team to execute best practices and comply with regulations and security protocols. Contact us today for practical development tips and a consultation on developing a new B2B eCommerce platform or adding eCommerce capabilities to your existing business operations.