B2B or not B2B –Is that the question? 5 ways to decide if your traditional B2C ecommerce site is ready for a B2B component

With over 10 years of ecommerce expertise Gorilla has experience in a wide variety of multichannel retailers. Clients range from retailers that started out as a small eBay store to grow to multi-millions per year in online revenue, to Fortune 100 companies with complex channel rules and vendors. Many of these companies have strategic relationships with resellers of their products, especially if they are brand manufactures.

During Gorilla’s in-depth project discovery phase we are often involved in discussions with clients to determine if they should start an online B2B channel to complement their existing B2C online channel. Most often this is accomplished with a dedicated login off the B2C site that displays an entirely different catalog, pricing and perhaps fulfillment processes for their vendors. More extensive B2B sites have their own look and feel, domain name, and customer segmenting.

The question of “What has worked well in your experience?” frequently is heard in the board room. While the determination is client specific and ultimately comes down to a cost benefit analysis, these questions will help you steer the conversations internally and with your ecommerce agency.

1.     Does your ecommerce platform support B2B or spinoff “micro”sites? Having a platform that has the functionality of separate sites, catalogs, and login specific views inherent in the system will eliminate the need to recreate the wheel. Keeping costs down and having a quicker time to market.

2.     Do you have complex pricing rules for resellers? To put it simply, if every one of your 1000 vendors have specific pricing that changes frequently, there will need to be significantly more discovery to translate the rules into an automated ecommerce program. A less complex price rule of “resellers get 20% off the catalog” would be more cost effective to implement.

3.     Where are your vendor relationships managed? If your vendor relationships are managed by an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tool you will need to consider an integration of that data into your ecommerce platform. Effort for this could vary depending on ERP and ECP involved.

4.     Do your B2B Customers have different shopping habits than your B2C customers? This will help you determine if your B2B site would need a completely different look and feel or if you could reuse B2C design. If your B2B customers buy the same products, just in higher quantities, then design re-work could be minimal. However, if your B2C customers are buying faucets while your B2B are buying whole bathroom solutions, site usability and design will need to be taken into consideration.

5.    Do your customers want B2B? This may be a simple question, but if you have a small number of vendors and a well defined process for filling B2B orders currently, it may not be advantageous to take up a B2B component at this time. When taking B2B into consideration you would also have to factor in the opportunity cost that the funds could go into such as marketing and upgrades to your B2C channel.