6 tips for your search for a B2B Webshop

You've made up your mind. You want a B2B webshop for your wholesale business. It's time for online success! You do some googling, and quickly find out that there are a few things you need to think about if you want to make an informed choice about particular software and vendor. These 6 tips are going to help you get your bearings on this.

1. What's the plan?

What do you actually want to achieve with your B2B webshop? Being online purely for the sake of being online is really no longer possible. The question is; what are your goals? Think about objectives in terms of existing customers, orders and order value, but also acquisition objectives. With your B2B webshop, you also create a powerful lead generation tool! Last but not least: what do you want to achieve internally? Are there process improvements make through automation?

2. Who What Where

Who should be involved in an implementation, but above all: Who will soon be working with the web shop? Provide a ecommerce boss who at least knows or learns about the whole process and the software, and involve others to blind avoiding stains. Think of someone doing the marketing, the people processing orders, the warehouse, customer service, etc. Can people's tasks also be automated? Think about who soon what does and where this happens in the process.

3. The contents

No webshop without products: What's in the shop? Your entire product range? And how do you present it? Think about what information you want to show with your products without overwhelming your customer. What is relevant and what is not? What other information do you want to have present on the webshop? And if you have an extensive product range, how do you provide a powerful navigation? Think about your category structure and how you want to use filters.

4. User experience

If you want to keep one thing in mind when making choices in this regard is that your business customer shops differently from a consumer who goes for a casual evening shopping on the couch. Your customer is used to a certain way of shopping online, but the intention varies tremendously. Your business customer has a task to place an order with you and therefore has different emotions than a customer who is just browsing around to see everything. A smooth handling is desired for this target group. In addition, consider whether there are specific functionalities that are important for your customer or added value has.

5. There is no truth without data

Without data, you can nothing say about the success of your webshop. Somewhere you have to read this. What is data you want to be able to measure from the webshop so you can say something about objectives and achievements? Don't make this too blunt, think mainly about main objectives and what kind of information you need for that, and from there you can think about other subsets of that data that are relevant may be.

6. The choice of software

There he is, right at the very end: Which software should you have? Start looking around to see what kind of package suits you. You have a rough idea of what you need because you have obviously gone through the previous five points thoroughly. Get informed about the possibilities of integrations between different software packages if necessary and pays more attention to the software you at least 80% of your requirements with it can be fulfilled.

And now? Get going! Start thinking about these 6 points and get well informed. A few more tips to avoid getting bogged down in a giant wish list:

• Keep the 80% from your customers in mind. Don't make choices for your customers' 20% that could potentially also (undesirably) affect your customers' 80%.
• Limit yourself to the key requirements. It's best to keep an idea list next to it which you can smoothly check if it would be possible to do this in the future with a particular software but don't include it in the hard requirements.
• Don't stare blindly on your competitor. Do they measure everything through? Have they made choices that have all yielded more profit, more customers, more optimisation? Don't know. Anyway, the question is whether they have the same goals as you.

Now you want to know more about successfully deploying a b2b web shop for your business. Then take a look at our b2b webshop guide.