There are several differences between manufacturing and distribution companies that sell wholesale, including the industry they operate in, the customers they serve, and the choices they make about their approach to sales and distribution. However, all manufacturers and distributors that sell business-to-business (B2B) do, however, agree that not all customers are created equal.
This customer segmentation is typically implemented through customer-specific pricing tiers, where sellers grant their Gold, Silver, and Bronze customers access to particular discounts and offers in accordance with their purchase volume. It's really simple and designed to reward loyal customers and encourage the most frequent shoppers to place additional orders. In some cases, customers are divided based on product access, meaning that only a portion of a product line is accessible to specific customers due to inventory problems or regional restrictions.
Prior to the advent of B2B e-commerce solutions, customer-specific selling could feel laborious and cumbersome to those who are still selling by hand, even if digital selling is becoming more and more important in B2B. In order to make sure they know what particular customer is entitled to purchase, at what price, and with what promotion, representatives must consult price sheets when they meet with customers in person. Additionally, because the catalogue is static, clients who order from you using an outdated catalogue must either cross-reference their individual price list or, worse, call or email you to obtain their pricing.
It sounds a bit out of date for 2025, right?
Let's talk about B2B e-commerce solutions. Solutions for business-to-business e-commerce vary widely in size, strength, and functionality. Although choosing a B2B e-commerce solution for your company involves many considerations, we will simply discuss personalisation in today's blog article and how crucial it is that your B2B e-commerce solution support personalised selling.
To get the most out of your B2B e-commerce system, you need to customise the following features for every customer (or set of customers):
If your B2B e-commerce solution does not enable you to display customer-specific pricing (either by a customer group or at the individual customer level), you should flee. This is by far the most prevalent personalisation requirement for B2B selling. Your customers won't need to call you to verify that the pricing is correct, and your salespeople won't have to commit intricate pricing rules to memory if you incorporate pricing personalisation into your business-to-business selling software.
Most crucially, since orders are less likely to contain errors, precise, customer-specific pricing also greatly reduces fulfilment times.
Your B2B e-commerce solution should have the capability to display promotions for particular consumers or client groups, which is closely tied to pricing personalisation. It's crucial that your B2B e-commerce solution can replicate the same strategy you would use for in-person sales, whether that means offering a free product if a specified order minimum is reached or implementing a buy one, get one free promotion.
You don't want to create the potential channel conflict that would occur when your customers can only receive promotions offline; instead, you want them to feel valued.
To make sure that your customers only see the products they are qualified to buy, B2B e-commerce solutions should let you filter and personalise your catalogue for each of them. This will keep customers focused on relevant products and keep them from feeling overloaded with options.
One of the most crucial components of the best B2B e-commerce solutions is the ability to customise order histories. Customers should be able to view their own order history when they log into your portal. Additionally, they must to be able to swiftly copy and edit a previous order—a reordering process that is very typical in business-to-business transactions.
This function in our B2B e-commerce platform receives a tonne of favourable feedback because it guarantees recurring revenue and saves our client's buyers a significant amount of important time.
One of the best ways to personalise your products is to display the items that your customers have ordered most often. They may now easily locate and add the items they most desire to their order thanks to this shortcut.
Furthermore, you can even return your customers' best products to the top of search results when they look for related items in your catalogue using advanced B2B e-commerce recommendation system included in Edistera.
Edistera’s B2B e-Commerce solution is known for a deep coverage of B2B selling, including extensive personalisation features. Set up a ten-minute phone session to talk about how we might be able to help you, and we’ll go from there.