Businesses working in niches (for example, selling personalized work uniforms) often can’t rely on off-the-shelf platforms. Sites like Amazon don’t offer them enough customization for their product categories. Moreover, their key audiences don’t search for their products on sites like these. They need to rely on search engines like Google to become visible instead. The best option is to create custom B2B (business-to-business) solutions: your own site or app aimed at selling products or services to other businesses. In this article, we look at the key steps necessary for building your own B2B ecommerce platforms and review some practical considerations connected to this task.

Define Business Goals and Buyer Requirements

The most important step for building your custom B2B ecommerce platforms is understanding the goals of your business and the general market situation. First and foremost, you need to understand whether there’s demand for your product. Who’ll use your service? For what? Is there a clear target audience for your particular platform? Secondly, you need to answer the “why?” question. Does your business need this ecommerce product? Will it make your business more stable? Successful B2B ecommerce projects understand their audience and offer a direct solution to their problems.

Choose the B2B Ecommerce Development Approach

It’s not enough to understand why you need to develop something, what you need to develop, and who’ll use that B2B product. You also need to understand the “how?” question. How will you ensure that your platform is capable of fulfilling the needs of your audience? On this level, you need to choose a development approach, plan platform architecture and core features, design buyer experience, and consider integrations with other platforms. 

Two development approaches are most popular these days. 

With Waterfall, you offer a detailed set of requirements for developers. They then actively work on those requirements and deliver the final product to you. This approach works well in situations when you definitely know what works well and just need to bring your vision to life. Budget requirements with those projects are rather predictable and usually don’t exceed original investments significantly. However, Waterfall is inflexible: you get exactly what’s written in the instructions. If some feature doesn’t work as well in reality as on paper, you’ll have to give additional resources to extensive redevelopment. 

Agile offers a more flexible approach to development. Development occurs in sprints that last between one week and a month; during them, programmers develop a pre-established list of features and demonstrate them to customers during regular meetings (for instance, weekly). This approach enables everyone to test whether some features work well in reality. At the same time, it’s more difficult to predict expenditures. Common requests for redevelopment increase costs and prolong development. Thus, the method works well when you have a general idea of your product but still need to test many of its aspects.  

Plan the Platform Architecture and Core Features

The second step in answering the “how?” question is planning the platform architecture and core features. Here, we recommend looking at the following aspects while developing B2B platforms: 

Customer Accounts and Roles

B2B platforms work with a large number of stakeholders that have different roles. On the one hand, you have buyers, who need separate accounts that give access to purchase options and communication with support. On the other hand, sales representatives and support staff need accounts that enable them to manage subscriptions/sales, add and modify new products, and offer support to customers if services/products are delayed or when they need additional instructions for using them.

Custom Pricing and Catalogs

Administrators of B2B ecommerce platforms need tools for setting up prices and adjusting them based on customer type. For example, returning customers who make regular orders can get certain discounts due to simplified transportation. Tools for changing prices are also necessary for adjusting to various market changes. Growth or decreases in component costs may require the appropriate adjustment of prices.

One more aspect here is catalogs. The absence of custom categories for niche goods is among the key reasons for not using off-the-shelf B2B solutions. With custom B2B solutions, managers have tools for creating customized categories of goods and updating catalogs based on a large number of criteria. Your solution should reflect the complexities of the market you work in. AI solutions, for example, have unique product categories that aren’t covered by platforms like eBay.

Quotes and Approval Workflows

In many cases, B2B sites don’t immediately offer prices because they need to know the particular circumstances of their clients to give realistic answers. Here, your B2B solution should focus on easy-to-use tools for giving realistic quotes. Based on our experience, you can do this through advanced chatbots connected to a database of typical cases and through accessible chat tools. If users can quickly ask a chatbot or write a support representative and receive an answer in two minutes, they’re also more likely to buy a product. Approval for purchases should be similarly simple. The best option is to create a fill-in form for your managers that will generate all further documents based on client data.

Bulk orders and repeat purchases

B2B sales differ from B2C (business-to-consumer) in their scope and frequency. Businesses buy most wares in large quantities (for example, construction materials are often calculated in tonnes). More importantly, their purchases are regular. Companies that assemble PCs, for instance, need to resupply components like video cards regularly. B2C purchases are only sometimes regular; moreover, the consequences of shortages for consumers are relatively low. If a particular brand of pasta is not present, they can buy something else. 

With businesses, it’s different. For this reason, B2B ecommerce platforms require advanced tools for bulk orders with multiple customization options. Your developers must also focus on configurations for repeat purchases. Users should be able to indicate when they’ll need more items and at what interval. In some cases, it even makes sense to add tools for generating formal agreements between stakeholders.

Design the B2B Buyer Experience

Design is also a very important part of the “how” aspect for B2B systems. Our recommendation here is to focus on simplicity and user convenience. Users like intuitive systems. The best option is to generate several profiles for potential users. Then, you should test how they would interact with your site. The main goal is to minimize the number of steps purchases take. The faster you achieve user buy-in, the better. Businesses work in ever-changing environments: the fewer obstacles they deal with, the better. Companies like Keenethics demonstrate that even seemingly small changes in UI/UX can have a tremendous positive impact on sales.

Integrate ERP, CRM, PIM, WMS, and Payment Systems

Most companies are using a complex mix of ERP, CRM, PIM, WMS, and payment systems. In practice, this means that your solutions should have tools for integrating with them. Easy-to-export numbers in popular formats like XLSX help register sales information in ERPs or CRMs. Integration with payment systems is also vital. Most businesses work with banks or payment platforms to facilitate payments. It’s important to integrate the most popular platforms in your region to ensure seamless workflows. If most businesses in your area use PayPal, then PayPal integration in your B2B platform will immediately simplify adoption for most potential users.

Develop and Test the Platform

Once you understand the key aspects of what you want to deliver, it’s time to actually develop and test the platform. During development, the most important action is to choose the right technology stack. Thankfully, most technologies have clear use cases. If you know what you want, finding appropriate solutions shouldn’t be difficult. For instance, online sites that need good scalability, mobile and web compatibility, and strong UI/UX typically use technologies like Node.js and React Native. After implementing everything, don’t neglect testing. Work with quality assessment specialists and, if possible, beta testers to find technical problems and remove any remaining usability issues. 

Measure Performance and Improve the Platform

When all major bugs and usability issues are removed, it’s time to launch your product. Here, our recommendation is to configure analytical systems. You need to understand how your users interact with your B2B platform. A strong practice is to not only understand the number of users but also your key user groups. Based on this data, you’ll be able to communicate with core groups and receive feedback. Then, your goal is to consider suggestions and gradually improve your B2B platform.