10 must-have B2B features for a Magento website

Not only retail stores move to online platforms, under the impact of Covid 19, the B2B phenomenon also becomes bigger and appears online as well. As a matter of fact, B2B businesses are applying automation plus web-based solutions to increase effectiveness and efficiency while saving money. Based on this issue, this article will show 10 must-have B2B features for a Magento website to maximize your profits. Make it Mobile Ready With over half of web traffic coming from mobile devices, it is then without question that you should pay attention. And then, invest more in the appearance and make sure your web is mobile-friendly. However, that’s not the only benefit. The bigger picture is that you also have to consider how your customer wants to place their order. From there, adjust your web to suit their buying experience and improve it. This can help to increase your mobile conversion rate. This way, you’re fully prepared to hit the ground running in the mobile space. Update Your Shipping Capabilities Error in shipping is one of the primary catalysts that cause loss in revenue as well as client turnover in B2B businesses. However, this can also happen before the order is made. Some of the reasons that B2B consumers can abandon their cart can be listed out as unexpected delivery charges or complicated checkout process or expensive shipping cost. As a matter of fact, your business can totally be impacted once those processes are not simple and speedy, consistent and reliable. The more automated and intuitive the shipping process is, the better. Fast Image Loading for SEO Don’t underestimate this because this sounds simple. The speed of your image loading for SEO can cause you to lose lots of potential leads if it is too long to wait. Image load speeds are important in general, but for image-heavy commerce websites, this is critical for your business. There are 2 reasons to explain why this is important. Firstly, your consumers are generally too busy and they require things to move as fast as possible. If the process takes time, they will likely abandon the cart since not enough information on the products is acquired. The second reason is that the faster your images load, the faster your site loads. Make Your Web Content Actionable and Engaging Businesses that ignore its content on the site can lose lots of potential clients. Remember that the content is your sales representative in words. So once that salesperson cannot convince consumers, they will leave. As a matter of fact, it is essential that you keep your customers engaged. In order to do so, you want to speak to their specific needs and pain points while offering the perfect solutions. Besides the meaning, the content should also incorporate the tone-of-voice you want your brand to have. Think of your content as your side of a conversation and then you will figure out the kind of voice you should use on the content. Customize for More Control Differentiation is a thing that helps you to stand out and remind customers of you. In order to do that, make sure your eCommerce website can reflect that. In order to do that, spend more time observing your customer journey, and then make some adjustments if needed to customize the process following to make them feel more comfortable when buying with you. The more control you have, the better. Implement Advanced B2B eCommerce Analytics B2B is different from B2C, rather than using macro metrics to track, for B2B, you cannot apply the same thing as your customers is unique – even if they’re ordering the same products. Each of your customers perceives diverse shipping needs and inventory concerns. So they’ll need personalized solutions, which means you’ll need to keep up with individual KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). As a matter of fact, your business needs a business analytics solution that allows you to track individual catalogs, actions, and contracts. Each lead you take on could be a high-ticket repeat customer and also play an important role in retention strategy. Personalization is Key for eCommerce Websites From the previous points, you must now be familiar with the concept of personalization. No matter if your customers are in pre, during or post purchase, they absolutely need a personalized experience. With such unique preferences and contracts, you’ll want to present visitors with tailored catalogs and ordering options. Once you are able to do that, you can save your time when taking care of customers while gaining more satisfaction. In summary, the happier your customers, the more money you’ll make, and the faster your business will grow. Include Discounts Differs from B2C, B2B requires you to think more about the volume of orders. Bulk Order Discounts keep you competitive and keep your customers coming back for more. They also help you get rid of perishables and make room for new and updated products. This is a standard practice in the wholesale business, though you can also run discounts strategically based on expiration dates and product updates. Price Levels and Tiers Price levels or tiers though sound simple but can actually contribute big changes to your business growth. Each one sets different conditions for each customer within it. Factors that could be affected may include the minimum order amount, the price of the products, and the bulk discounts. When a potential customer negotiates with your business, you can take their financial factors into account and offer them the terms of the tier that best suits them. Flexible Payment Options A lot of B2B transactions these days are paid by credit card. Many B2B transactions these days take place online with a credit card. However, your business customers, whether because of their needs or simply their preferences, may want to be able to pay in other ways. Therefore, providing a variety of payment methods is another way to offer some personalization to B2B purchases. Final note Above are the 10 must-have B2B features for a Magento website. Sounds

Google shopping integration with BigCommerce: what does this mean for your store?

It has been always mentioned by Google that businesses should create streamlined shopping experiences for shoppers. And following this issue, they have created Google Shopping. This application leads ads of the product right directly to the site selling the item. To boost this convenience, Google has been encouraging the use of Shopping ads more and more, with several new features released earlier last year. In this article, we will show you how Google shopping integration with BigCommerce can affect your store. More qualified traffic  Google Shopping can bring you much more qualified traffic. This works similarly to Google Search, you only have to pay if someone clicks on a Google Shopping ad. Once you are running a business, and you only want to pay for clicks that are potential and convertible, then Google Shopping is exactly what you need. When a person searches for something, they will automatically be encountered with fully updated information regarding the product image, name, functionality, price and even shipping, promotion if included. Plus, it even shows up next to other similar products. So users can be updated and compare products before making a final decision. As a matter of fact, when somebody clicks on a shopping ad, the likelihood is that they are interested in it. All the information is given up front, and alongside other options. Unlike a text ad, so much specific detailed information is already available before you even pay for the customer to click. Better user experience equals to better conversion rates  Compared to other regular search ads, Google Shopping built a much more streamlined experience for users. When someone clicks on the ad, it will take them directly to tha product page. By doing that, users can save a lot of their time, and their effort instead of clicking around to some other pages, sites before figuring out the final place that sells the products. The process is designed to be extremely simple. This is a brilliant feature of Google Shopping, because it all helps to streamline the conversion process. This equals to the fact that when consumers are being taken straight to a product page, there is less chance that your customer will get annoyed by your website, and disappear! This leads to a higher cost per conversion, and an overall better return. Inventory management From the above points, it seems clear that once you apply Google Shopping, the chances are that you will get more potential customers. However, what happens when the product they want to buy is out of stock? Many will think that they should hide that product away and display it again when it is restocked. That is not a really good idea since it means you are losing a lead that is possibly about to be converted. It can be understood easily that your consumer will go to another store to find, and don’t care about the fact that you can immediately restock. In this case, refer to Backorder. This app allows consumers to order even when the inventory equals 0. By doing that, you do not have to care much about the stock, and consumers will not lose their chance to buy their favorite item.  Above are some changes that might happen to your store when Google Shopping integrates with BigCommerce. Most of them are positive signs, however, still you must prepare to handle all of the arising tasks. 

Best customer retention strategies after Black Friday

As considered to be one of the biggest shopping weekends in a year, it is easy to understand that plenty of plans will be involved to best optimize and boost sales during this season. However, after this, you will have to be prepared for Christmas and New Year, so are yet free, there is still a lot of work left to handle, one of them is to make sure you’re retaining traffic and customers? In this article, we will list out some of the best customer retention strategies after Black Friday.   Send follow up emails & ask for reviews Email marketing is one of the most effective methods that you can use for shoppers online. However, these might be considered personal data so users will be more selective to hand over. As a matter of fact, be sure that you have a visible email signup box on your site too. In addition, offer them discounts and free shipping or free wrapping if they sign up. This helps you to retain their info for future marketing use. Now you’ve got all those important email addresses, make sure to take advantage of that usefully or else sooner or later, you will be transferred to the spam category.  Don’t send an unnecessary volume of emails that will ultimately lead to the customer unsubscribing from your list completely. Instead, follow up after a successful order has been made to ask for the reviews. Reviews are a fantastic way of boosting sales, without spending too much money. Reviews or using an impartial reviewing site, a wealth of positive reviews can be one of the best ways to maintain a healthy ROI. However, if you find email to each and every customer might be tiring and exhausting, Atom8 can do it for you. This app allows you to group customers by purchase behavior and then send email via Mailchimp/Klaviyo. You can discover the app here if you’re BigCommerce merchant: The app helps you save hours of working and increase productivity.   Stay active on social media This step is essential once you spend a big amount of money on social media ads for Black Friday. Stay active by regularly posting content, new products, future promotions and anything else you think your followers might be tuned into. By doing this, you can save yourself a lot of time. If you can combine the right strategy and customer engagement plan, social media can become your best sales channel.   Analysis and dig into data Never forget to take a look back and disregard any data you have from the previous period. From there, you can see and figure out lots of valuable and precious information, such as which products are more preferred, a particular time of day where your audience is most likely to checkout or you may be able to validate the structure of your website by viewing which devices your customers use to browse. Analyze and analyze, keep breaking all data into pieces then merge them, you will then find a perfect plan for the upcoming season. Above are some practical customer retention strategies after Black Friday that you can utilize and apply to your business. Rather than targeting new consumers, if you can retain your old customer, you will save yourself a lot of money and boost sales.

How to get your BigCommerce store ready for Black Friday?

Holidays are just right around the corner. In previous years, things were different. But since the pandemic came and made a huge change to earth in all aspects, businesses had to operate in new ways to survive and thrive. As a matter of fact, it’s time to get your online store ready for this year’s holiday rush. However, to become shoppers’ go-to for gifts, you need to make the shopping experience easy, flexible and include options that suit their needs. This article will show you how to get your BigCommerce store ready for Black Friday. Get your commerce engine ready One of the most important and obvious things you have to do is to ensure your site loads fast. Shoppers will take a look at several websites to seek out the best deals and the perfect item before making a final decision. So, you want to make sure they don’t get impatient and leave before your site even has time to load.  In addition, another thing is that you have to be certain that your site can deal with the influx of traffic. BigCommerce had 100% uptime during the Cyber 5 for the last seven years4. If you’re not sure about your provider’s coverage, reach out to customer service and check. Read more: Bigcommerce upsell Automation Automation, the amazing life savior who can totally save your life during this busy and chaotic season of the year. It helps you to save time and focus on other important tasks, a worthwhile investment in the long term. Refer to Atom8,  an app for BigCommerce, Shopify and Magento platform that automates all the website tasks, including sending emails as well. You will be free from all the desk work and have more time enjoying holidays yourself. For more information, Atom 8 can be scheduled to change sales prices, theme and publish banner products. Email marketing will no longer be exhausted since this app can do it for you. In addition, you can also use it to change sort order for out of stocks. Just too many incredible functions within an app. Such a small and smart assistant you should not say no to. Backorder It is much harder to track your inventory at this time of year since people would come and go with plenty of things. But what will happen if your inventory equals 0 on an eCommerce site? It can be understood easily that your consumer will go to another store to find, and don’t care about the fact that you can immediately restock. In this case, refer to Backorder. This app allows consumers to order even when the inventory equals 0. By doing that, you will not lose your potential consumers. Adopt a variety of promotions Shoppers like deals and proactively look for those. And within Black Friday, this eagerness becomes even more. As a matter of fact, this is the perfect time for you to plan on several options to keep them engaged all season long and to boost sales, introduce new and potential products. Here are some of our suggestions for what you can try:  Offer gift cards when spending a certain amount of money  Offer seasonal services such as free wrapping, free shipping  Build urgency with daily coupon codes or windows for free shipping. Implement a loyalty or rewards program. The best part about this time of year is that it’s a chance to have fun and get creative with your deals so that you’re really taking advantage of the holiday themes. Optimize your checkout experience Another thing to make sure you are able to convert from shoppers to consumers, check out your payment process. Does it all happen on one single page or do people have to go through many steps? This can make it easier for those shopping on mobile devices to complete their purchase quickly. By doing this, you will not only attract more consumers by word of mouth but also be able to increase their retention and boost sales. Conclusion Now’s the time to start preparing for the influx of holiday shoppers. By creating an experience that entices shoppers and offers a smooth path to purchase can help ensure they’ll select your eCommerce store over the competition.