What’s behind the shift of b2b companies to eCommerce sites
Business-to-business, or B2B, is one of the fastest-growing segments for new and established companies. Forrester Research posited in January 2019 that in the United States, B2B e-commerce “will reach $1.8 trillion and account for 17% of all B2B sales in the U.S. by 2023.” So what is behind the shift of B2B companies to eCommerce sites, this article will give you a hint regarding this topic. Access To A Larger Customer Base: More B2B Transactions Are Happening Online Net Solutions conducted a study in January 2020 about the state of B2B e-commerce. It found that B2B takes cues from the business-to-customer (B2C) market and tries to emulate the latter’s growth strategies by adapting them. Many B2B companies are moving online because their customer base is there, as well. The clients want knowledge about the products and services available to find the best items or software for their business purposes. Forrester Research found that 74% of B2B buyers conduct research online before purchasing. Education and valuable copy need to go hand-in-hand, and many B2B companies deliver on knowledge. On this note, smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices are often used to make purchases. Net Solutions reveals that 91% of B2B customers use mobile devices to search for a product, and 25% use them to make a transaction. Thus, B2B companies need to have storefronts and web pages that are mobile-friendly and convenient to access. They need to implement upgrades to certain platforms to make them easier for users to access and organize their orders. An office manager, for example, will want to calculate future budgets and check past purchases accordingly. Shipping for physical goods is another concern. B2B companies need to ensure that they can match Amazon for two-day shipping — or other benefits if they cannot meet that standard. This is where wholesalers can stand out by dropshipping, or delivering products only when a customer makes an order. Dropshipping not only reduces the pressures of shipping, but also the risk of accumulating unused inventory. Many e-commerce B2B services are working to fill this niche and increase efficiency within the marketplace. Flexible Payment Options Traditionally, businesses would have to pay for services and goods using cash, check or a credit card. While credit cards have benefits that allow owners and managers to build a business’s credit, they can also prove inflexible. Many B2B customers would rather avoid such inconveniences. Thanks to the internet, e-commerce has a larger variety of payment options. In addition to bank account transfers and credit cards, office managers can often pay via PayPal, Venmo, Apple Wallet or other digital currencies. PayPal even offers credit cards so that a business can take advantage of the policy. This lowers potential barriers for inexperienced or newer entrepreneurs to enter certain fields, as well. While each vendor has its drawbacks — for example, PayPal sometimes will freeze accounts for seemingly arbitrary reasons and take months to restore access to users — they also offer alternatives with convenience. For example, people can install Venmo on their phone and pay off vendors quickly. This flexibility means that a manager doesn’t have to rely on one source of payment for these transactions. Many B2B Buyers Are Younger And Want A Personalized Experience Gen X and Gen Y are some of the top users of B2B e-commerce. Gen X is the generation that came of age in the 1980s and early ’90s, followed by Gen Y, also known as millennials, with birth years between 1981 and 1996. Together, they are key players and business decision-makers. B2B researchers, or potential customers who seek information on certain products and services to assess their value, can provide living proof that millennials are powerful within this type of business. In 2015, Google conducted a study and found that 46% of B2B researchers were between the ages of 18 and 34. Many millennials want an enhanced customer experience when making a purchase online. They will seek as much knowledge as possible about the products that they desire for an office or digital workspace. That means an ideal storefront will be easy to navigate on any digital device, with options for a fast transaction and efficient record-keeping. A track record for purchases allows them to make informed decisions, which increases their confidence in the company providing the history. One potential solution is to either design or outsource the creation of an app for your business. Many corporations have these apps, such as Whole Foods, with QR codes to allow for efficient checkout at grocery stores. Conclusion As we enter the 2020s, grow within global B2B. With technology expanding, you have ample chances to gain a higher market share. Trust your B2B marketers and their research reports to help you reach a higher level.
Is BigCommerce the best eCommerce enterprise platform to look out for in 2023?
With over 95,000 live sites currently using the BigCommerce system for selling items and processing payments online, there’s strong reason to believe that BigCommerce provides a viable and powerful interface for your eCommerce needs. Our BigCommerce Review covers all of the aspects of this eCommerce platform, from the features to the security and support. From there, we hope you will answer yourself whether or not BigCommerce is the best eCommerce enterprise platform to look out for in 2023. Features The BigCommerce features all start with the website builder; since it allows for beautiful, responsive designs, without knowing much about web design. Add and manage products without any problems, and accept payments through a wide variety of options. Customized shipping is a must-have for most vendors, and BigCommerce has all of that. The flexible tax system and dropshipping features ensure that you don’t have to shift around your business model just because of your eCommerce system. Note: According to readers BigCommerce has been largely unresponsive to feature requests, making it difficult for many customers to justify the cost. For example, many of the features are built for primarily US customers. Which leaves the rest of the world with features that aren’t entirely useful. In addition, customers have complained about useful features getting requested over and over in the forums; but never coming to fruition (like the ability to customize order statuses). Ease of Use In terms of startup businesses looking for eCommerce platforms, the first thing companies typically ask about is pricing. After that, the ease of use is almost always the most important area. This makes sense, considering a business person generally doesn’t have the web design or development skills to build a site from scratch or mess around with confusing building processes. So, is BigCommerce easy to use? When you launch your website with BigCommerce they have some nice tutorials and steps to get you started. However, our tests, and the feedback from readers, show that the new Stencil framework from BigCommerce is more friendly for advanced developers. That’s great news for stores that can hire a solid developer. However, non-technical users are finding it difficult to make small tweaks, something that’s necessary for the average inventor or entrepreneur. Next to Shopify, BigCommerce has the features needed for developers, but it’s not quite there for the average non-techie. The first page you see when landing on the dashboard is a list of steps you should take to complete your store within a few seconds. For example, you can add products, set up shipping settings and manage your tax rates. After that, the development gets more complex. Apps and integrations help for customization; and website themes are pre-built for making it look like you hired a pro to design your website. However, BigCommerce relies largely on a company called Pixel Union for its themes. They look sleek and modern, but users have suggested that this focus on one designer leaves room for improvement in the uniqueness area. Not only that, but many of our readers have made it clear that it’s easy to find random bugs that generally don’t get fixed. Pricing At one point BigCommerce had some competitive pricing that compared pretty well with that of Shopify. However, after numerous emails and comments from our readers, it looks like they have dramatically increased prices for their more successful customers (making more than $125,000 a year in revenue). This is a huge blow to both BigCommerce customers and our view on the company as a whole. Sure, you still get some of the fixed prices that we’ll outline below; but once you surpass a certain point in sales you’re going to get slammed with insanely high monthly rates. It’s almost as if BigCommerce is trying to gouge users that make more money, simply because they can. Refer: Bigcommerce cross sell Is it Worth It? The speed and performance of your website come into play for a variety of reasons. First of all, Google and other search engines take your site speed very seriously. The search engines know that your user experience is lessened if the user has to sit around and wait for pages to load. Therefore, a fast site can boost your search engine rankings. Furthermore, your customers are far more likely to stick around and buy something! Seeing as how speed is so important in today’s competitive eCommerce world, it’s great to see that BigCommerce is now definitely the best performing eCommerce platform you can choose. There are several reasons for this. One, BigCommerce has implemented Google AMP on its platform. This is an open-source framework from Google that stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. It increases page load speeds and boosts search engine visibility on your mobile product and category pages. BigCommerce also has something called the Akamai Image Manager built into its system. All BigCommerce users are able to natively access the image manager. Which automatically optimizes all of the images on your site. Conclusion Above are some reviews and analyses regarding BigCommerce enterprise platform. If you have any questions about this topic then contact us and we will help to figure it out.
BigCommerce vs Woocommerce: who will be the winner?
We live in the age of social media and online shopping. More and more businesses choose to start an online store and sell their products that way instead of creating a brick-and-mortar shop. Having an online store will give you the chance to capture a wider audience and you can basically sell worldwide through your website. The first challenge businesses have when starting an online store is choosing the right e-commerce platform that will cover all their needs. There are several popular options available, and two of those are WooCommerce vs BigCommerce. This article will analyze and compare two of them. Design WooCommerce Design It’s not a big surprise that WordPress offers a huge selection of free themes (much more than BigCommerce), but you also have the option to buy a theme. There are many WooCommerce specific themes available, around 52 at this time. The premium themes cost $39 and up, which is a lot less than any BigCommerce theme. You’ll find that WooCommerce is very fast and easily updatable. The quality of themes is superb, with a lot more customization options when you compare it to BigCommerce. Customizing the theme is easy as you can do everything through a familiar WordPress dashboard so, usually, you won’t have any problems getting your store to look just the way you want it. Also, the best thing of all is that you can use any WordPress theme you want because WooCommerce is perfectly integrated within WordPress and any theme will work with WooCommerce online store. There’s one theme that is specifically designed for WooCommerce, and that is Storefront. Storefront is free to download and use, and you can also purchase additional extensions and child themes if you want to add some additional functionality. Depending on what theme you choose, your store will have a different look, feel and functionality. Each theme has unique navigation options and a unique product display, as well as different colours, fonts and stock images. There is, of course, no one size fits all approaches to choosing a theme, but the product availability through WooCommerce opens up options for every possible context. BigCommerce Design With BigCommerce, you have a selection of both free and paid themes. They offer 16 free themes, but usually, most users go for a paid theme eventually. There are 42 paid themes available, and the prices for them range from around $120 to $250, but you also have the option to get one designed for you for substantially more money. They try to make it as easy as possible for a user to perform simple everyday tasks like adding products, but at the same time, they make it a slightly more cumbersome process because they expose some additional options to users who want to deal with some finer details of product customization. Overall, the choice of themes might be heavy on the WooCommerce side, but in terms of quality, the themes on BigCommerce are not lagging behind. Read more: Bigcommerce upsell Price & Fee WooCommerce Pricing Since WooCommerce and WordPress are free, your main cost is going to be the ongoing hosting bill. Besides that, you will probably need a few plugins and extensions to give your store a few additional functions, e.g. if you want to bill your customers each month, you’ll need the Subscriptions extension. This will allow you to save thousands of dollars over the next few years if you go with WooCommerce and not BigCommerce. With WooCommerce, you also get support from people all around the world, along with full mobile responsiveness, default currency control, pre-installed payment gateways, shipping calculations, product variables, automatic taxes, and much more. BigCommerce Pricing BigCommerce has three fixed monthly pricing plans to choose from: – The Standard Plan: at $29.95 per month, it includes hundreds of built-in features like unlimited storage, bandwidth, and sales. You can upload an unlimited amount of products, accept payments through credit cards and PayPal, use coupons, and other great features. In this plan, BigCommerce has transaction fees that you need to pay for each sale. – The Plus Plan: this is the most popular plan and it will cost you $79.95 per month. When you choose this plan, you won’t have any transaction fees. All of the features from the standard plan are included as well. You can also post listings on eBay, and the checkout is actually hosted on your website which is not the case in the standard plan. – The Pro Plan: this plan will set you back $249.95 per month, it includes everything above, plus fraud monitoring, high volume security, and product filtering. Support WooCommerce Support When you have WooCommerce, you will not only have the WooCommerce community available, but also the entire huge WordPress community that can help you with any problem that you may have. They have extensive documentation available and also a ticket system where you can submit your questions. Their documentation is very good and you’re very likely to find an answer to your problem there. Plugin developers are always available to contact and usually get back to you in 1-2 days. This makes a multifunctional site very easy to manage, no matter what sort of errors you run into. BigCommerce Support BigCommerce offers 24/7 support via email, phone, and live chat that WooCommerce doesn’t provide. They also provide guides, forums, and support tickets like WooCommerce does. They’ve moved to 24/7 support after a while because it was the feature that most of their users requested. It was also because there are a lot of people who work in their stores during the night time as well, so it made sense to offer support outside normal business hours. Conclusion Above are some differences regarding BigCommerce vs Woocomerce. We hope based on this, you have made your decision on what to choose. If you have any questions then contact us and we will help you to answer them.
eCommerce platform decision for beginners: Wix vs BigCommerce
It used to be that only the most talented coders could create their own websites, or those wealthy enough to hire professional programmers to do it for them! However, nowadays, with the assistance of some eCommerce platforms, it is possible for everyone to build their own website without knowing a single line of code. So if you want to start an online store or company, choosing the best eCommerce website builder to create the most fantastic, eye-catching, and useful website is a major decision because each one has its own set of features and benefits. This article will compare Wix vs BigCommerce to help you choose the right platform for beginners. Wix vs BigCommerce: Pricing & Plans Wix It offers a free service (which we rate as the best free website builder) as well as a two-week money-back guarantee for all of its paying services. Wix also sells Wix Enterprise, a high-end market solution with a personalized pricing package tailored for large companies. The more time you sign up ahead of time, the cheaper your paid Wix package would be. When you pick an annual rate package, for example, you’ll spend less per month. Here are the distinctions in each Wix plan: Plan Paid Monthly Paid Yearly Combo $18/month $14/month Unlimited $23/month $18/month Pro $28/month $23/month VIP $47/month $39/month Business Basic $28/month $23/month Business Unlimited $33/month $27/month Business VIP $56/month $49/month BigCommerce BigCommerce offers 4 different plans to fit your business’ needs, from starting out to ready for advanced features like Product Filtering or increased API calls corresponding to 4 price ranges which are suitable for every customer’s pocket. Besides, it also provides customers with a special offer of a discount of 10% and a free trial for 15 days for annually “Plus” and “Pro” plans. The system will automatically upgrade your plan based on your trailing sales volume during 12 months. If you wish to take advantage of the features available in other plans, feel free to upgrade your plan anytime. While individuals and small firms would find it ideal to purchase the first three plans for their company or a certain part of their product range, the last plan is geared towards serving large companies and businesses. Plan Paid Monthly Standard $29.95/month Plus $79.95/month Pro $299.95/month Enterprise based on business’s requirements Wix vs BigCommerce: ECommerce Features Both Wix eCommerce and BigCommerce are eCommerce websites, but they cater to various consumer groups. However, we would like to believe that each website is more suitable for distinct kinds of enterprises. BigCommerce is a feature-rich eCommerce website designed for larger and growing companies. The other is an eCommerce website for small and independent companies that is simple to use. With that in mind, let’s compare the eCommerce capabilities of the two companies. Wix This eCommerce may be a more basic eCommerce website, but that doesn’t mean it’s devoid of plugins and applications to help you optimize your profits. 1. Numerous clever eCommerce add-ons Wix’s eCommerce models come with a range of valuable eCommerce platforms and applications. This basic “kick-starter pack” will assist you in These simple tools will help handle your market and increase the store’s online presence for the vast majority of small business owners. That’s not to suggest Wix doesn’t have more sophisticated eCommerce functionality – it certainly does! Many BigCommerce themes have these features as usual, but you can find the majority of these third-party features by searching the Wix App Market. Some of these apps are free, but most apps that offer additional eCommerce features are only available to paying subscribers. Read more: Bigcommerce upsell 2. Best apps for you: It’s comforting to know that Wix has additional capabilities if you need them, so what are the best eCommerce applications for newbie entrepreneurs? The below list includes some of them: BigCommerce As we can see, the reputation of BigCommerce is built from themes’ useful apps and plugins which produce a range of functions. When it comes to Ecommerce features from the app marketplace to the ability to write custom HTML, BigCommerce can assist you well. 1. Build new tools Fortunately, the majority of sales and marketing features you need are contained by BigCommerce themes. This is such a time-efficient and money-saving solution that you no longer have to spend your precious time finding extra features for your online store. Some core features that can be found on a BigCommerce theme are: 2. Making choices without complication BigCommerce also provides users extra features in its App Marketplace, even when you are unlikely to need it. While some of them are free to use (SurveyMonkey), others require purchasing after a free trial period. Practically, free trials are an incredible way to test out different features and functions to see whether they are worth spending money on. Wix vs BigCommerce: Themes Wix It has a sample gallery of over 500 professionally designed models, including hundreds of specialized eCommerce shop designs. The great thing about Wix’s models is that you don’t need to know how to code to edit them as much as you can! Starting with a blueprint will save you a lot of time and effort. You not only get an appealing eCommerce shop interface that is designed for your clients, but you also save time that can be put to better use in other areas of your market. BigCommerce BigCommerce themes may lack the eye-catching animation of Wix models, but they illustrate the fact that it caters specifically to users who want to create eCommerce websites. 1. Customized templates designed to sell BigCommerce has over 100 themes, many of which have been hand-picked and crafted specifically for eCommerce pages. This is particularly useful for eCommerce beginners or independent traders because you can not only customize a store theme to best represent your company (for example, by changing the colors and images), but you can also use them as a source of design inspiration if you’re stuck for ideas. One of the most irritating aspects of Wix is
How Magento B2B eCommerce digital portal can help you serve bigger audience efficiently
Going along with the seamless development of B2B eCommerce business, the business runners need to develop their infrastructure to serve a larger number of customers; to improve their technical solutions and eCommerce websites to serve a larger number of customers. With the Magento merchants, they need to take advantage of the B2B eCommerce digital portal to serve bigger audience; and meet the demand of each customer. Our article today will point out how a digital portal can help your Magento business. Satisfy Bigger Audience With Magento B2B eCommerce Digital Portal Logical Account Management The B2B business runners need to deal with a team or a department customer rather than the separate ones; therefore, the customer accounts are more complicated. Magento provides a company account for the customers and all the company PICs can login and conduct the transactions as an admin. With these functions, the members in the procurement team can keep track of and take part in the buying procedure by sub-accounts and flexible permission from their managers. The B2B sellers can understand customers thoroughly through their management to have appropriate strategies to deal with each B2B customer. High-secured Account Permission With various B2B customer accounts, the eCommerce business uses “Catalog permission” to protect private content for each customer. Only the one who has permission to access is able to access the category; including products, pricing plan, purchase policy and so on. The businesses only need to go to the Store, choose Setting; and then click to Configuration on the Admin column to adjust the Category Permission for each customer account. Quote Request And Negotiation B2B transactions include valuable and big orders that both the customers and sellers need to go through some steps to reach the final agreement of price. Magento allows you to hide your public prices, set up quotes requests and price negotiation. When going to the negotiation, the buyers and sellers can be more connected and understand each other’s demands to get better deals. The price here is flexible and depends on customer budget, product quantity and contract duration. The process of price negotiation starts when the customers find the product interested and make a quote request for the sellers. Then, the sellers will consider the quote and make a response. If the customers are satisfied with the reply, they will convert the quote to cart. Personalized Experience Thanks to B2B accounts, Magento provides customers better personalized experience when shopping online. The sellers will rely on data from account management to personalize marketing strategies, customer services approaches and membership programs. Moreover, the personalized search engine and pre-set filters can shorten the searching time; and allow the customers to find the product and make a purchase more quickly. Omnichannel Experience It would be a mistake if we don’t mention omnichannel when talking about Magento. Omnichannel can connect the suppliers, sellers and buyers closely with accessible databases and centralized management. With omnichannel, all the transactions are recorded and stored. Then the sellers and buyers can simultaneously keep track of and make immediate adjustments to avoid potential problems. Conclusion If you want to serve a bigger audience efficiently, the Magento B2B eCommerce digital portal should be never missed. We hope you take advantage of this appropriately and get a huge amount of benefit.
