In recent years, B2B e-commerce has become increasingly important. The turnover of B2B e-commerce has recently exceeded that of B2C e-commerce. However, online sales are still marginal in the B2B sector. However, it is becoming increasingly important for companies to engage in online sales. Consumer habits are changing, and so are those of the same people in their business context! To succeed in your digital strategy, you need to make sure you have an innovative e-commerce site that is adapted to your customers.
In B2B, one of the particular and fundamental elements remains the pricing policy, which is always personalised and specific to each customer. So how do you manage the prices on your B2B e-commerce site? This is the subject we are tackling today.
Traditional B2B pricing policy
Traditionally, each professional buyer negotiates his rates with the company according to different criteria (quantity purchased, loyalty, etc.).
Each customer therefore has specific prices, which they have negotiated with the seller beforehand. They also get access to personalised offers and promotions.
As a fundamental practice in B2B sales, if you start selling online, your customer must be able to find their negotiated rates when they log on to your interface. Your customer will never order online if he is not sure to find all the conditions he has negotiated with you before.
Thus, in order to maintain and retain your customers, your e-commerce site must offer this customisation capability.
Many tend to think that selling online will no longer allow them to customise rates, believing that it is not possible to apply the rates negotiated with their customers via an e-commerce site.
With BigCommerce, it's possible!
Creation of customer groups and price segmentation on BigCommerce
BigCommerce offers the creation of groups to segment customers according to their negotiated pricing terms. Indeed, you can classify your customers by segments or groups with the customer group feature available on some BigCommerce programs.
By associating a customer with a unique customer group, you can automatically personalise their experience on the site. You will be able to assign prices, product recommendations and discounts directly to the customer using the integrated price list functionality.
For example, it will be possible to create a loyalty group in which you give access to specific products or categories at reduced rates. You could also create a dedicated wholesale group to give access to specific product categories without showing them to retail customers.
With this segmentation, each customer sees his or her prices without seeing the prices negotiated with your other customers! This is a real advantage for both sellers and customers.
Consequently, the problem encountered in the implementation of certain BtoB e-commerce solutions on the market is the volume involved in managing these specific tariffs.
Let's imagine a company with a catalogue of 20,000 product references and 1,000 active customers. If the solution is not properly architected, it will be necessary to multiply the number of product references by the number of specific customer conditions to obtain all possible price combinations.
The advantage of BigCommerce is that it offers this functionality as standard in an Open SaaS model, which means that the size of the infrastructure and its adaptation according to the volume are taken care of by the editor. The entire infrastructure is managed directly by BigCommerce in the Google cloud.
Finally
Thus, the management of customer rates is possible within the framework of online sales. The functionalities offered by BigCommerce respond perfectly to this need for customization, which makes this solution the most powerful e-commerce interface on the market.
Other BtoB functionalities are also proposed in BigCommerce. They will be the subject of future articles, in particular the possibility of managing buyer profiles for each customer.
While waiting for our next articles, you can discover the whole BigCommerce offer by consulting our BtoB e-commerce page!