March 20, 2023

By: Surbhit Arora and Tushar Sehjpal

In our last blog, Introduction to B2B Marketplace, we talked briefly about how & why ecommerce has paved a way for B2B marketplaces. The blog mentions the fundamental questions that businesses need to answer, to define their marketplace strategy and operations. We also briefly touched upon what it takes to build a successful B2B Marketplace.

In this blog, we will deep dive into some of the key pillars required to build a robust and scalable B2B online marketplace that strives to simplify the B2B buying/ selling experience.

1. Seamless Commerce capability
2. Intelligent Order Management System
3. World class Customer experience (CX) capability
4. Strong Platform Foundation

Seamless Commerce Capability

With the rise of ecommerce trends in D2C, we have witnessed similar growth patterns in B2B industry too. The focus on providing a seamless shopping experience has been one of the most important aspects of new-age commerce platforms. A study conducted by Merit says that 73% of today’s B2B buyers are millennials, and they expect a smooth shopping experience, whether it’s B2B or B2C. A great B2B online marketplace with a seamless shopping capability helps businesses discover various customers, suppliers, and products across different categories in order to make the best deals possible. It also facilitates secure payments and offers additional logistics support. In such a marketplace, businesses are enabled with self-service channels, that helps them adapt to the rapidly changing customer expectations. Some of the best-in-class capabilities which contribute to seamless shopping experience are mentioned below.

1. B2B Catalog Management to offer personalization and customization options specific to their customer demands
2. Personalised Reports and Dashboards to give complete transparency and E2E visibility of the ground activities, such as daily orders, days on hand, order to cash timelines, etc.
3. Customization of workflows and processes as per the sellers’ requirement and compliance standards

Intelligent Order Management System

An Order Management System (OMS), a layer just beneath the commerce layer, can be called the backbone of e-marketplace. This is where all the orders and returns are processed. Over the years, we have witnessed the evolution of order execution and fulfillment – from manual order entries and allocation to automated returns management. A strong data layer that underlines the transactional and historical patterns of buying/ selling is a key enabler of building an intelligent marketplace. With the integration of more and more data and analytics capabilities, OMS layers provide that intelligence quotient to your B2B online marketplace.

There are two key reasons why having a robust and intuitive OMS is extremely important. Firstly, it allows businesses to meet customers’ expectations of flexible ordering options, picking, receiving, and returning. Secondly, an OMS (order management system) enables businesses to fulfill and manage distributed orders, with options of fulfilling a particular order from a specific or multiple locations. Based on our experience with multiple clients across domains, we have shortlisted some of the key features that make an intelligent OMS.

• Demand Prediction and Forecasting: A B2B Marketplace with an intelligent OMS capability gathers data and insights from trends such as purchase behavior, discounts and promotions and predicts demands. This helps sellers to thoughtfully forecast, thereby allowing high OTIFs to customers.
• Automated Ordering and Reordering: An OMS has the ability to check the new in-demand and out-of-stock items and automatically reorder based on the user’s historic data.
• Inventory Management: An intelligent OMS uses AI/ML models to analyze the inventory data and prevent stocking issues, and help sellers determine the right number of items to stock up.

World-class Customer Experience Capability

In our conversations with clients, focusing on strengthening their B2B business, we have identified a significant concern. Most customers expect the B2B buying experience on a digital marketplace to match their B2C online buying experience. According to a Mckinsey report, B2B customers demand a better customer experience with their top priorities revolving around – cost savings, purchase efficiency, internal client satisfaction, seamless communication and information transparency. As a result, speed and efficiency come up as recurring priorities in the B2B buying journey, to the extent that these have a greater influence on customer loyalty than cost reduction.

From our client experience, a few of the top CX best practices that can help you transform your B2B experience using a digital marketplace as a platform are depicted in the below infographic.

1) An optimal web store design, offering an engaging experience and online and offline capabilities on both web and mobile devices, making it easy for your customers to find what they need
2) Self service capabilities allowing your customers to quickly access what they need, when they need it, including insights into products/ services
3) A synchronized tech stack to deliver a fast and streamlined customer experience, from purchasing and delivery to invoicing and returns
4) Real-time, accurate information and seamless communication/ customer engagement strategy for more transparency in your B2B customer experience

A persona-based user experience design approach lets you get into the shoes of your customers by focusing on the who, what and why. This will help any customer experience optimization effort throughout the digital marketplace roadmap by offering an element of personalization for each customer segment.

Strong Platform Foundation

From here onwards, we try to draw a distinction between the front-end and the back-end experience, that ultimately defines the quality of your digital product (in our case an online digital marketplace). During our client interactions around building world-class b2b marketplace platforms, we ensured that the foundation blocks of information orchestration, storage and analytics are considered at the outset of the digital strategy. It is critical to think about the relationship between IT, Commerce, Supply Chain and Customer Experience when discussing a roadmap for your digital commerce journey. Once your B2B business grows, it will exert pressure on your core business, data protection and information security needs. A strong B2B marketplace platform foundation will help you iron out such challenges that may crop up.

Conclusion

A world class B2B digital marketplace, therefore, aims to reduce the friction during the buying/selling process. It helps the users buy/sell their products easily by offering:

• An easy registration and on-boarding process with bare minimum details required
• Easy and effective catalogue creation for discovery and user research
• User support with inbuilt intelligence on inventory availability and order orchestration
• An effective logistics system, backed by the best logistics partners (inhouse/ contractors)
• Full compliance with industry and government rules and regulations
• Easy payments and returns
• Intuitive dashboards that provide visibility of key order data and fulfillment as key performance indicators (KPIs).
• Effortless operations, including supplier/vendor onboarding, payment management, warehouse and inventory management, marketing, and promotions etc.

Though all these operational aspects are a part of one or more of the four pillars mentioned above, it is important to consider the key functionalities while building the marketplace. In our next blog, we will cover the operations part of B2B marketplace.

References:
https://oroinc.com/b2b-ecommerce/blog/10-essential-features-for-b2b-ecommerce-solutions/
https://www.bigcommerce.com/articles/b2b-ecommerce/b2b-ecommerce-platforms/
https://echidna.co/blog/top-b2b-ecommerce-features/
https://www.cloudfy.com/platform/features/
https://fabric.inc/blog/intelligent-order-management/