B2B eCommerce Management Made Simple

For an eCommerce Manager, the right platform can reduce their workload in a variety of ways. For one, being able to segment customers, pricing and more means you can set up your various buyers and they can see their specific information without needing to contact someone on your team. Second, having multi-customer accounts ensures that you can have merged order histories and more across an entity. Each member of that company can see when orders have been placed and what’s going on with the account (including the billing contact, who may be different from the ordering contact) and the person who approves orders can see them across the organization as well. All of this can be done without needing direct support from you or your team. Finally, if your organization uses salespeople, their orders will be visible to your buyers as well, so an entire order history, including tracking capabilities and more, will be visible all in one place, reducing the need to reach out about orders not placed directly by the buyer.

Data management tends to be a potentially time-consuming part of eCommerce, whether it be loading products, processing orders or creating customers. If you are using other business systems, you can have data pushed and pulled into your eCommerce platform from those systems through reliable integrations, such as the ones Zoey offers for QuickBooks Online and NetSuite. CSV import and export capabilities, as well as data mapping tools for files pulled from Google Sheets, Dropbox or other solutions, can also simplify the process by making it easier to upload or download data in bulk. Finally, the ability to push or pull data based on events-based Webhooks can make data that is created based on specific steps in the eCommerce process easier to retrieve or be ingested at the right time. Notably, all of these data automation steps will reduce the risk of errors from data entered manually by a member of your team and will speed up when data is present in various systems to move along things like order fulfillment.

Technology can replace existing methods of capturing orders, and in some cases facilitate orders taken in non-ideal ways through technology today. Instead of manually receiving orders by phone, email, pen and paper while in person, you can use a B2B eCommerce platform built for your warehouse to thrive online. You can connect eCommerce to other key systems, especially if you’re managing a more complex business setup. If you have fulfillment partners or a warehouse, they can be linked in as well, allowing a seamless flow from order placement to fulfillment to invoice management/payment.

Shopify is a popular eCommerce platform, built primarily to support B2C use cases. Its app ecosystem allows for extending the platform in a variety of ways. That said, relying on a platform built for a different use case means more frequent frustrations and limitations that can constrain a business. A B2B-focused eCommerce platform can help not just take pressure off of eCommerce managers, but many other roles that can benefit from such an approach, such as marketing, sales and fulfillment.