Top 5 Essential B2B Features

01 September 2020 15:14

Selling B2B online, and managing your wholesale customers, is an essential part of your business. Many companies are looking for a solution that is both easy-to-operate, but flexible enough to handle the granularity of their processes. iPages has a large array of features that are highly suited to B2B selling online and customer management.

1) Customer-Specific Pricing

Many businesses negotiate flexible pricing with their account holders. As a B2B owner you might have the same product priced 5, or 50, or 500 different ways, depending on the customer. It's quite common for a larger customer to have a lower negotiated price, while a new trade relationship might start off on a different standing. iPages is able to handle a unique pricing matrix for each customer for each SKU.

Each product has 4 price break points; single, and then up to 3 extra price break points. You can set the price/unit for all 4 of these prices for each customer, such that the first customer sees regular prices, while the next customer sees a discount on their terms, and so on.

The best bit about this is that the discounts are fully flexible and easy to amend. You can export the data for management in a spreadsheet and re-import the data to quickly update and adjust the levels for each customer.

2) Access-Controlled Variants

Product Variants are a whole topic to explore - how you can set images, pack sizes, min/max order quantities and delivery rates on a per-variant basis. But one feature that people look for above others is trade access control.

This means you can have one listing on your B2B portal, and one on your B2C portal with the same attributes, variant and product information. This means that it is easy for you to manage your listings and inventory in one place, while also controlling with detail the access customers have to each product.

3) Customer Reporting, Groups and CRM

Customers on your business-to-business come in a variety of sizes. You might have department stores, large retailers, small independent chains, well-known close customers and so on. If you're looking to manage these customers into different groups and track their activity, you can manage this within iPages.

You might want to send communications, updates and offers to specific groups, and managing a customer's group and mailing preferences is easy within iPages. This means you can have targeted campaigns and information to specific customer groups, allowing you to target discounts and information.

4) Inventory Management; Links to Warehouse

If you are selling in a large scale online, you likely have a warehouse partner solution either in house or externally through a 3PL provider. iPages makes it easy to send and transmit information to your warehouse system of choice. Every warehouse system is different, but there are typically three major feeds of information:

Receive stock level information to display in real-time what SKUs are available.
Send orders to a warehouse for fulfilment.
Receive back a confirmation of shipment and notify customer.

iPages makes this process seamless and joined up from your website through to fulfilment.

5) Customer Account Management

Typically business to business customers pay on account, with agreed terms and limits. In iPages you can manage a customer's account, their current credit limit, see their order history and settle payments against their account. Here are few features Customers can have within iPages:

See and track aged debt across all accounts, see which customers are overdue on their statement.
Give a customer an account code for when you want to export this to another system.
Set a default payment method and delivery option for a customer.
Set custom pricing and trade access.
Set global discount on all items for this customer
Give credit limits and opening credit amounts
Make payments against their account, choosing with payment method - cheque, BACS, online, cash etc.

B2B Selling made simple

With iPages, you get a complete, all-in-one web solution that integrates with your warehouse system to dispatch and fulfil orders easily. If you don't have a WMS, you can use our pick and delivery notes to create these documents, too.

What features would you look for in a web store to manage B2B selling and warehouse solutions? iPages has integrated stock management, links to fulfilment, customer account management and unrivalled product detail. If you're weighed down by paperwork and complicated sales processes handling inbound orders, we would love to hear from you.

No more plugins, just clean functionality for order management.

We appreciate every business is different and your particular requirements will be unique to you. We'd love to hear from you to learn how we can support you - get in touch today.