Why B2B commerce cannot be just e-commerce

B2B commerce: why your company should adopt it

It’s been at least five years since companies with turnovers ranging from €50 million to €1 billion have asked us to set up a complementary digital channel to support their sales networks in:

• establishing an ongoing relationship with their customers, even when they are not physically present
• organising their time more effectively, dedicating it to developing new clients
• serving and communicating with customers who are more distant or less frequently reachable

The first request we receive when talking about B2B e-commerce with our “new” contacts is the possibility of having a shop in their customers’ pockets, allowing them to place repeat orders at specific and reserved conditions at any time: 24/7.

This is why the very first version of the solution was created almost 10 years ago, and it was called smartsales. Its goal was to further empower the sales force by enabling direct reorders from B2B customers.

In an increasingly complex and fast-changing world, the transaction is only the final step of a chain that actually begins much earlier—well before clicking the “add product” or “reorder” button in the purchase history of that supplier.

The point is that the companies commissioning our .onSales B2B commerce solution have long-term, trust-based relationships with their customers—sometimes without even being fully aware of it!

This relationship is built on the concept of service, which today represents the predominant part of the perceived value compared to simply having a product available or offering a better price than the competition.

.onSales B2B: just like your home banking app

This B2B commerce service is the same one that, as consumers, we have appreciated for years in home banking apps. We know we have in our pockets a tool that opens up an incredible window of services and information, allowing us to:

• keep a full history of all your documents, organised neatly and easily searchable
• make payments directly from your phone
• interact with the service provider without having to pick up the phone or wait to speak with a customer service operator
• state your preferences or sign up to new contractual terms
• analyse your purchasing profile so you can be advised on how to buy better

The data is there—and often there’s more than enough—but when an application organises it in a way that makes even just some of the above options easy for you, then we are no longer talking about e-commerce, but about an ecosystem.

It’s a kind of portable metaverse in your pocket, a service so convenient that you will hardly want to give it up to switch easily to another provider.

So please, let’s stop calling it B2B e-commerce 😉