Published on December 22nd, 2019 | by Bibhuranjan

B2B Platform for e-commerce: Development Trends in 2020

The e-commerce market in the B2B segment is at the stage of active growth. According to studies b for 2019, 93% of buyers today prefer to place orders online in B2B – the truth is, this is about the US market. Moreover, more than half of the companies (56%) make at least half of the purchases online.

If we talk about the B2B e-commerce market – it is estimated at $ 20 billion and is one of the ten largest markets in the world, but it has great potential for expansion. The B2B e-commerce platform allows you to take advantage of this potential and take cooperation with suppliers and customers of the company to a new level.

Wholesale companies often seek a clear definition of a B2B platform – what it is and for what tasks such a solution is applicable. B2B e-commerce platform is a portal for B2B sales automation that allows you to optimize sales taking into account the individual requirements of the company for organizing business processes, connect accounting systems of suppliers, reduce the burden on managers and ultimately increase sales. Such a b2b e-commerce platform also includes marketplaces and systems for electronic procedural bidding.

Trends in the development of e-commerce in the industry and prospects for the introduction of Best E-commerce platforms for 2020 were discussed by experts of the largest cloud provider of B2B e-commerce systems.

Using the marketplace model as a system of low-value and high-grade purchases

There are several types of products that automate electronic sales and purchases over the Internet in the B2B segment:

B2B-portal is an e-commerce platform that allows one company to sell to many customers – legal entities (distributors, dealers, resellers), corporate clients and self-employed individuals. The owner of the platform is the seller, he is interested in increasing sales, increasing the speed of warehouse turnover, the ability to digitize work with customers and reduce the impact of the human factor on the quality of processing customer requests.

Marketplace – a platform for the sale of goods from suppliers to various customers. Marketplaces are divided into several types.

Classic Marketplace is an Amazon model that allows a supplier to place goods and receive orders. For this service, the site takes a commission.

Aggregator is a platform that collects commodity leftovers and earns on sales margins. Also, the aggregator can sell access to the collected data. Typically, such projects are launched in industries.

The owners of such sites are operators who earn on margin, access, promotion services and advertising.

The procurement portal or ETP is a trading platform for procuring from many suppliers in the electronic bidding format. The owners of such sites are, as a rule, large companies with large purchases.

Buying ready-made B2B e-commerce platforms

Wholesale companies increasingly come to buy a ready-made b2b e-commerce platform, not wanting to start the long and unpredictable process of creating their own product. This cannot be called unjustified: the companies that get involved in their own development, firstly , face serious expenses, and secondly , the problem of lack of expertise, which prevents them from creating a high-quality and stable product that will continue to need further improvements, and thirdly – with insufficient qualifications and lack of experience among developers who did not encounter similar tasks.

Given all this, wholesalers come to the idea of buying a ready-made B2B solution for e-commerce. This saves not only the money that would be spent on development, but also the time to test the platform.

Refusal of significant customization

The desire to accelerate the launch of the B2B platform leads not only to the abandonment of our own development, but also to the minimal settings of the existing solution. By introducing ready-made e-commerce B2B systems / platforms, companies are starting to abandon large-scale interface customization.

Other companies turn to customization, but subsequently come to return the settings to the default version. This approach is illustrated by one of the Agora.ru clients, the company Auto Expert, which specializes in the sale of tires and rims. Initially, Auto expert implemented a complex configuration scheme in the B2B platform and accounting system (1C) in the B2B portal, but after a while decided to return everything to the original “boxed” version.

Using predefined functionality configurations

Another of the trends of B2B e-commerce, which will be continued next year, is ready-made configuration of functionality. Companies are increasingly choosing to use templates for organizing business processes available on their chosen e-commerce platform. The opportunity to take advantage of the proven business logic strategy, which, for example, the B2B portal from Agora.ru offers “out of the box”, will save the company enough resources and money.

The reason for such decisions is a lack of resources, in particular the lack of qualified employees. Lack of personnel leads to the fact that even system integrators themselves are in search of contractors.

Therefore, next year, solutions that can be implemented out of the box using a ready-made set of functions tested by hundreds of customers of such an e-commerce platform will also be successful.

Conclusion

Thus, in 2020, the trends outlined in the past year will develop in the e-commerce market in B2B:

some companies will prefer to use marketplaces for organizing purchases
many will come to the decision to purchase ready-made B2B e-commerce platforms
the prevailing will be the introduction of standard solutions without significant customization
at the same time, there will be a simplification of the functions of B2B platforms in order to increase productivity
the number of requests for mobile solutions will gradually increase;
more applications will appear to simplify the work with B2B-platforms from mobile devices;
platforms will be forced to actively develop logistics

Tags: B2B, business, commerce, development, website

About the Author

Bibhuranjan Editorial Officer, technofaq.org I'm an avid tech enthusiast at heart. I like to mug up on new and exciting developments on science and tech and have a deep love for PC gaming. Other hobbies include writing blog posts, music and DIY projects.