If you represent a large national corporation that works with partners around the country, B2B fulfillment is an enormously important topic. Perhaps you are a franchisor, and you have hundreds of franchisees running their businesses while depending on you for marketing support. You may be a manufacturer who has critical relationships with the retail partners that carry your products.
In these types of relationships, the way you communicate with these partners and get your products and marketing materials to them greatly influences their success, and by extension, yours. Today we’ll show you the factors that matter most when it comes to the online storefront you use as your hub for B2B fulfillment activities.
1. Look and Feel
The very first thing that a franchisee or retail partner will notice when they log onto your online storefront for the first time is what it looks like. As they make their first few clicks, they’ll start to notice what it feels like. Those two first impressions are very important, and they set the tone for how that B2B partner will see your organization.
At Spectra, we make sure that the B2B customer is deeply impressed by the quality and convenience of our client’s online storefront. That starts with white labeling. The customer who logs onto our client’s site doesn’t see that they are using a portal built and managed by Spectra. Rather, everything is branded for the client and sends the message that the B2B customer is ordering from them.
2. User Experience
Wait a minute–isn’t user experience the same as the look and feel of the online storefront? While the initial impressions are very important, they can be fairly quickly changed in the customer’s mind if the online portal fails to follow through. Once the customer is finished familiarizing himself with the site and looks for items to order, places them in a “shopping cart,” and moves through the steps of placing the order, how intuitive is that process?
The worst potential problem with this part of the B2B relationship is that if it goes badly, the national corporation reaching out to the customer may never find out about it. It is not guaranteed that the individual exploring the storefront will take the time to compose an email to their contact at their wholesale provider and explain in detail the issues that he notices. It’s much more likely that he will simply avoid using the system.
Instead, it’s up to the national corporation to make sure they know that the online storefront they offer to their B2B customers is easy to use, secure, and trustworthy. With Spectra’s help, you can be confident that the entire user experience, from initial login to completing an order, is seamless and enjoyable.
3. Individual, Not General
Many of our clients use the Spectra online storefront service to reach B2B customers of differing types. Retail partners may come in different sizes and relationship types, and franchisees in some areas of the country may need slightly different marketing materials than others.
If the client offers hundreds of total items through their online storefront but not all items are available to all of their B2B customers, the result can be confusion and delays as users try to order items, only to find out that they are not eligible for them. Worse yet, if the storefront is not set up to prevent unqualified customers from buying certain items, they could get shipped to them by mistake and need to be returned.
To help clients avoid these headaches, Spectra offers individualized access to online storefronts. Each B2B customer gets a unique username and password, and our team uses that login information to make sure that each customer only sees the items that you as the client have approved for them.
A wholesale distributor can use this capability to create tiered access levels for retail partners. Those who order a certain amount annually, for example, can move into higher tiers and get access to special marketing materials. Our expert team can help you brainstorm about other ways to use individualized access to improve your relationships with your B2B customers.
4. Ongoing Support
In the simplest B2B fulfillment experience, a customer places their order for materials, then receives that order at their address a few days later. But when complications happen along the way or after the order is delivered, a critical inflection point occurs. When the customer needs to have an issue resolved, what happens next can either solidify the relationship long-term or cast serious doubts on it.
Clients of Spectra never need to worry about the kinds of customer service failures that can drive B2B customers away. Not only does Spectra’s fulfillment expertise minimize the number of mistakes that happen during the process, but the Spectra team is also committed to responding quickly to service requests and giving customers the help they need to get back on track.
Reverse logistics are another important category of services that can help Spectra’s clients make the most of B2B fulfillment. Giving a franchisee the ability to return unused marketing materials after the conclusion of a campaign, for example, makes it easier for them to set up their promotional efforts without worrying about whether they are ordering enough volume.
Spectra’s clients also offer advertising materials such as yard signs, stand-alone banners, and other large format printed items through their online storefronts, giving their B2B customers the option to return them after use. Spectra inspects and restores the items to good condition, then places them back in inventory where they are ready to be ordered and used again in the future.
Create Your Online Storefront With Spectra
Does your online storefront do all these things well? If not, or if you haven’t yet begun to offer your B2B customers access to your materials online, your first step is to schedule a consultation with Spectra. Our fulfillment professionals can tell you more about just what’s possible with our intuitive, customer-friendly online storefronts.
