By Ruth Richter • July 08, 2024
If your company operates in the Business to Business (B2B) sphere, you know how important customer relationships are. By carefully cultivating relationships with your B2B customers, you can often ensure repeat sales and a steady income. But if your business doesn’t have a B2B portal for these customers, you’re missing out on one of the best ways to increase your customers’ satisfaction.
A B2B portal allows for a customized shopping experience for each company, and it’s essential for any business looking to thrive in the B2B world. In this blog, we’ll take a closer look at the benefits and important features of B2B portals before exploring the different options that ROI and IN-SYNCH can help you integrate with Sage 100.
The Benefits of a B2B Portal
A B2B portal can have many benefits for your business! A B2B portal speeds up the reorder process, making it easy for customers to resupply when needed. Some also allow for automatically recurring orders, which provide stability and efficiency on both ends of the transaction. It also makes it easy for your business to apply custom pricing or bulk options for particular customers. This can be especially useful when your company offers complex or customizable bundles of products. In addition, a B2B portal can increase your customers’ satisfaction by providing a seamless, personalized interface with your company.
Important B2B Portal Features
Here are some important features to look for if your company is in the market for a B2B portal:
- Many customization capabilities: With a B2B portal, the more customizable options, the better. For a truly tailored experience, your company should be able to display pricing, sales options, and even product types or specifications according to each customer’s company. Many portals also allow your team to set up customer groups according to location, business size, or order volume and apply pricing differences to each group.
- AI capabilities: For an even more customized experience, some portals use AI to suggest products to your customers based on their order history, increasing the likelihood that they’ll find what they need right away. These sorts of AI tools gather data and “learn” what a particular customer is most interested in, showing them related products accordingly.
- Integrated payment options: B2B sales often involve more unique forms of payment such as purchase orders, payment terms, checks, or corporate accounts. Some purchases may even be tax exempt. It’s important that your B2B portal can deal with each of these payment types.
Integration: The Most Important Feature
No matter how many great features your new B2B portal has, they won’t do your company any good if the portal isn’t integrated with your ERP. Integration is essential for B2B portals, given the sheer amount of complex data and pricing information that appears in both your company’s ERP and your portal.
Our IN-SYNCH solution can integrate any third-party software with your Sage 100 ERP, and we work with many ecommerce platforms that offer B2B portals. Here are some of our most popular B2B integrations:
- BigCommerce: The BigCommerce B2B portal offers native integrations, customized shipping rates, easy quote creation, complete invoice and payment visibility, and the flexibility to handle complex operations.
- Adobe Commerce (Magento): The Adobe Commerce B2B portal allows your business to set up customer company accounts that include multiple buyers in tiered organizational structures. You can also set up unique approval processes for each client.
- WooCommerce: The WooCommerce B2B portal is endlessly flexible, allowing for integrations with dozens of other platforms, including email marketing, payment processing, and accounting software.
Ready to Get Started?
If you’re ready to get started with a B2B portal, we’re here to help! Whether you’re interested in BigCommerce, Adobe Commerce, WooCommerce, or any other ecommerce integration, contact us today.
