24 February 2017 by Caroline Levey

Online Business Processes

The explosive growth of Business to Consumer (B2C) has created a lot of attention over the past few years as more and more businesses opt to sell their products and services online.

This is where companies have jumped on the band wagon and utilised Business to Business (B2B), as their customers have become accustomed to the ability to make retail and lifestyle purchases online.

Companies using B2B are seen to be growing and innovating rapidly as they’ve already pulled far away from their competitors. Ensure your company joins in on the race by having a look at a few best practices for implementing a successful B2B website.

B2B Best Practices Guide:

Taking your business processes online

B2B is not limited to only selling products online to an established customer, but also includes the exchange of information and services, such as allowing customers to view financial documents, responding to and tracking customer queries, doing reports and targets and booking training online, to name a few. B2B enables businesses to form electronic relationships with their distributors, resellers, suppliers, franchises and other partners.

Customisation is key

Each and every business is different and the first step is to find the B2B platform that best fits your business operation. Platforms that work for your business today need to be developed in such a way that they will be able to be adjusted and rearranged to meet new challenges and business opportunities in the future.

A robust platform is also essential to integrate with third-party enterprise applications to facilitate online sales, reports, and other business applications.

Developing software to meet business processes

Instead of adapting the business processes to meet the software requirements, software should be developed to meet the business requirements. Even though this will increase development costs, businesses will reap the rewards by identifying and implementing business processes that will save time and ultimately increase profits.

Functional Design

The functional design process includes everything that a platform does and how it appears and functions for each company stakeholder and customer. In order to build this design, you will need to ensure your website has a clean, organised and professional design. As the ultimate aim for a functional design would be to build and develop a useful and easy to use platform to ensure it can be used by all stakeholders.