Covid-19 Accelerates Change for B2B Distributors


This past year, in"How to Prosper as a B2B Distributor," I addressed the urgent need for wholesale distributors to evolve. I explained the necessity of adapting to a self-serve digital shopping experience, where buyers can find, evaluate, and purchase products anytime. The experience may include live chat for immediate customer support, detailed spec sheets, comparison charts, and even training and advice.

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Covid-19 has accelerated that need.

Legacy Processes

Organizations who have operated in precisely the identical fashion for years frequently rely on key, long-serving personnel. Procedures and systems aren't documented. By way of instance, just a single salesperson might know which product or price fits a particular customer. Identifying the perfect product or price is not necessarily complex, but the method is undefined.

Moreover, manual processes lead to inefficiencies and errors .

Shifting the culture of a business from manual to electronic can be challenging at any time. Doing this in a pandemic can appear doubly tricky.

To start:

  • List the high-tech functions of your company -- e.g., sales, operations, customer support, shipping.
  • Identify which functions are the bottlenecks.
  • Discuss each bottleneck with a worker in that region. Ask her to explain on a web meeting (Zoom or equal ) what she does. Record the meeting.
  • Work with the employee to identify measures that could be automatic. This can serve as the foundation to move the procedure to digital.

Upgrading Internal Systems

An old fashioned system can be debilitating. Seemingly nobody understands it all. It's expensive to keep. It restricts your ability to integrate with other systems. Yet, your company runs off it. Employees realize the need for change, but they're apprehensive nonetheless.

How do you determine when to scrap the outdated system and invest in a new one? Upgrading company-wide software can't be done quickly.

Begin with research:

  • Reach out to contacts in similar sectors and similar-size businesses. Ask about their experiences with applications platforms and implementers.
  • Read reviews on sites like Capterra, Gartner Peer Insights, and TrustRadius.
  • Contact prospective suppliers. Request demos. Request customer references.
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Factors

When assessing potential providers, consider variables that complicate shipping. By way of instance, real-time transport quotes are tough for orders that collectively weigh over 150 lbs. A carrier frequently requires more information even when a distributor knows the weight, which isn't necessarily the case.

Additionally, the pandemic has produced out-of-stocks, forcing vendors to ship partial orders. But heritage ecommerce platforms frequently allow a distributor to bill a customer's credit card just for the whole order, not for partial shipments.

Here are some workarounds:

  • Display shipping rates only for orders of less than 150 pounds. For bigger weights, allow customers to test out but display a message that the shipping cost will be calculated and billed afterward.
  • Consider a service, such as ShipperHQ, that offers shipping flexibility, like products in a number of warehouses, illegal destinations, and exceptions from free shipping offers.
  • Customize your cart to tokenize credit card information (store the information securely together with the payment gateway) and then charge the card when items ship.

Direction

The ground is changing for vendors. Surviving in the digital era demands innovation and strong leadership. Such changes were necessary prior to Covid-19. They are now urgent. The pandemic will finish, but transformations in the B2B marketplace are here to remain.

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