The B2B sale is traditionally a lot longer than its B2C counterpart, but business buyers are bringing many of their ecommerce expectations to B2B - forcing the companies that provide products and services to companies to offer streamlined, cross-channel experiences or risk losing sales to those that do.
Bloomingdale, Ill.-based company Christian Art Gifts is ahead of the curve in this regard as it is now taking a B2C approach with its B2B customers with the implementation of responsive design, faceted search and one-page checkout.
Christian Art Gifts was able to add these capabilities through its use of NetSuite's Suitecommerce. Shortly after going live with Suitecommerce in Feb. 2014, the company saw a five-fold increase in overall traffic and online orders. Christian Art Gifts also found significant improvements in valuable metrics like average order value and page views per session.
Using NetSuite, Christian Art Gifts is now able to give its 4,000 B2B retail customers (which includes Barnes & Noble), an online shopping experience that mimics some of the most popular consumer destinations. Its B2B retail customers now have self-service account management capabilities to view orders, access invoices and management payments.
NetSuite customer RST Brands has found similar success but took the opposite approach - building on the success it already achieved with NetSuite for its B2B side and now re-launching two direct-to-consumer websites. For a little background, RST Brands supply home and lifestyle décor products to leading retailers like Home Depot, Costco, Sears, etc.
To build its B2C brand, it re-launched www.rstbrands.com and www.flowwall.com, on NetSuite Suitecommerce. Since going live in Dec. 2013, RST Brands has seen higher conversions and less cart abandonment and single-page bounces, particularly with smartphone and tablet users.
"Suitecommerce has opened up the door for us to be able to deliver the experiences our customers have come to expect when shopping online," said Matt Grimm, RST Brands director of ecommerce. "We have definitely seen an increase in mobile engagement. Site speed is faster, the search is easier to navigate, especially faceted search, so customers can filter results and quickly find what they want."