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Bringing Checkout Innovation To B2C And B2B Brands

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Forrester Research has included Bold Commerce in both their B2C and B2B Now Tech reports which analyze commerce solutions for business leaders.  

The reports come at a time of continued growth for both B2C and B2B ecommerce, and as the technologies that power them continue to evolve. Forrester predicts ecommerce growth in 2021 to top out over 15%, the highest rate in 8 years (excluding 2020), while ⅓ of B2B buyers are now purchasing through ecommerce.

Bold is among the new breed of component solutions, leveraging headless commerce frameworks to power their Checkout Experience Suite plugin used by thousands of brands. Brands can customize the look, flow, and functionality of checkout with flexible APIs and webhooks, to reduce friction and drive increased conversion.

“Inclusion in the B2C and B2B Now Tech reports is a reflection of how our Checkout Experience Suite can help both types of enterprises grow revenue with advanced checkout, subscriptions and pricing capabilities,” says Deanna Traa, Chief Marketing Officer at Bold Commerce.

Traa adds how Bold’s solution offers one checkout “to unify both business opportunities, such as helping Staples Canada power their checkout, pricing and promotions for retail and wholesale customers with a single checkout solution.” 

Staples Canada, like many enterprise brands, is faced with the challenge of driving innovation and efficiency, while servicing the complex requirements of both B2C and B2B customer segments. This includes streamlining the ordering process for B2B customers, and implementing a single source of truth for pricing and promotion management across all channels and customer segments. For example, one checkout  serves up regional pricing based on location, customer specific wholesale pricing, and stacked discounts or flash sale promotions for online and instore shoppers. 

“B2B buyers look to Bold for flexibility to build a checkout experience tailored to business needs,” Traa says. “As well as being highly customizable, it comes pre-integrated with many leading solutions that already are part of an enterprise B2B or B2C tech stack, such as payment gateways, tax and shipping solutions.”

Optimize the path to purchase for B2C shoppers

B2C shoppers expect a personalized frictionless shopping journey across all touchpoints.  Brands are investing in digital marketing, discovery, and personalization – curating the shopper journey to drive revenue and customer loyalty.  And while checkout lives at the edge of the shopper journey, there is still a significant checkout experience gap holding brands back. 

In fact, The Checkout Benchmark recently revealed the top 25% of brands are achieving 73.2% checkout completion rates on desktop and 65.3% on mobile, more than doubling the lowest performers. How much is that 40% gap costing low performing brands? 

Enable a smooth shopping journey for B2B customers

For leading enterprise brands, understanding the customer journey is crucial for building lasting relationships with loyal clientele. Brands benefit when they shift focus to creating seamless journeys across multiple touchpoints. This is evident in B2C, and even more pronounced in B2B where complex journeys with multiple stakeholders are involved in the buying process. Insist on agility from your next commerce solution to gain the power you need to quickly eliminate friction points that come to light from those journey maps.

Traa says a robust checkout suite will set B2B companies on the right course. “Brands need better ecommerce experiences to grow, and when we talk about checkout it’s not just about where payment happens but also extends to include capabilities with our suite – like conditional pricing and logic based on individual accounts.”

She goes on to say, “B2B companies are asking themselves, ‘How do we pick and choose the parts of the customer journey that we can enhance or improve to drive either efficiency or revenue?’”

Coordinate between silos, instill a culture of innovation

Too often, B2B organizations don’t have their IT teams working in collaboration across functions to select the software partners or vendors that would power their ecommerce initiatives seamlessly. Establishing a cross-functional team, and opting to collaborate and engage with technology partners early and often is the best route for bringing your vision to life.

Traa adds that  involving trusted partners early in the process can help “ensure you are clearly defining the problem you are trying to solve and how the solution fits into the context of how you’re doing business today and how it contributes to evolving the business for the future.”

Going hand-in-hand with that insight, find, cultivate, and support your development team. The stronger your internal developer ecosystem, the better equipped a B2B company can be to integrate and maintain innovative ecommerce solutions. 

Creating a sustainable strategy for a B2B company that is looking to continuously develop their tech stack should have components of an in-house developer culture that acts “as a marriage of IT technologists and business users to align the business strategy with technical needs,” adds Traa.

Whether the business model is B2B or B2C enhanced checkout experiences are important to the future of an omnichannel strategy.“Brands need robust APIs to let them tailor and customize their checkout experiences so it can be as smooth and frictionless as possible,” adds Traa. “And based on our growing experience in the B2C space, we believe we are well-positioned to help B2B businesses think about their transaction experiences differently.”

Elevate your checkout

This originally appeared on Bold Commerce and is made available here to cast a wider net of discovery.
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