How tradeit is delivering enhanced B2B Ordering Portals

For years, B2B procurement has tended to stay largely unchanged. Often driven by strong existing relationships with account managers and the entrenched use of existing procurement systems, there’s been a reluctance and/or inability to move online.

In general, the adoption of B2B ecommerce solutions has been significantly slower than their B2C equivalents, mostly due to the complexity of the B2B procurement process compared to B2C ordering.

For many years, ecommerce platforms have been unable to replicate the more complex requirements of B2B online ordering (many still can’t), particularly when compared to industry-specific procurement portals, meaning digital transformation has stagnated across many industry verticals, or barely even begun.

The feeling has been that although these industry-specific portals are quite rudimentary a lot of the time, their functionality is niche enough that they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, be replicated by other systems who deliver a more generic offering, so companies had to make do with the limited choice they had. For many sectors this has created a kind of industry-standard ordering solution where everybody defaults to one or two similar systems. These tend to be fairly basic meaning things work ok, but functionality is the same and it is impossible for merchants to separate themselves from their competitors online. The user experience is often poor too.

However, the flexibility of ecommerce systems like tradeit is now dramatically reshaping procurement—with industry-specific B2B online ordering portals alongside the rich user experience, marketing, content management, and personalisation capabilities traditionally seen in advanced ecommerce solutions—effectively delivering the best of both worlds from a single platform.

Procurement Portals

User Management (Roles & Permissions)

One common element amongst many of these online ordering portals is the granular level of control for customers, and what their users are allowed to do, or not do, on their account. This helps remove administration from the merchant, enables the customer to self-serve in their own time, and with an advanced system like tradeit avoids the manual processes potentially carried out by a third-party company responsible for their ERP system.

On a very basic level this could be as simple as saying whether they can access it, and if so, what elements they are allowed to access, but can extend to much more complicated controls such as budget setting, ordering controls, product list creation (what products other users are allowed to see and purchase), invoice payments, reporting, defining other users’ permissions, and much more.

tradeit includes some pre-defined roles with differing permissions and access (Super User, Manager, Employee, Accounts) but merchants can also create additional and customised roles with their own access and permissions.

Not only that, but these permissions can also be configured across channels, user groups (such as different offices, sites, depots, warehouses, showrooms, trade counters, cost centres, job roles, or departments), individual users, or programmatically (based on company-defined rules such as budget or product limits), meaning that different users can have different levels of access and administration rights, all controlled by a ‘Super User’ at a company-wide level.

Ordering Workflows

In a typical ecommerce scenario, the ordering process is very simple, particularly in B2C/D2C commerce. The person placing the order is usually the recipient, (and more often than not, also the end user), pays up front and has delivery to a single address. This means that the ordering workflow is very basic and easy to control.

eProcurement portals have far greater levels of complexity at play including defining who can place orders, who can approve orders, what payment methods they can use, whether users can order on behalf of somebody else (across companies, locations, departments, cost centres, or cost codes for example), what users can buy (both in terms of what products they can buy, but also how many of that product over a defined period), and what their budget or allowance is (could be in total as well as being product-specific - over a defined period).

Restricted Catalogues/Ordering Lists

Another common element of B2B ordering portals revolves around what products a user can see and what they can order, and how this is controlled. In some instances, this is all controlled by the merchant (based on what they want, or are allowed to sell, and to whom). Other merchants pass this control to their customers meaning a ‘super-user’ can define an ordering list that each of their user groups, or users, can access and/or order from. This can help improve the ability of the customer to order quickly by removing superfluous products that they aren't able or permitted to purchase.

These users can then only see and order what products they are allowed to against a budget that is assigned to them. If a user is purchasing on behalf of another user, they inherent their permissions and will only be able to order products that that user is able to order.

Split Fulfilment

eProcurement often means a central purchaser ordering products on behalf of a team, site, department or even company-wide. These end users may all be based in one location or spread across multiple locations (potentially in far-flung corners of the country). Either way any order is likely to need splitting - either within the same delivery (all labelled individually - as there could be multiple different users at the same address) or to separate delivery addresses. tradeit allows you to split orders to different delivery addresses down to a SKU level, meaning you can send any element of an order, or group of products within one order, to any address you need each with it's own naming convention (i.e. user's name).

tradeit's Competitive Advantage

Unlike other B2B portals & platforms, tradeit isn’t just an order taking system. With the capability to display more of a web-style front-end, it has the ability to push content, products & key information to your users based on their job role, user group, and much more.

Personalised Products, Pricing, Promotions & Content

Target different customer/user roles with different products, offers, pricing & content based on over 40 rules including who they are, what is in their basket, what they search for & where they came from. For example, consider the purchasing of PPE and how you could target the different roles:

• Senior Buyers: Push new ranges, wider catalogue & additional promotions
• Health & Safety Managers: Push content on PPE legislation updates related to the products they purchase
• Staff: Push items off their wider list which are part of their product wardrobe/restricted list.

Configure Customer Alerts

Using tradeit's inherent tools, alerts can be automated via the portal and/or email to advise customers of certain information. Examples include:

• Not bought for x period.
• Product replacement required.
• Allowance/budget remaining, or about to run out.
• Staff member not purchased.
• If a certified product has a warranty period then alert senior buyer to replace.
• If staff member has not ordered send a notification to remind them.

Remove administration from your ERP

Merchants can relieve the pressure of low-level administration tasks from staff & back-end systems by handing day-to-day control of procurement to customers. Allow them to add new staff members, define ordering permissions, create product lists for staff to buy from, add new addresses, approve orders, and much more.

It also uncouples control from the ERP meaning that changes are cheaper and quicker than any unwieldy ERP to update.

Run multiple digital channels from one system

tradeit enables merchants to cut the cost of managing & hosting multiple websites by running any web portals as well as additional channels, like a B2C ecommerce site or corporate website, via one centralised system.