With B2B orders ever increasing and industry analysts only predicting a great future for B2B eCommerce, who would want to miss the boat? With B2B eCommerce practices closely following on the heels of B2C eCommerce, a good amount of investments are being made to spruce up the B2B websites and storefront. How can you justify the investments on your eCommerce storefront and how well can you protect the investments made? You can do that by constantly collecting data, analyzing them and acting upon the shortcomings if any.
Why measure?
While B2B eCommerce is similar to B2C in ways of the basic customer expectations like: easy search and navigation, accurate product information, and secure payment methods there are many other metrics that can be collected for B2B ecommerce which can serve as decision points.The three main reasons to measure your B2B eCommerce performance are:
- To benchmark against competition: With ever changing business trends you need to keep pace with your competitors. Having a well defined metrics will help you benchmark yourself against competitors.
- Continuous site improvement: The preferences of users keep evolving and hence you need to keep your site updated to attract them. Measures like the traffic source to your site etc. can help you identify areas of improvement. Also, marketing your web store will take considerable effort for fruition and you need these metrics to help you market your eCommerce site effectively.
- Better decision making: Of course the ultimate goal for any business is to generate revenues and armed with metrics you will be able to take better decisions and hence drive initiatives more confidently towards revenue building.
What can you measure?
Now we know the importance of measurement, but, what to measure? Apart from the regular business metrics like sales revenues, volumes and the common B2C metrics like shopping cart abandonment rate the following can be measured for a B2B storefront.
- Customer Engagement – number of users viewing a product than customers on staying on a generic landing page.
- Unique visitors – this will be different as most of the B2B users are repeat visitors and tracking the unique visitors can help you in marketing engagements for new customers.
- Average days between purchases – tracking the frequency of purchase for each user of your site will help you in effectively managing your inventory and gauging the busy periods of the year and high value purchase frequencies.
- Top products – This metric will help you streamline your sourcing products to enable higher volume of sales.
- Non-returning customers – B2B users will have a pattern of visits and clear product ordering profile. A non returning user is most likely a lost customer. Tracking this data will enable you to channel your marketing efforts to attract the customer back to your store.
- Traffic Source – This is hugely vital to an eCommerce site from a marketing perspective as you can divert your resources from non-lead generating sources to the ones generating promising leads and returns.
These are just a few metrics listed to leave you with a thought that not all B2C and B2B metrics can be comparable. We would like to hear more from you on what you think as the metrics suitable for B2B eCommerce.