6 B2B eCommerce Mistakes You’re Probably Making (And How to Fix Them) – Part 6: Know-It-All eCommerce

Businesses that struggle to adapt when new marketplace avenues open often fall behind. For B2B eCommerce stores, that can mean losing customers and missing out on new opportunities.

Unfortunately, there are plenty of B2B eCommerce mistakes. They happen to enterprise-level eCommerce giants just as much as they do small business entrepreneurs. What sets successful businesses apart from those that struggle most is identifying mistakes so you can minimize their impact.

In this series, we’ve focused on some of the most common B2B eCommerce mistakes businesses make. From undervaluing your products to not being customer-focused, we’ve given you tips and tactics to craft a better, more effective eCommerce experience. Our goal is to make sure you’re familiar with eCommerce pitfalls and strategy missteps, so you can avoid them.

Mistake number six in our series is thinking you know everything post-launch. Simply put, you can’t improve your eCommerce strategy if you always feel like there’s nothing to improve.

Know-It-All eCommerce is a Dead End

Our last article focused on post-launch maintenance and upkeep of your online store. Too often, businesses don’t budget or plan for post-launch.

The same is true for your post-launch business strategy and tactics. B2B customers have evolved to be much more digitally savvy, therefore, it’s critical to tap into the full capabilities of your commerce platform to keep up with customer expectations and unlock the true potential of your eCommerce storefront.

B2B eCommerce sales, marketing, and reporting all require ongoing attention if you want to succeed. The worst mistake you can make is to think the business runs itself after you’ve launched your store. If you do that, the product catalog will stagnate, customers will get bored, and you’ll find yourself wondering what happened.

Instead, it’s important to realize your store needs to continuously adapt, modernize and shift if you want to stay ahead of the competition.

Know-it-all eCommerce usually means you’ve stopped paying attention to emerging trends, think your tactics are already the best, and aren’t updating your store accordingly. That’s a quick road to a dead end.

How to Identify B2B eCommerce Strategy Gaps

It’s a common marketing mantra that a strong strategy doesn’t happen overnight. Iterating on your strategy, perfecting your tactics, and finding an intersection between content and commerce takes time and resources. That’s why it’s so important to not only plan for post-launch management but to also budget for it.

That said, simply having a plan and sticking to it can go a long way. The first thing you need to do is identify your B2B eCommerce strategy gaps.

Common post-launch eCommerce strategy missteps include:

• Failure to adjust tactics
• Failure to test and implement changes
• Failure to act on gathered data
• Failure to collect data in the first place
• Failure to measure customer satisfaction
• Failure to measure performance and efficiency

Remember, it takes time to get these things right. It’s ok to focus on sales, but you also need to consider other aspects that contribute to your store’s success.

• Do you have a marketing strategy?
• Do you perform regular operational assessments?
• Are you engaging customers?
• Are you using analytics to drive business decisions?

You don’t need to formulate an award-winning business strategy in a day, but you need to start cultivating a solid strategy foundation.

B2B eCommerce Metrics and Marketing Tactics

Post-launch metrics help businesses understand how well your store is doing and where you can improve. An ideal eCommerce platform provides limitless data and reporting solutions, so you can make data-driven decisions. That said, it’s your job to define which metrics you’ll use to measure success.

Traditional eCommerce success metrics might include:

• Revenue
• Cost
• Margin
• Return on investment
• Conversion rate
• Customer satisfaction
• Customer turnover
• Bounce rate
• Email opt-ins
• Cart abandonment
• Site speed

You can’t know how you’re doing if you don’t measure performance using at least some of the above-listed metrics. Your team’s ability to identify what’s working and to take advantage of new opportunities relies heavily on having a strong understanding of your customers and how they’re interacting with your site. A modern eCommerce platform will provide the tools and functionality for marketing teams to answer questions about the performance of the business and subsequently take action.

These are only the tip of the eCommerce marketing iceberg. It’s your job to read the digital room, so to speak, and use all of that juicy data to strengthen your post-launch strategy.

The Right eCommerce Platform Helps Your B2B Strategy

Sounds like a lot of work, right? It can be, but the work you put into building and improving your eCommerce strategy before launch pays off big time. That’s why so many smart business leaders choose to take a tried-and-tested shortcut and outsource B2B eCommerce management to a professional platform.

The right eCommerce platform makes reporting, analytics, and product management easy and intuitive. Things like headless commerce solutions and increased product flexibility let businesses focus on the big picture while the eCommerce platform handles the behind-the-scenes.

With a partner like Ultra Commerce, you can easily measure and track customer engagement, create and manage customer profiles, and monitor repeat business all from a complete modular commerce platform.

Don’t fall victim to post-launch mistakes. Instead, contact our eCommerce experts today to help identify your strategy gaps and improve your overall B2B eCommerce experience!