Almost half a decade back, we believed that online commerce is for business-to-customer channels, where customers can directly purchase from the retailer online. At that time, B2B business was conducted in-person through offline channels. However, the market has evolved and even business-to-business sellers are adopting online commerce solutions like Liferay solutions for eCommerce.
According to the data released by McKinsey, 50% or more businesses may spend more than USD 50,000 for an online commerce self-service solution.
A smartly designed B2B commerce portal using Liferay portal for eCommerce helps improve user satisfaction, improve sales, and lead to business growth. There are so many benefits of using Liferay Commerce 3.0, we have explored this in the following article.
What Is Liferay Commerce 3.0?
Liferay Commerce 3.0 is a solution for B2B commerce that allows creating a marketplace for B2B sellers. This improves the experience and offers a seamless digital commerce platform that eliminates manual B2B meetings. This eCommerce Liferay solution is designed to improve the efficiency of your B2B commerce channel.
How Liferay Commerce 3.0 Helps Your Business?
There are so many benefits of using Liferay Commerce 3.0. In this article, we have discussed relevant advantages that help a multitude of B2B companies.
1. Reduce Costs
With the right Liferay solution for eCommerce, businesses can eliminate manual processes. These processes restrict customization and consume the precious time of the business.
With Liferay Commerce 3.0, you can create an advanced digital channel that combines legacy systems, streamlines processes, and reduces the cost of workflows. Overall, from high maintenance activities to time-consuming manual purchasing, Liferay Commerce 3.0 reduces comprehensive costs for the business.
The entire process of identifying customers, capturing leads, and converting leads is optimized, which reduces the costs involved in the workflow.
2. Seamless Purchasing Experience
Traditionally, most B2B buyers are used to purchasing the inventory manually. With a Liferay portal for eCommerce, you can improve purchasing for customers.
Most of the users of B2B organizations are repeat customers, who purchase inventory month after month. With Liferay Commerce 3.0, you can offer an efficient experience to buyers, where they need minimal to no supervision finding relevant products online.
Powered by tailored navigation and customized feeds, Liferay Commerce 3.0 empowers buyers to get detailed product data, decreases browsing times, and overall decreases the hassle of ordering inventory from a B2B supplier.
3. Optimize Customer Adoption
When customers are interacting with your website regularly, making purchases, and finding products, you can extract insights from user patterns. These insights help optimize the entire customer acquisition lifecycle.
Whether you know these customers or visitors or not, you can track page analytics and use this to visualize the user’s path. These behavioral patterns help us understand purchasing patterns, which not only empower our customization but also help identify popular products and categories.
Here are some things you can know from Liferay Commerce 3.0:
- What are the pain points of your customers?
- Where customer churn is high?
- What type of customer service does the user like?
When you are able to decrease CPA (Cost per acquisition), your ROI (Return on Investment) automatically rises.
What Are The Features Of Liferay Commerce 3.0?
What features of Liferay Commerce 3.0 a Liferay eCommerce consulting service can help you implement?
Here’s an exhaustive list of features offered by Liferay Commerce 3.0
1. Site and Content Management
The first valuable feature of Liferay Commerce 3.0 is site and content management. You can maintain more than one store with Liferay solution for eCommerce. With this, you can create multiple catalogs on every site that is powered by different types of access controls.
Your users who don’t wish to sign up can opt for guest checkout and purchase in a hassle-free manner.
The product pages are equipped with rich content. In fact, you can even schedule content for your publication.
2. Catalog and Product Browsing
The second important feature of Liferay Commerce 3.0 is a catalog and product browsing. This includes a page builder that allows creating pages with a drag-and-drop feature. There’s also elastic search that enables filtering, which provides seamless product discovery and browsing.
Apart from this, Liferay Commerce 3.0 also allows product recommendations for user-based and content-based methods. This means cross-selling and up-selling based on the content of the product and the user’s profile.
Through this feature, your users can also compare different products and understand which one is better for business requirements.
3. Catalog Management
Catalog management is exactly as it sounds. This includes managing product options, product types, samples, attachments, product views, etc.
For instance, what type of product you are selling, what are the downloadable attachments, what are the group products, etc.
With the help of this feature, you can offer customizations to B2B buyers, such as engraving.
The feature also includes product availability, product quantities, and product SKU generator.
4. Checkout
The checkout page of your website is important, as that is where payment decisions are made. With Liferay solutions for eCommerce, you can design a smooth checkout experience. There are options for clearing the cart, validation of the cart, order summary, confirmation options, and notes added by the seller.
5. Pricing and Discounts
Another important consideration for your website is pricing (And discounts). You need to create contract pricing, pricing according to a customer group, custom pricing, etc. Liferay Commerce 3.0 helps you design these pricing models without glitches.
You can allow subscriptions, offer discounts, and give varied bulk pricing. Depending on the pricing or discount rules you have added, these offers would be added to the cart automatically.
For example, adding discount limit and rule for the Christmas or New Year discount.
6. Payment and Tax Management
You can either pull exchange rates from another service or app or define the rate manually. Further, this section allows adding tax rates, fixed or flexible. You can even define relevant tax categories as per the products sold to B2B buyers.
7. Order Management
For a B2B buyer, Liferay Commerce 3.0 brings order management. It includes an order dashboard where you can find completed, pending and open orders. You can receive alerts to complete orders and track order status.
The payment history for every order is visible to both the B2B buyer and seller, including product order, payment details, etc.
You can further integrate buyer workflows and order management systems to your Liferay portal.
8. Shipping Support
As a B2B commerce solution offering products to customers online, you can specify various shipments methods, track orders, and support operations of many warehouses.
It is even possible to add inventory-based rules along with rules for expected shipping dates.
Many sellers use fixed and variable rates for shipping depending on different shipping models. You can choose between the two and a range for the same.
9. Sales Support
Liferay Commerce 3.0 also supports sales representatives by allowing them to view and edit orders. As a sales rep, you check account updates, track the health of your leads, and analyze KPIs. The sales dashboard gives you a collated view of purchase history, purchase patterns, and other activities by a particular customer.
10. Self Service
Lastly, Liferay supports self-service. The user can create an account, update their account details, manage passwords, and other details. They can store multiple shipping addresses, secure accounts with a strong password, and change account information accordingly.
Conclusion
While we have accepted manual B2B trade models for a long time now, the market is expanding and evolving. There’s an urgent need for creating a B2B commerce landscape, where B2B suppliers don’t need to meet in person. An online commerce environment helps track inventory, create purchase orders, and ensure seamless quick transactions.
AIMDek Technologies is a leading Liferay eCommerce consulting service with wide experience in the eCommerce landscape. We have helped a range of businesses implement a self-service B2B commerce platform using Liferay Commerce 3.0. Connect with us and get a quote today for your business!
