Large transactions, regular customers, dependable partners – being a player in the Business to Business market can pay off. An important factor supporting your B2B success is found in your ePages online shop standard feature set.
When doing direct sales to end-users, it’s best not to limit access to your shop. But it is sometimes quite different in a Business to Business scenario. If you want to offer special prices to certain customer groups without making this public to everyone, it is better if the large customers and the small customers only see their own prices. To do this, you need to separate your customers as soon as they enter your shop.
Your ePages online shop provides several features to help you with this task. For example, if you want to make sure that only your known partners and customers can access your catalog, just limit shop-access to registered customers only. Anonymous visitors are not able to register themselves; they need to ask for an account via the contact page. The customer can only enter your shop after you have created an account for him in your shop back-office.
Another possibility is to allow potential customers access to the shop, but to allow only registered customers to create a shopping basket. If you allow baskets only for registered customers, visitors will be asked to register or log-in as soon as they try to place a product into the basket. Additionally, you have the option to block newly registered customers from ordering until you have given them permission to do so.
Additionally you can decide which data you want new customers to enter when they register at your shop for the first time, and which of those fields should be marked as “required”. Good to know: during the registration process, your customer’s VAT-ID number field will be checked for correct syntax and country of origin.
Offer your good customers and bulk purchasers discounts on their orders. Assign them to particular customer groups and offer them a variety of discounts, using price lists and discount schemes. Of course you can make individual offers to specified single customers.
Further customer-specific features are the choice of tax model – whether to show gross- or net-prices to this customer, as well as adding an internal comment about the customer in the “Internal note” field. With the “Confirm now” button, you can also mark the customer account with a time-stamp which documents the last time you confirmed the accuracy of the account’s data. Note: the customer will not be informed of this action via E-Mail.
If you wish to exclude particular customers from viewing/paying VAT, you can do this individually.
Möchten Sie nur für bestimmte Kunden keine Umsatzsteuer ausweisen, können Sie dies ebenfalls individuell festlegen.
Especially useful features for business customers are those that simplify ordering and re-ordering. Your shop has two features to assist with this.
Ordering via an order form
There is a link to the standard order form from the “shopping basket overview with product line items box”. A simple link to the order form can also be assigned to any navigation bar in the “Design” menu. You can add up to 10 products into the order form by entering their product numbers and amounts.
Ordering from shopping lists
If your customer regularly re-orders the same group of products, he can do this with just a mouse-click, using shopping lists. To do this, he just needs to save an existing order as a shopping list for later visits. This can be done directly from any basket page, or from the customer’s “My account” list of old orders. If, later, a re-order is necessary, he can click on the link to “Manage shopping lists” in his “My account” page, and re-order any shopping list. This allows bulk ordering with just a mouse click.
Last but not least, we have designed new shop products especially for B2B online merchants, ePages Flex and ePages for SAP Business One.
With ePages Flex, you get an inexpensive rental shop on a virtual dedicated server, with activated web services. These web services allow you to connect any desired third-party systems to the ePages shop. Extend your shop functionality via a connection to a CRM system, an ERP system or any other financial system. With ePages Flex, it’s all possible.
Our second new product, ePages for SAP Business One, is aimed at companies using the SAP Business One ERP system, who want a simple and economical start in E-Commerce. The inexpensive rental shop is pre-configured with a connector to SAP Business One.
Do you want to know more about ePages Flex and ePAges for SAP Business One? Our sales team would be pleased to advise you at sales@epages.com or on the phone at +49-40-350 188-0
