Customers live in a world of digital distractions and the last place you want your customers to be distracted is during checkout. Consumer eCommerce has taught the B2B (business-to-business) world a lot about what a distraction free, conversion friendly checkout looks like: we should reference these lessons for best practices. Due to its ubiquity, your wholesale buyers are conditioned to expect a comparable level of service to what they experience on Amazon in your B2B store. Tactics like 30 day terms, free shipping, and bulk discounts are some of the techniques referenced in this articles but we’ve compiled a few extra that you won’t find on Amazon. Take a look at the 5 creative ways to reduce wholesale WooCommerce shopping cart abandonment, increase conversions, and grow your bottom line.Offer flexible net terms directly in your checkout
1. Offer Flexible Net Terms Directly In Your Checkout
B2B wholesale orders on average are three times more valuable than B2C transactions. As a wholesaler, ensuring large orders don’t negatively impact your customers cash-flow is critical: steady cash-flow and consistent inventory turns increases buyer order volume and order frequency. When you offer net 30 terms, you give customers 30 days to pay their invoice, minimizing the impact that purchasing inventory has on their cash-flow. Exposing terms as a payment method in your checkout is the easiest way to give your customers access to net terms, and increase sales. Gateways like Rumbleship give you guaranteed payment on your sales, eliminating the risk of late and non-payment. Approximately 8% of order abandonments occur due to lack of accepted payment methods. For less than a credit card processor, give your customers more ways to pay with flexible net terms and enjoy the benefits: growing sales, increasing conversions, and reducing cart abandonment.
2. Have a dedicated wholesale store
Many merchants start their wholesale business by distributing coupons to buyers to use in their consumer store at checkout. Not only does this introduce a host of issues in your backend, including fraud, but it devalues your brand. Give your valuable B2B customers a dedicated wholesale store, which will add legitimacy and professionalism to your brand by improving their buying experience. Coupons are a patch and only provide a discount, causing problems with order minimums and free shipping triggers. Remember, your wholesale customers will on average spend three times as much as your B2C consumers and they deserve a store where you can provide wholesale-specific information directly to them. Having a dedicated wholesale store also helps protect you from fraudulent orders by removing coupon abuse from the equation. Generating and distributing coupons requires extra work on your part to maintain, if just coupon falls into consumer hands, your brand could be be materially harmed.
A dedicated wholesale store should house specific packages designed specifically for retailers and distributors. A consumer would not want to order an entire palette of your product, but your distributors will. Special pricing for large quantities should be clearly advertised. We’ll go more in depth on pricing strategy in the last topic. If you need a little inspiration on what an effective B2B WooCommerce store looks like check this out.
3. Line sheet ordering & layout designed for B2B
Giving your customer an easy ordering process is key to improving conversions. The more easily a customer can find new products and reorder what they need, the more frequently they’ll finish placing the order they’ve come to place. This means giving wholesale customers the ability to order both via a detailed (grid) view and via line-sheets. New customers will enjoy the grid view, complete with product pictures that help them find what they came for and explore both the depth and breadth of your inventory. Return customers will appreciate the speed and ease of line-sheet ordering, which enables them to quickly find and order exactly what they need in the fewest number of clicks. The more products you offer, the more important setting up line-sheet ordering becomes: scrolling through pages of product that each only contain 20 items will dramatically increase the amount of time it takes for them to fill their shopping cart, lowering the chance of them finishing their order.
4. Free Shipping
Free shipping is such an ingrained expectation for B2C shopping that your wholesale customers have been conditioned to expect it. Giving your buyers free shipping can give your sales an instant 10% boost and can increase your conversions by 50%! Free shipping encourages customers to buy more product. A great way to ensure free shipping doesn’t hurt your bottom line is to make an order minimum to qualify. Working with your 3PL (third-party-logistics) or shipping provider can help you understand where the break even point is for your business. With that information, you can confidently implement this strategy long term, which will pay dividends immediately and for years to come.
5. Bulk Discounts
B2C shopping experiences are littered with bulk discounts:
“Buy 5 items and get 1 free!”
While a volume discount like this can incentivize your B2B customers to buy more product, but if you don’t carefully consider the costs before you implement them you can put your business at risk. By measuring returns and understanding how discounts change buying behavior, you can decide if this is right for your business. Let’s explore three reasons to offer a bulk discount:
Compete better with competitors who already offer them – Selling the same (or a similar) product at full price while a competitor offers for discounted amounts can cost you sales. To improve your conversions and win more sales it would be worth considering a similar or better pricing strategy.
Lock in customers – Volume discounts nudge buyers to commit. In highly competitive markets, locking in customers preserves market share and increases barriers to entry for new suppliers.
Encourage larger orders instead of a series of smaller ones – Shipping overhead can be hard to calculate, but everybody agrees that it’s more efficient to ship one large box than seven small ones. Providing bulk discounts helps your customers decide to place bigger orders that are easier to ship. Pair it with a minimum for free shipping, and you’ve got a winning recipe for minimizing your packing-and-picking headaches.