The principles of design and visual appeal are common for both B2B and B2C websites, but B2B websites will have to be more robust as their customers are enterprises with exacting standards of quality who make high-value purchases.
A B2B website should be designed to convince another business to purchase from them. For this to happen, the website should have a clear layout, should be easy to navigate, provide sufficient product information, and clients should be able to easily locate, search and purchase products. NopCommerce is a great open-source e-commerce solution that makes all the above possible. It has a simple admin control panel that offers one-page checkout that supports multiple online stores, and easily integrates with third-party sites.
Here are further features that make nopCommerce a great choice for your B2B website:
1. Easy to build and customize your website
nopCommerce is a .NET based solution that many developers are familiar with. So, finding skilled developers to develop your website is not a difficult task. It is quick to download and set up. It has many features that support e-commerce like a customizable shopping cart, a catalog-based front-end where you can list your products, and a versatile administration tool which allows easy site management. Its pluggable modular architecture allows developers to add features and elements dynamically during run-time. It comes with a large number of plug-ins and themes which you can use to give your website a unique look and feel. B2B stores need to be more informative regarding their products compared to B2C stores. With nopCommerce, you can define up to 60 properties for a single product, which allows you to provide maximum product information to your clients.
2. Multi-store support
nopCommerce allows you to create a number of stores that run using a single back-end system and can be managed through a single admin window. Since the back-end database for all the stores is the same, the catalog data, promotional information and product attributes can be shared between stores, which is a great benefit when you are hosting both B2B and B2C stores. It is possible to set separate configurations for each store. Users of your site can login to all your stores using the same credentials. The multi-store support is a useful feature for B2B marketers who can quickly set up micro-sites for promotional products and campaigns and link it to the main store.
3. Drop-shipping
nopCommerce has multi-vendor support which is great for drop-shipping. With this option, B2B sites need not invest time and money in storing and managing inventory. They can simply pass the order details to a registered vendor who ships them directly to the customer. This gives the B2B site the freedom to work with many vendors and sell a large variety of products on their site. Vendors can be given access to the B2B site to manage their products, view sales data, order details and the like.
4. Search-engine friendly
SEO is important for any e-commerce website. nopCommerce is search-engine friendly and allows site owners to create customized URLs for their websites as well as tag each product they sell with appropriate keywords. It supports both XML and HTML sitemaps which allows search engines to easily locate pages within your site. It also supports social Meta tags which helps greatly to improve site visibility. It is integrated with Google Analytics so that site owners can monitor and improve site performance.
5. Mobile commerce
nopCommerce offers a simple, user-friendly graphical user interface which you can use to create a mobile version of your site in a very short time and without any additional development effort. The themes in nopCommerce are responsive which means they will easily adjust to any device and screen size. It is easy to manage both your mobile and online versions from a single admin control. A Gartner study finds that mobile accounts for 19.4% of all B2B commerce. With nopCommerce, you can quickly make your business visible among mobile and online customers.
6. Multiple payment and shipping options
nopCommerce allows you to offer your B2B clients multiple payment options which can be configured depending on any country’s payment preferences. It offers more than 50 payment options/gateways which is a great-to-have feature for any e-commerce site. Shipping preferences can be configured as per your requirement. For example, you can specify no shipping, free shipping above a certain amount, shipping discounts on certain products, and so on. nopCommerce also allows customers to estimate shipping costs based on the country and zip or postal code which is useful considering the fact that B2B purchases are generally in bulk amounts.
Due to its attractive features and high affordability, nopCommerce has been downloaded more than 1.8M times. The fascinating themes and intuitive layouts, along with a friendly user-interface will allow you to deliver a positive experience to your clients every time they visit your site.
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