SOLUTIONS FOR B2B eCOMMERCE

The Web has become the de-facto means of doing business. Your customers and business partners are increasingly demanding an engaging and efficient online experience. They expect their online business interactions to be of the same quality as their favorite online retail sites.

With competition and the cost of sales on the rise, getting your customers to do business with you online is becoming one of your primary business goals. But your business customers expect to find what they need quickly – and if you can't offer the exact brand they want, you had better have a suitable substitute; if you don't, they will go somewhere else for it.

Mercado Ignition for B2B eCommerce enables businesses to offer the experience your online customers expect – and to sell more as a result. Just as merchandising professionals in retail eCommerce take every opportunity to up-sell and cross-sell on their consumer-facing sites, your business can actively sell online by turning your eCommerce site into a powerful sales channel.

Grand & Toy, Canada's leading supplier of office supplies has seen significant sales improvements as a result of providing a more engaging online experience for buyers. They believe that by providing useful tips related to specific products, they will help move buyers closer to purchase decisions, and provide a useful service at the same time – a great customer retention strategy.

Built on Mercado's proven search, navigation and merchandising platform, Mercado Ignition for B2B eCommerce provides an intuitive online sourcing environment for employee purchasers and business partners through intuitive online catalog navigation, targeted product search and buyer-centric merchandising.

For most B2B companies engaged in eCommerce, the challenge is not really about increasing conversion rates; typically business clients purchase repeatedly, so when they visit your site it is likely because they need to make a purchase. According to Brad Chandler at SiteStuff, the key success metric in B2B eCommerce is usually average order value (AOV), and this is where merchandising has a role to play in B2B. For example, why simply present a list of individual products that match a query when you could deliver a 'solution kit' that includes the necessary tools or add-ons that will allow your customer to fully leverage their purchase?

Richer product discovery

Given that your goal is to sell more, why make your products hard to find? The most effective way to ensure catalog accuracy and richness is to exploit the characteristics – or attributes – inherent in your product data. Our Product Data Optimization service gives a boost to your catalog data, making your site search and navigation even more effective. With Mercado Ignition for B2B you can make your catalog do much more of your selling than you thought possible. Mercado's underlying catalog data structure allows you to augment raw catalog data with relationships defined by concepts like "complementary", "substitution", or "replacement". By infusing catalogs with these product relationships, you are optimizing selling opportunities through catalog search & navigation. And, Mercado gives your B2B eCommerce site a head start with more than 30 industry and general commerce thesauri and taxonomies that boost the power and accuracy of your catalog from start.

Measurement, analysis, automation

According to Gartner, B2B executives list analysis and measurement as one of their top priorities. Inaccurate forecasting can prove costly, but more costly is the loss of customers who look to another source to fill their needs. Mercado Ignition's reporting and analysis tools – and integrations with leading analytics solutions like Coremetrics and Omniture – help you close the loop, allowing you to make smart decisions about your catalog and the inventory behind it.