If you run a B2B business enterprise then you can understand how it is tricky to sometimes collaborate and maintain relationships with multiple other B2B businesses.
The primary difficulty companies face with running a B2B business is the fact that they have to manage relationships with multiple other companies and look at different factors and variables and keep track of business relationships in the best way possible.
That is easy to do if you only have relationships with a single other B2B enterprise but things can become very complicated if you have more than one connection.
That is why the easiest solution for an entrepreneur like yourself is a comprehensive B2B business portal that will allow you to monitor trade and communication between other businesses and monitor information and the status of product delivery and services and much more.
This becomes essential for specific industries like the manufacturing sector where a manufacturing B2B company needs to communicate with multiple other companies regarding logistics and raw material supply and inventory management.
You can also look at other industries such as the wholesale sector as well as the travel or even the e-commerce sector which needs to connect and collaborate as well as conduct transactions with multiple other businesses.
The B2B industry is massive and while it is nearly impossible to keep track of global B2B companies all over the world but let us look at one of the most significant markets in one of the most significant segments of e-commerce in order to understand the size of this industry.
If you look at the stats mentioned about then you are going to find that the US E-Commerce B2B market is estimated to be around $6.5 trillion in 2022. This includes every manufacturer within the eCommerce sector such as consumer electronics as well as sports goods and even automatic parts and much more.
The entire world runs on B2B relationships but nearly all these companies are using the old manual standard of conducting transactions and communications between each other without any centralised smart B2B portal between them.
Let us understand the benefits of having such a B2B portal for business enterprises and entrepreneurs.
Benefits Of a B2B Portal for Businesses
Accessibility
One of the most important reasons why B2B enterprises should have a B2B portal is simply because of the convenience aspect of it.
These businesses need to interact with a lot of other businesses and share information and maintain communication channels with different suppliers and other businesses where order tracking as well as automatic catalogues and other conveniences can be very helpful to conduct easier business operations.
This is generally done manually without a portal and can take up a lot of company time and is very bad for efficiency purposes.
A B2B portal solves those issues fair and squarely.
Scalability and Diversification
The only solution for stable business survival is growth and expansion and a B2B portal enables just that because it allows businesses to keep track of a lot more other businesses and partners and maintain a much bigger network.
When a business can organically cultivate its network of suppliers and distributors and wholesalers, it can expect business growth and business diversification.
Having a portal just opens up a lot more doors for a B2B business because now they can maintain a lot of healthy business relationships without jeopardising the other ones. In simple terms, it is like having 10 extra hands.
Customisations
Every business has its own set of needs and challenges and that is why it is always better for a business to go for a personalized business solution that can accommodate specific business needs.
A smart B2B business portal is just that because it will allow endless customisations where businesses can configure the portal to display all the necessary things that impact business.
For example, a cement manufacturing B2B business might set up its portal to show slag prices for the day. That would be different from a toy manufacturing company which can set up its personalized portal to show upcoming trends when it comes to children-related events such as Universal Children’s Day and much more.
Workflow Automation
Running a successful business is about identifying business opportunities but there is something even more important than that, we are talking about the management and maintenance of business processes.
For example, a toy manufacturer always has to keep track of the price of plastic pellets and put in orders for raw materials before their inventory has been depleted, if they do not do that then it will simply stop the manufacturing process of toys.
In a situation like this, businesses need some form of automation in order to make sure they do not miss out on critical service or material orders and just become smart critical when it comes to B2B businesses with bulk orders costing big chunks of capital.
A B2B business portal allows for the automation of manual processes such as automatic inventory tracking and automatic order placement. This reduces the burden on manual oversight and ensures smooth business functioning.
Here Are the Solutions B2B Business Portals Can Provide
Product and Service Catalogue
A B2B business portal has two sides and one is accessed internally and the other is accessed externally and that is where we come to the very first feature and solution this kind of portal can provide.
A B2B business portal can be an excellent conduit to showcase product and service catalogues and listings where companies can display comprehensive product listings with descriptions and images and specifications.
Along with that, they can also add the functionality for ordering these products right from that portal with advanced search and filtering options for their B2B partners to make purchases quite easily.
These listings can be easily managed with a portal.
Inventory Management
Inventory management is yet another very important aspect of such a portal because it allows for automatic order tracking and also the tracking of raw material consumption in the case of a manufacturing company. This can be done with the help of sensors or even manual barcode scanning and other tracking methods.
The data from these scanning operations can be integrated into the universal B2B portal so that it can place automatic orders when stock levels are low or they can be programmed to even send out inventory alerts for manual order placement.
This provides an excellent level of automation in inventory management and can also be programmed easily to handle high-volume ordering and transactions.
Transaction Management
A B2B portal has many uses but one of the most important features of this system is transaction and payment management.
A business portal like this can be utilised to accommodate diverse payment options and can be utilised to provide secure payment gateways for their B2B partners when placing orders.
Along with that, you get automated smart ledger solutions as well as automated invoicing and even automated tax management to deal with the specifics of taxes for different reasons with different tax regulations.
A B2B portal can handle all monitory aspects of a business all at a glance in the B2B dashboard.
Access Control
Access control is fundamental for businesses with different levels of access for different levels of employees.
You do not want an intern at your business to have access to company turnovers and critical financial data or you do not want the company CEO to not be able to access administrative controls or data.
This kind of user management control is very difficult to obtain manually but with a B2B portal, you can password-protect different areas of your business management software and allow different levels of access to different kinds of employees.
This will ensure better efficiency and better data protection and can even be quite helpful when allocating new job roles for different projects. All you need to do is sign up every employee with their unique user ID and password and simply give them different levels of access according to the hierarchy.
This will allow different types of users to have their own dashboards that prioritise their type of work.
Communication
A B2B enterprise survives on communication and if you want to run a good business you need to have smooth and effective communication with your other B2B partners.
This can be quite challenging to do manually but with a B2B portal you can integrate messaging right into your portal dashboard along with the option for notifications and alerts.
You can also integrate things like help desk support for your B2B partners so that they can reach you whenever they want and this ensures that they can have multiple channels of reliable communication links.
If you want to grow in the B2B industry you are going to need to maintain your network effectively.
The benefit of a B2B business portal is that it has the support for multi-vendor communication channels meaning you can maintain the same levels of attention and care for all your B2B partners with options for vendor performance tracking as well as vendor onboarding and much more.
Analytics
Data is King and the business that utilises data and studies reports and invests in analytics is the business that is going to predict future business trends and always be above the competition.
A smart B2B allows for minute micro-management of the entire business along with customised reports and performance metric tracking.
This means that your portal will not only allow you to manage your business but will also help you identify all the areas in your business that are not performing optimally.
While this does require a certain level of AI integration but this can be quite helpful because a portal that can forecast demand can be very beneficial for a B2B enterprise all available on your B2B dashboard.
Marketing and Promotion Tools
If you thought that was enough then you are wrong because a smart B2B business portal also has the ability to run marketing campaigns and also provide a good level of control on promotional campaigns.
This means that you can utilise the portal for target advertising and also provide special offers and discounts to attract the attention of potential vendors in the process.
You can also manage social media marketing on a portal like this which can be managed from a unified dashboard.
Key Things to Remember When Building a B2B Web Portal
Target Audience Identification
If you are planning on building such a portal then the first thing you need to understand is the target audience for that portal.
If that portal is being created for a software development company that provides B2B services then you can let the interface simplicity take a backseat and improve the level of functionality and features that are applicable for that industry.
If you are creating a portal for a company that manufactures candy then your approach should be different.
Tech Stack Selection
Choosing the right tech stack is quite important because that will let you add the level of functionality you want into the portal.
If you want to choose among the most popular ones then you can choose HTML or CSS as well as Angular or JavaScript and React.js for the Front-end.
Similarly for the Backend, you can opt for Laravel, .NET, or Django as well as Node.js and PHP.
Apart from that you need to also choose a reliable cloud platform and we are always going to suggest something between Google Cloud or AWS but this is something you need to choose.
When it comes to choosing the databases, you have great options like MongoDB as well as MySQL and PostgreSQL among others.
User Experience (UX)
User Experience (UX) should always be a priority when creating a B2B portal because having a portal is all about easy navigation and a central dashboard with everything visible and easy to control.
If the experience of operating and viewing the portal is not good then it defeats the entire purpose of having a portal in the first place.
That is why you should ensure the UX always stays the priority with things like customisable dashboards as well as real-time data tickers and much more.
Future-proof Design
Modular architecture should also be among the priorities when it comes to the development of such a B2B portal.
This is because if a company is investing in a system like this then they will also expect this system to be able to accommodate business expansion because if the system is not scalable enough for business growth, no company is going to utilise it.
If you want to ensure a future-proof design then we would always suggest you opt for cloud hosting instead of localised solutions.
Seamless Integration
A B2B web portal is only going to be helpful if it is able to integrate with existing business systems in the form of the existing CRM or ERP software used by the company.
Along with that, this portal should also be able to accommodate the integration of third-party services in the form of payment gateways, delivery platform APIs and much more.
You need to develop this portal in a way that ensures the freedom and options for seamless integration.
So, How Do You Create Such a B2B Portal
The first stage of the creation of a B2B portal is developing the idea of the portal and this can be done with the help of research and also with the help of understanding business requirements as well as goals.
When you are happy with the conception of the idea and the planning stage of the process, you can then move on to designing the portal. This includes creating mock-ups that accommodate functionality and align with the goals of the portal.
Then comes the development stage of the process where security should always be a priority in all aspects of the development stage whether it is front-end or backend development.
After that, we can move on to regular testing and rigorous testing and then finally deploy the B2B portal.
We hope this blog helps you understand all the benefits of a B2B portal as well as all the important things to keep in mind when developing such a portal and how it can have a positive impact on your business.
If you are someone looking for experienced IT professionals to help you develop such a portal that can take care of multiple aspects of your B2B business then we are here for you.
We are Think To Share IT Solutions and we are one of the premier names when it comes to B2B as well as B2C portal development. Along with that, we can also ensure you the best levels of AI-functionality integration within your B2B portal along with cloud integration solutions.
We welcome you to visit our website and check out everything we do.
