Get Started with B2B Commerce

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Explain what Salesforce B2B Commerce is.
• Identify some of the key features of B2B Commerce.
• Explain how to use B2B Commerce with Salesforce CRM data.

When people think of ecommerce, they often think of the ease of online shopping in their daily lives. But there’s another world of ecommerce with its own unique relationships and buying capabilities: business-to-business (B2B) commerce.

Businesses in the B2B market are turning to B2B Commerce, an ecommerce platform specifically designed for businesses making purchases online. It enables companies to create exceptional ecommerce storefronts and experiences for their business customers.

B2B Commerce is designed to support complex B2B buying relationships. But B2B is just selling from an online catalog, right?

Well, sure. But we’re not talking about a few items—we're talking about purchasing potentially hundreds of items in a cart, adding up to potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars. Plus, these purchases require negotiated, account-specific pricing and terms, and are often placed on behalf of someone in the call center or the sales rep. As you can see, B2B purchases can get complex fast.

Too many businesses are using outdated technology to capture orders and manage post-order processes. Without cutting edge technology, sales reps, partners, and customers are forced to email, phone, and even fax orders. They have to go through the same channels to get basic customer information, including order location, order history, and invoices.

So now you’re probably wondering what does B2B Commerce really do? Beyond providing an exceptional online buying experience, B2B Commerce delivers a seamless multichannel relationship with business buyers. It gives sales reps and CSRs a holistic view of the customer so that they can provide a personalized, 1:1 buying experience.

Great question. Let’s use a hypothetical customer example. The Simone Group provides a B2B Commerce experience for its customer, Catalina, who manages a few locations of The Chair Stop.

Catalina logs into SimoneGroup.com to find a site that’s personalized with her company’s colors and logo. Catalina knows she’s in the right spot. As she navigates the site, she sees special pricing that she previously negotiated with her rep at Simone Group. Her entire experience is personalized from corporate branding to the products and pricing she sees. She’s interested in reordering her previous order, but wants to make some modifications.

In two clicks, she’s able to make the change and reorder her previous shipment, paying with her approved invoice. Since she runs several stores, she needs to ship to multiple locations. Simone Group provides her the ability to organize her order and deliver a certain number of products to each of these locations, all in one order.

Since B2B transactions are often made over time by long-term customers, capturing commerce data is super important. That’s why B2B Commerce is built natively on the Salesforce Lightning Platform. It integrates out-of-the-box with Salesforce (Sales, Service, and Communities) to enable sales, service, and marketing to operate with intelligent customer 360 insights.

• Salesforce: Make online buying easy, and generate more revenue now with Salesforce B2B Commerce
• Trailhead: Implementing Ecommerce for B2B Businesses