B2B and wholesale sales interactions have traditionally been very manual processes,” says Wayne Vernon, Lead Product Manager at Bold Commerce. “In order for customers to get the best price available to them via an ecommerce platform, they usually have to engage with a sales rep who manually creates an order that reflects the customer’s special pricing, volume discounts, etc. This not only introduces friction into the buying process that results in drop-off, but is also incredibly labor intensive.”
For example, a brand in the medical supply industry likely has fluctuating prices based on changes from suppliers or competitors in addition to any discounts or pricing deals layered on top for customers. In a traditional ecommerce platform, it can be impossible to show the correct price to a customer based on multiple overlapping factors without a serious time and resource investment in custom development.
To improve the B2B customer experience, brands should consider pricing automation via a platform-agnostic API. This solution automates the flow of high-volume, high-complexity pricing data from one system — a brand’s internal legacy system — to another, in this case the ecommerce platform, says Vernon.
“This works by building an integration from one system to another using powerful price rules APIs. This replaces manual processes, such as sales reps creating orders and manual exports and uploads of CSVs, which reduces labour costs, errors, and increases customer satisfaction and conversion by removing friction from the buying journey.”
Once a brand has integrated an API into their systems, the price rules engine can provide the best price for a customer, product, and cart at the time of transaction on any purchasing channel, he says.
“At the time of checkout, the system would send a request to the pricing API with the customer’s email address and cart and the API will return an adjusted cart with the best prices given the context. This enables a brand to automatically offer accurate and consistent pricing across all channels — point of sale, kiosk, mobile app, phone, and more,” says Vernon.
Modern pricing APIs can create an omnipricing experience for B2B customers without manual intervention. The customer gets the same price — and the best price available to them — regardless of channel.
What ecommerce pricing capabilities are possible with APIs?
A modern, platform-agnostic API should provide B2B retailers with the ability to provide complex pricing to their customers regardless of channel and without manual intervention.
B2B retailers should look for solutions that can handle and layer together overseas chinese in uk data the following types of prices:
Percentage-based or fixed-price discounts
Setting a fixed price for a customer
Customer-group based pricing
Volume-based “buy more, save more” pricing
“Buy X, Get Y” bundle discounts
Scheduling offers or deals, such as a 24-hour flash sale
Quantity-limited discounts, such as buying a maximum of 10 units at a specific discounted price
Location-based pricing
Adding in regulatory fees, like tech recycling or eco fees
Multi-currency capabilities
With a powerful pricing API in place, a B2B brand can start exploring creative ways to meet their customers’ omnichannel purchasing needs, says Vernon. For example, sales reps at a trade show no longer have to use a spreadsheet to record all the show-specific deals and then follow up later with an invoice for each buyer. Instead, they can use a tablet to pull together an invoice and email it to the buyer in the moment.