This is a guest post by Matthew Abdalah of Rumbleship – if you like the article, make sure to thank him in the comments!
Customers live in a world of digital distractions and the last place you want your customers to be distracted is during checkout.
Consumer ecommerce (B2C, business-to-consumer) has taught the B2B (business-to-business) world a lot about what a distraction-free, conversion-friendly checkout looks like: we should reference these lessons for best practices.
Due to its ubiquity, your wholesale buyers are conditioned to expect a comparable level of service to what they experience on B2C websites such as Amazon and eBay.
Tactics like 30-day terms, free shipping and bulk discounts are some of the techniques referenced in this article but we’ve compiled a few extra ones.
Here are 5 creative ways to reduce wholesale WooCommerce shopping cart abandonment, increase your sales conversion rate and grow your profits.
1. Offer Flexible Net Terms
B2B wholesale Average Order Value (AOV) is 3 times greater than B2C transactions. As a wholesaler, ensuring large orders don’t negatively impact your customers cash-flow is critical.
When you offer Net 30 terms, you give customers 30 days to pay their invoice, minimizing the impact on their cash-flow. Exposing terms as a payment method in your checkout is the easiest way to increase sales.
Gateways like Rumbleship give you guaranteed payment on your sales, eliminating the risk of late payments and non-payment. Approximately 8% of checkout abandonment occur due to lack of accepted payment methods.
For less than a credit card processor, you can give your customers more ways to pay with flexible Net terms and enjoy the benefits: growing sales, increasing conversions and reducing cart abandonment.
2. Develop a Dedicated Wholesale Store
Many merchants start their wholesale business by distributing coupons to buyers to use in their consumer store at checkout. Not only does this introduce a host of issues in your backend, including fraud, but it devalues your brand.
You should give your valuable B2B customers a dedicated wholesale store, which will add legitimacy and professionalism to your brand by improving their buying experience. Coupons are a patch and only provide a discount, causing problems with order minimums and free shipping triggers.
Remember, your wholesale customers will on average spend three times as much as your B2C consumers and they deserve a store where you can provide wholesale-specific information directly to them.
Having a dedicated wholesale store also helps protect you from fraudulent orders by removing coupon abuse from the equation. Generating and distributing coupons requires extra work on your part to maintain – if a coupon falls into the wrong hands, your brand could be be materially harmed.
A dedicated wholesale store should house custom packages designed specifically for retailers and distributors. A consumer would not want to order an entire palette of your product, but your distributors will. Special pricing for large quantities should be clearly advertised.
We’ll go more in depth on pricing strategy in the last topic. If you need a little inspiration on what an effective B2B WooCommerce store looks like check these WooCommerce website showcase lists.
3. Enable Line-Sheet Ordering & Custom B2B Layouts
Giving your customer an easy ordering process is key to improving conversions. The more easily a customer can find new products and reorder what they need, the more frequently they’ll finish placing the order they’ve come to place.
This means giving wholesale customers the ability to order both via a detailed (grid) view and via line-sheets. New customers will enjoy the grid view, complete with product pictures that help them find what they came for and explore both the depth and breadth of your inventory. Return customers will appreciate the speed and ease of line-sheet ordering, which enables them to quickly find and order exactly what they need in the fewest number of clicks.
The more products you offer, the more important setting up line-sheet ordering becomes: scrolling through pages of product that each only contain 20 items will dramatically increase the amount of time it takes for them to fill their shopping cart, lowering the chance of them finishing their order.
4. Offer Free Shipping Thresholds
Free shipping is such an ingrained expectation for B2C shopping that your wholesale customers have been conditioned to expect it.
Giving your buyers free shipping can give your sales an instant boost and increase your conversions.
Free shipping thresholds encourage customers to buy more products or greater quantities. Working with your 3PL (third-party-logistics) or shipping provider can help you understand where the break even point is for your business – with that information, you can confidently implement this strategy long term, which will pay dividends immediately and for years to come.
5. Enable Bulk Discounts
B2C shopping experiences are littered with bulk discounts: “Buy 5 items and get 1 free!”
A volume discount like this can incentivize your B2B customers to buy more products, but if you don’t carefully consider the hidden cost you can put your business at risk. By measuring returns and understanding how discounts change buying behavior, you can decide if this is right for your business.
Let’s explore 3 reasons to offer a bulk discount:
- Stand out from your competitors : selling a product at full price while a competitor offers the same at discounted amounts can cost you sales. To improve your conversions and win more sales you should consider using a better pricing strategy
- Lock in customers: volume discounts nudge buyers to commit. In highly competitive markets, locking in customers preserves market share and increases barriers to entry for new suppliers
- Encourage larger orders instead of a series of smaller ones: shipping overhead can be hard to calculate, but everybody agrees that it’s more efficient to ship one large box than seven small ones. Providing bulk discounts helps your customers decide to place bigger orders that are easier to ship. Pair it with a free shipping threshold, and you’ve got a winning recipe for minimizing your packing-and-picking headaches.