On the Internet, B2B e-commerce is an internet-initiated business-to-business transaction between businesses, such as between a manufacturer and a wholesaler, or between a wholesaler and a retailer. B2B websites are not about the shopping cart and making immediate sales as like as most B2C websites. The B2B website’s goal is to sell relationships. The B2B sales cycle can go for long time from months to years. B2B website is for online preference of company’s offline business and makes information available for different audiences and user types. Below are the 10 usability guidelines for designing B2B websites to help the prospective customers in research phase of consumer buying cycle.
- Optimize website for popular search engines
- Create concise title and meta description
- Balance visual design with simple interaction design
- Differentiate B2B website from consumer sites
- Clearly communicate what company offers in specific pages
- Emphasize your unique selling point (USP)
- Use pictures and graphics with text description to enhance company offering
- Make a dedicated product page for each product
- Place web page elements in their expected locations
- Make sure website loads quickly
Optimize website for popular search engines
Most businesses have websites, but a very few percent of them are optimized for search engines. By implementing an effective SEO strategy for your website, you will not only get targeted visitors from organic search results but also establishing company brand. Make sure you have implemented SEO strategy for your optimizing company name, product name or model number, item specific problem descriptions in popular search engines to drive prospective visitors from search results.
Concise Title and Meta description
People makes decision to go to a website from search engine result pages by scanning title and meta description. Business people skim rather than read result pages word-by-word, especially professionals who do not have much time. So make title and meta description descriptive and concise for driving prospective customers from SERPs.
Balance visual design
Websites visual design impacts the people’s perception of your organization. Making a first look positive impression helps people to aware of your company branding. Visitors decide to stay or not on a website within 7-10 seconds by considering visual design and this time is very important for any business owners to attract the visitors with a good first impressions.
It is also important to have a simple interaction design in parallel with company’s visual representation of website. Simple interactions match people’s mental models by behaving in expected ways. Business customers need websites to research their processes, answering their questions easily and quickly. They do not have time to find out necessary information from a complex website design.
The SCube’s creative website design team apply brainstorming for balancing visual design and make the website simple & user friendly while designing for any business niches.
Include keywords for differentiating B2B website
Customers need to know whether the company is able to fulfill their needs and problems. If you sell for businesses, provide signals on your site to let people know you cater to them. Common terms that differentiate B2B e-commerce from B2C e-commerce are bulk amount, wholesale, distributor, enterprise etc.
Clearly communicate what your company offers
Do not assume that people know who are you and what your company offers when they arrive at your site. Always provide a straightforward description of your company’s purposes throughout your site. It is important to have a clear message on the homepage of your company’s purpose, but remember, customers do not always enter your site from there. Make sure that information about your company’s purpose is easily accessible from anywhere of website.
Emphasize your business approach
If your business approach is a key differentiators, highlight it on the homepage and other relevant pages. Free shipping, low prices, quality products and services etc. grab people’s interest and drive them to your website. Consider what is unique about your company, products or services, make that your selling point and emphasize it in the specific pages.
Use pictures and graphics to augment the text describing
Generally people do not like to read much information in online. Appropriate pictures that augment the websites content make a more positive user experience than a heavy wall of text. Adding text with meaningful pictures also increase your site’s attraction. It helps people better understanding your company’s offering.
The SCube’s extraordinary digital media solution team does research for adding suitable pictures and graphics with websites content for enhancing company offerings.
Make a dedicated product page
Product pages are the homepages for each item you are selling. People get additional information for each products they are interested in their initial research phase from specific product pages.
The average usability of B2B websites is not very helpful for visitors or customers. As a result, the websites become unsuccessful for provide business value or website purpose. B2B sites must provide a much wider range of information in a hierarchical way than any B2C websites.
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