Are B2B websites facing an identity crisis?
There are several retailers in the industry that have a B2B and B2C customer segment base. While there have been several innovative implementations in the industry to provide a rich online shopping experience for B2C business models, there is little if any being done to revamp the B2B sites. These sites are very functional in nature offering basic capabilities to reorder merchandise, place new orders, manage account details etc. However, they significantly fall short in providing the ability to present alternatve views of products, zoom in and change colors, provide guided selling tools that help the B2B customer visualize what the end product may be etc...
I think the time is ripe for relooking at how we manage the online customer experience of the B2B segment, what can be done to make it rich, yet simple and interactive. There is tremendous opportunity to make this investment worthwhile to a retailer thro' cross-sells and up-sell opportunities that can be offered to the customer dynamically as they make different choices online...
