How to Get a Wholesale eCommerce Site Started With BigCommerce
Wednesday, November 27, 2019Eric Zegarski
How to Plan a BigCommerce Wholesale eCommerce Store Development and Launch
BigCommerce is an universal commerce platform used by many B2C and B2B merchants. As trends in B2B change, and more millennials move into key roles that involve having purchasing responsibilities, it’s important to revamp your wholesale process. Wholesalers now face an opportunity to create a digital shopping experience for their customers. Executed properly, this can pay for itself and protect you from losing market share to others who adapt early. Here’s how you can develop a proper B2B wholesale website using BigCommerce:
Start by Developing Your Project Requirements
When starting a project like this, it’s important to craft a checklist for yourself. It will keep you accountable as well as help you carve out a roadmap for building and launching your wholesale site on BigCommerce. Some important questions you should answer include:
- What competition is there currently for you online?
- What products do you want to initially sell on your store?
- How big is your entire product catalog that you would want to eventually offer?
- How will you handle sales taxes on your site?
- A ballpark range of how many orders you expect to get in your first year.
- What payment processor will you use for your online sales?
Identify Potential Roadblocks For Development and Launch
Now that you have answers to the questions above, it’s important to uncover where you might find yourself stuck with either development or going live with your wholesale site. It’s important to identify and address these early on so your go to market process runs smoothly. Here are a few common roadblocks that wholesalers face that are unique to wholesalers:
- Having an approval process that requires internal review before a customer can place an order.
- The vendor calculates shipping after the order is placed and they don’t know the final total of the order when the order is placed.
- Government regulations that affect how products are purchased. For example, certain products might not be able to be shipped to certain countries.
Craft Goals For Your Wholesale eCommerce Website
With a wholesale eCommerce store powered by BigCommerce, your business is going in a direction you have never taken it down before. It's important to set up measures of success for yourself both internally as well as externally for your customers. The most important measure of success for your customers is that an online wholesale store will make their lives easier and simplify their buying process. In addition, here are some metrics you can keep track of internally:
- Set revenue targets for year one, two and three.
- Increase in speed of fulfillment as your store matures from its launch date.
- A decrease in the amount of time your sales team spends taking on small orders.
Get Your Organization Onboard
Undertaking a project like launching a BigCommerce wholesale store involves support from your entire organization. This is due to the fact that processes might change across all departments. More likely than not, you will have a couple of people who will not be 100% onboard with this initiative. The key to winning them over is providing them examples of other companies who have successfully undertaken this initiative. In addition you'll have to be able to answer their objections proactively. Here’s a few things you can do to properly equip yourself and your team with the right knowledge:
- Educate yourself about wholesale and eCommerce by reading books or listening to podcasts.
- Be sure to share with your team what in the first place got you excited to take on this endeavor. In addition, highlight the benefits this project will bring for the entire organization as well as your customers.
- When chatting with sales assure them that there are no penalties for their department if customers choose to place their orders online. A popular tactic is to give sales the same commission on online sales for accounts that they own. After all, sales is still actively managing relationships with these customers.
Build Your Killer eCommerce Team
If you’re looking to take charge and ensure your organization is successful with your new BigCommerce wholesale site, you’ll need a killer team to back you up. Before you go into full Nick Fury mode and set to assemble Earth’s Mightiest eCommerce Team, you’ll need to identify gaps in your current organization. It might involve transitioning people in your organization to fill these gaps or recruiting new people.
Most successful eCommerce teams are a collection of developers, content creators, and digital marketers. If you feel like your current marketing team can handle the added workload that comes along with driving traffic and sales to your BigCommerce store, then you can always look at outsourcing your store development to an agency that specializes in BigCommerce store development and launch. Most of these agencies also offer retainer services so they can help you manage the behind the scenes tech that powers your store down the road.
BONUS – Integration Supercharges Your BigCommerce Store
Integrating your BigCommerce commerce store with your ERP allows you to have a unified and connected commerce network. Using an iPaaS (integration platform as a service) like eBridge enables bi-directional data flow between your BigCommerce wholesale site and your ERP. Some benefits of integration include:
- Eliminate manual data entry and avoid costly errors due to human activity.
- Increase the speed of data exchange, improving customer service efficiency.
- Reduce deployment time by utilizing turnkey integration solutions.
- Gain almost instantaneous organization wide transparency.
- Fulfill and ship your orders faster.
- Free up time and resources to focus on your business.
eBridge has pre-built connector for
BigCommerce. Which means we can execute a BigCommerce integration in a timely and effective manner. In addition, eBridge is hosted on Microsoft Azure, therefore ensuring an almost 99.9% uptime and industry leading security. With an integration solution from eBridge, you can ensure that your commerce network is connected and communicating data bi-directionally.