Responding to the growing eCommerce market in Office Supplies

Market developments follow each other in rapid succession

Developments in the Office Supplies market

As in many other markets, the Office Supplies market has seen a shift from the physical store to online business. More and more companies buy their office supplies online via marketplaces and webshops. This offers them ease of ordering, efficiency and a wide range of products to choose from. Sustainability and environmental friendliness play an increasingly important role in this choice.

On the other hand, we see a shift in product demand. Customers are becoming increasingly digital and make less use of the office supplies as we used to know. For example, there is more demand for personalized office supplies and an online ordering platform or webshop is ideal for this. Seamless integration between the eCommerce platform and the ERP system helps the Office Supplies wholesaler to improve efficiency, reduce costs and increase customer satisfaction.

eCommerce functionalities for Office Supplies wholesalers and manufacturers

Essential features for a rock-solid strategy:

Featured Highlights

With the Featured Highlights, a visitor can quickly find the right product that fits his or her wishes. These properties provide direct insight into the various properties on the product list page (PLP). Consider, for example, a visual representation of the material, quality mark or brand of the product.

Add your own design

There is an increasing demand for office supplies with a logo or company image. Let customers add their own design in the design software. When the design is ready, they get to see a preview of the end result. They can also order the product directly.

Order Lists

Let customers create order lists for extra convenience and speed with repeat purchases. It is also possible to compile an order list offline and send it when the internet connection is restored.

Order Matrix

Companies often want to order office supplies in many different shapes, colors and sizes. Going through a standard ordering process every time can cause annoyance to customers. So let them use the alt+tab key combination to quickly place an order in all the different combinations.

Search navigation on product properties

Certainly durability, but also material or shape are important properties for office supplies. Let customers easily search for all kinds of product properties such as brand, eco-label or material. You can achieve this with filters, content search and synonyms, for example.

Marketplace

You can include products from different providers in a marketplace on your webshop. The CloudSuite platform supports multiple shopping baskets where separate payment is possible per provider. It is also possible to offer your products yourself via a link on an existing marketplace.

Personalized content with own catalogs

Let regular customers log in to their own environment where they can see personalized content. For example, show your own range of products with a customer logo. You can also use segment catalogs and only show certain products to customers who meet this segment. In this way you are relevant to every customer.

Sales Center

Sales Center is a powerful feature that helps the sales department quickly enter and manage orders for customers. All search and product information is available offline and shows exactly the same as the customer experiences in the webshop. Use the search functions, cost rules, payment options and delivery schedules for fast and high-quality order processing.

OCI

The CloudSuite platform can receive orders from various channels such as webshops and purchasing systems. Let buyers benefit from the flexibility and direct them directly from their system to the webshop to order. Instead of going to the checkout, the webshop sends all information to the purchasing system. This contains product and price information, including delivery dates.

pCon.planner integration

By showing products in 3D, you can give customers an even better picture of your products online. This lowers the threshold for ordering online, because it helps the customer to visualize how the product is in the office.

Dealer Service Points

Office supplies wholesalers and manufacturers often work with a dealer network that sells their products and provides support. By adding the option to select a dealer service point during checkout, you actually make your dealers part of your online strategy.

Dealer shops

You can also choose to build multiple dealer webshops. When a dealer receives an order, the sales order is automatically forwarded to your webshop and further processed as a purchase order. An interesting piece of automation to make the ordering process run efficiently.

eCommerce inspiration for wholesalers and manufacturers in office supplies

Whitepapers

Personalization in B2B eCommerce

The modern B2B buyer does not want to pick up his phone, but wants to be as autonomous as possible in his decision-making process. Thinking must therefore be customer-oriented; you don't want to personalize for the sake of personalizing it. Just as buyers don't like being hounded by sellers, "personalization" that doesn't help you can quickly become annoying.

Download the whitepaper

Blog

A B2B customer portal: old-fashioned or indispensable?

In this blog article, we'll discuss the benefits of a B2B eCommerce customer portal, the key features it should have, and how to set it up and implement it to improve the customer experience and drive sales.

Read the blog