Are you stuck between offering products or services to just individuals or organizations?
Well, you’re not alone.
Today’s e-commerce world has grown exponentially to such an extent that it’s no longer limited to catering to just individuals (B2C).
It has quickly become synonymous with selling to businesses (B2B), as well.
That being said, a one-size-fits-all strategy or even a platform for that matter isn’t probably a good idea.
Now, we understand your dilemma regarding providing for both B2B and B2C customers and bouncing between which solution to opt for.
And the solution is simple. Why compromise between platforms when you can have the best of both worlds through a hybrid solution.
No, the hybrid platform is no longer an experiment but has become more of a necessity to communicate with both individual buyers and businesses through a single platform with the purpose to boost one’s ROI.
What is a hybrid e-commerce platform?
As mentioned above, a hybrid e-commerce platform is a single platform that offers the best of both B2B and B2C e-commerce worlds.
It provides the essential features you need to cater to both audiences without compromising on content, data, or buying patterns. With this out of the way, let us look at the top 6 reasons why you must consider choosing a hybrid e-commerce platform.
6 reasons why you need to opt for a hybrid e-commerce solution
1. Separate pricing
As obvious as it might be, it’s also one of the most important reasons to consider a hybrid e-commerce solution.
When providing for B2B and B2C customers, the most glaring difference arises in pricing. While it remains constant for all of your individual buyers, the pricing for an organization will vary depending on many factors.
To ensure that these two sets of audiences are directed to the right pricing, you need to create separate portals through which they can log in and view the specific pricing.
The best part is that you can manage these portals from a single platform itself.
2. Specific product or services
Similar to pricing, if your business provides specific products to a separate audience in addition to the products that are available for everyone, you need a hybrid solution to ensure anonymity as well as for the right customer to add the assigned product to the cart.
Again, this is made possible by creating a specific portal in the same website, which a particular customer or organization can log in to view products that are assigned to them alone.
This scenario is more relevant to businesses that provide customized/personalized solutions to specific customers in addition to the products that are publicly displayed.
3. Content and data access
When you’re catering to a wide range of audiences, you must ensure that the data and content created or displayed is easily accessible to all of the departments in your organization as well as across all of the platforms you have.
But the problem arises when you try to ensure that the created content or data is not being duplicated across your platforms. Ignoring this will have damaging effects on your business.
This issue can be solved by employing a hybrid solution for your e-commerce store.
4. One dashboard, omnichannel control
By now, you might have already realized one of the most critical use cases of a hybrid solution, which is to have the functionality to manage all of your platforms from a single dashboard.
It provides you a bird’s eye view of all your platforms, allowing you to take a call on the products, customers, marketing, and other operational strategies without having the need to log into multiple portals or dashboards every time.
Simply put that a hybrid platform will ensure uniformity across all of your channels or platform by providing you the functionality to access them from one dashboard.
5. Future-proof
Your platform might currently cater to just one business model.
However, that fact must not stop you from having a hybrid platform, especially if you have plans to expand your business into multiple channels or markets in the future.
Future-proofing your e-commerce platform now will save you a lot of time and effort in the future as a hybrid platform will provide you the option to take advantage of both the B2B and B2C markets without the need to re-platform.
6. Stand apart and stay ahead
In today’s fast-paced world, if you’re not the first or at least among the first to implement or adopt a viable solution, then survival will be hard.
History has proven time and time again that when big businesses who fail to take the chance to stand apart from their competitors or to stay ahead of the curve usually get lost in the mix.
If you have started thinking about your e-commerce platform requirements already, get in touch with us by clicking below to discuss it.
