Ronald Duncan is the founder of cloudBuy, a B2B (Business to Business) eCommerce and eProcurement platform. In episode 6 of the 2x eCommerce Show, he shares tips on how to get B2B eCommerce and eProcurement right as well as how cloudBuy works for entrepreneurs looking to get started in B2B eCommerce. His key takeaways are: Going Global, having a Structured Pricing model in line with volume, investing in and providing quality rich-content with joined up system (integration), SEO - unstructured - optimised and winning deals i.e bidding to RFQs. B2B is a lot more complex than the straight forward B2C where you’ve got one product and you’ve just got to market it out to the customers Ecommerce is critical for e-procurement We’ve got over 15000 little apps that suppliers have built on our platform B2B actually requires really good content management because you’re trying to sell complex products There’s about 400 000 organisations that buy from us on an unofficial basis On the buyer side, we’ve now analysed 750 billion dollars worth of spend We’ve got 80 year olds going up and buying their own care It’s more like a buying club where the local council has gone off and negotiated the prices for you and then you come off and buy The big volume of suppliers is Hong-Kong, Singapore, India and the Middle-Easts because there's very little B2B ecommerce in those economies Going global is making yourself available to the world Providing rich content is where people underinvest, they don’t understand that a B2B site needs to be better than a B2C site, not worse B2B sites can do really well on SEO because the competition is rubbish quite often. The biggest challenge in SEO is making sure that you’ve got attractive content The most important thing in B2B tender is getting in early and having a good website helps get you in early The science of the B2B market worldwide, last time Visa surveyed it, it was 109 trillion - only 1-2% go through electronically One of the biggest industries in the UK is social care and what we found in there was 100% of suppliers did not have ecommerce What I’m usually doing is listening to our customers and finding out what’s working for them, what we need to do to change and support them Listen to your customers and follow them
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