Transitioning from B2B to B2C

While some B2B focused warehouses have seen their orders plummet by 80-95% many B2C companies are watching four fold, or even six fold increases in orders.

When faced with figures like that it isn’t remotely hard to see why so many companies are looking to pivot away from selling to shops and factories and large offices, and instead reach out directly to the consumer.

This however is a model that presents unique and specific challenges. It will be much more important than ever that every aspect of your business talks to every other aspect of your business in a language that they all can understand.

Fortunately, this is exactly what the OrderWise software package offers. To show you what is on offer, we’ll be looking at three pain points that often arise in the transition from B2B to B2C, and exploring how OrderWise offers the soothing balm of better business operations.

One – Courier Processing

In terms of sheer numbers of individual orders, the magnitude increase when shifting from B2B to B2C is dramatic. Whatever your daily individual throughput levels were when you were B2B, put at least one extra zero on the end, and this is what you will get dealing with B2C.

If you are still using a manual order processing system, this can be time consuming to an business-breaking extent. Crafting labels by pasting in all the details into every field is painstaking and exacting work. With more orders comes the much higher potential for mistakes and misprintings of labels.

This is where OrderWise can help. With its courier integration module, the moment an order is generated, a coruier order is placed and an label form is filled out and ready to be printed. Our system works with over 50 popular courier services. Everything from Amazon Seller Prime, to DHL, DPD, Royal Mail, Yodel, and far more. To deal with the increasing number of orders that shifting to B2C will mean, make sure you have a streamlined courier processing system that will save your business valuable time.

Two – Stock Tracking

While you might have the same amount of stock as before, since B2C is often not a bulk buying market, you will have a lot more individual units. This means you’ll need to keep a much better track of how much of every last item you have, as well as where it is, and how many different variations of it there are.

Not only that, but your stock tracking will need to be much more responsive. Manually updating your stock tracking software can be a viable option for B2B companies, because of the much smaller number of individual orders. However with so many more orders, manually updating every time you receive an online order is not only time consuming, but potentially embarrassing. You may not be able to update your website fast enough. If there have been fifteen orders for an item you only have ten of, how quickly can you put up the message that you’re out of stock?

This is why OrderWise offers an end-to-end stock tracking solution that is fully integrated with our ecommerce services. The moment an online order has been placed, your stock tracking system is updated, and your ecommerce store can respond in kind. Manual updates can be a thing of the past, and you can make sure your store is selling at its maximum speed and optimum accuracy. See here to learn more about our stock tracking solutions.

Three – Accounts

Shifting from B2B to B2C comes with some substantial new and different kinds of costs that need to be managed and monitored. While you might have substantial experience in tracking costs and margins relating to B2B sales, B2C has new issues associated with breaking down bulk orders into smaller units.

These new costs need to be tracked carefully and responsively. Breaking down a bulk purchase into individual orders means warehouse work reorganising the storage, arranging picking, processing repacking, and arranging returns. To organise all that labour into a margin that makes sense, you will need some sharp and smart accounting software.

It’s for exactly these kinds of problems that OrderWise built its accounts module. Our system can handle everything from automatic inclusion of invoices, proper processing of payments, and gain control with advanced cash flow forecasting. Since these systems all have access to the information supplied and sorted by every other aspect of your business, your accounts will provide an entirely accurate and real time projection of how your business is doing, where your money is coming from, and where it is going. All more essential than ever when moving from B2B to B2C trading. Learn more about our accounts module here.

The situation with Covid-19 is a great and history-making challenge for businesses of all kinds. While many might crack under the pressure, the most successful realise that pressure isn’t something you need to resist, as much as it is something you need to mould and move yourself in response to. The shift from B2B to B2C is a major adaptation. OrderWise will help you not only make it possible, but make it profitable.