B2B eCommerce Software for the Chemical Industry
Why Your Chemical Business Needs an eCommerce Platform
Chemical products are essential to virtually every manufacturing industry, from industrial products to consumer goods.
Growth in durable goods and consumables will continue to fuel growth in the chemical and food additives industry through 2023 and beyond. Companies focused on chemical manufacturing and distribution can expand even more by considering digital selling. B2B eCommerce for the chemical industry can produce significant cost savings, increase sales productivity, improve the customer experience, and speed innovation.
Key Benefits of a B2B eCommerce Platform for the Chemicals Industry
Improve Customer Experience
See full features listPersonalize the purchase experience
- Facilitate complex customer journeys. Chemical manufacturers and distributors sell to customers in industries with diverse purchasing processes. Ecommerce for chemicals supports intuitive self-service portals with product descriptions, prices, and fulfillment options. This, in turn, provides chemical buyers with easy reordering, bulk purchasing, and order tracking.
- Personalize content. When you make purchasing easy for customers, they will buy from you again. Pull data from regulators such as the FDA, offer MSDSs, and personalize for the product and the location. Digitize onboarding, RFQs, contracts, and approval hierarchies, regardless of the complexity.
- Enable sales teams. With eCommerce in the chemical industry, you free up your sales team from phone calls about pricing and availability, order coordination, and manual data entry. Ecommerce lets you empower them as problem solvers and modern sellers that build deep relationships with customers to help them reach their goals.
- Optimize your negotiation process. Handle all your contract documentation, requests, and approvals digitally. Manage e-signatures and inform customers when more information is required. Digitalizing negotiation improves back-office productivity while removing friction for customers.
Automate Routine Tasks
See full features listDigitize manual tasks and workflows for efficiency
- Put your sales process on autopilot. Whether you run an SME or a corporation that spans verticals and countries, enable buyers to order 24/7 with a self-service portal. Automatically import orders, send RFQs, and convert quotes to sales with eCommerce software built for the chemical industry.
- Optimize your resources no matter how complex your workflows get. An automation engine allows you to create separate onboarding workflows for chemical customers in different industries. Ensure proposals, quotes, and work orders are handled smoothly, securely, and without errors.
- Maintain a single source of truth by breaking down business silos and keeping customer, product, order, and fulfillment data central. Connect with your ERP, CRM, eCommerce PIM, and payment systems for comprehensive business intelligence.
- Accommodate complex B2B buyer hierarchies. Enable B2B buyers to define roles that match their corporate structures within your eCommerce system. Allow them to manage their own organizational and approval workflows and to set responsibilities for managers and buyers.
Build Business Resilience
See full features listBy investing in eCommerce, the chemical industry can prepare for uncertainties
- Eliminate friction as you grow. Online, there are no physical assets to manage. You can alter and fine-tune strategies when marketing, adding eCommerce features, and scaling your business. You can also better react to market changes than with brick-and-mortar infrastructure.
- Operate multiple business models. Combine multiple organizations and business units under one roof to simplify your operations. Expand your company across numerous selling channels such as B2B, B2B2C, D2C, or a B2B marketplace. Adopt new business models and sales strategies before your competitors.
- Sell across borders and industry verticals. Penetrate global markets. With a rock-solid architecture, flexible multi-organization, and plenty of localization features, you can sell in multiple languages and currencies. Tailor your eCommerce website to your customer’s vertical and fulfillment needs.
- Scale without limits. Don’t be held back by the size of your catalogs, orders, product information, or the number of transactions. Offer the same excellent reliability and service to customers no matter how large you grow.
Fast-Track Your Sales
See full features listGrow your customer base and increase market share
- Move sales processes online. Move chemical sales to web commerce while preserving complex relationships with customers and partners. Improve accessibility and discoverability and execute a digital sales strategy that reduces the length of sales cycles and increases conversion rates.
- Enter new markets with confidence. As markets dwindle and new ones open up, you’ll be able to easily adapt your business and provide customers with what they need. Capitalize on new trends by pivoting your business model with ease – whether it’s a new brand, environment, product line, or service offering.
- Reach customers of all types. Selling to manufacturers, retailers, institutions, or governments is vastly different. Build eCommerce storefronts made specifically for your vertical. Offer buyers purchasing flows that meet their exacting business, industry, and regulatory requirements.
- Streamline complex sales processes. Chemical customers have in-depth product information needs and diverse product discovery, approval, and onboarding paths. Create separate purchase experiences for every customer or customer group, including the fulfillment and after-sales process.
Success Story: How Oro's eCommerce Software for the Chemical Industry Powers Digitization at Azelis
Azelis is a prime example of how a company in the chemical industry can drive digital transformation with eCommerce. Azelis launched a robust B2B self-service portal to enable its customers to find high-quality technical data, request samples, order, and reorder from a single platform.
Reinventing Customer Experience with OroCommerce, Chemical eCommerce Platform
Azelis is a leader in sustainability, digitization, and innovation in the chemical and food additives industry. Their digital transformation strategy included being the first to offer customers a completely on-line buying experience in a traditionally off-line industry. They selected OroCommerce as their B2B eCommerce platform to expedite the sales cycle, improve back-office efficiency, and improve the customer experience.
Countries
Customers
Annual B2B Sales
Matt Nancekivell
Digital Solutions Director at Azelis
OroCommerce as the Ultimate eCommerce Software for the Chemical Industry
Boost your ROI and decrease time to market
Geopilotical pressures, pandemics, and logistics challenges disrupt supply chains and necessitated flexibility. Today’s chemical manufacturers and distributors must sell on adjacent markets, meet changing customer demands, and implement new strategies quickly. With an extensive chemical eCommerce platform from OroCommerce, you can get to market quickly with the flexibility to add functions and features as needed in the future.
Offer a better customer experience
Whether you sell to pharmaceutical companies, laboratories, hospitals, educational institutions, governments, or on a marketplace, your customers demand top-notch, user-friendly purchasing experiences. That’s why OroCommerce accommodates B2B, B2C, B2B2C, D2C, B2G, or marketplace selling in parallel or integrated experiences.
Designed specifically for B2B needs
OroCommerce is made for the needs of the B2B chemical industry by a team that understands both the complexity of B2B eCommerce and the chemical industry. Whether you’re digitalizing your offline business or expanding to multiple eCommerce websites and purchasing portals, Oro meets the most demanding business needs.
A 600,000+ strong ecosystem
Numerous partners, developers, and users contribute to improving Oro solutions, which makes them more secure, stable, and B2B-ready compared to competitors. You also get the flexibility to choose your developers according to your project requirements and budget.
Native CRM integration
In today’s digitally connected world, a great eCommerce experience is more important than ever. OroCommerce comes with OroCRM, a B2B CRM that provides a 360-degree view of customers for enhanced customer journeys.
Top-tier customer support
We measure our success by the success of our customers. Our customers benefit from live support around the clock, resources in the form of documentation and multimedia, case studies, and a large and active community.
Frequently Asked Questions About B2B eCommerce In the Chemical Industry
What is the impact of eCommerce on the chemical industry?
Technology is changing the sales process in the chemical industry. Social distancing pushes B2B interactions online, but it’s also opening B2B brands to new markets. Rapid developments in analytics, 5G, and IoT tools can be used by chemical companies to digitize business processes and introduce digital sales channels.
The right eCommerce experience allows companies to conduct transactions online, wherever they are. Better access to customer data helps with personalization, optimizing and managing sales processes, and diversifying revenue streams. Analytics about purchases and markets also helps improve the customer experience and unlock more opportunities and therefore more value.
Why is the chemical industry slow to move online?
The chemical industry is diverse, but most industry managers agree that some trends are accelerating faster than others. Sustainability, the focus on health and safety, and innovation through digitalization are prime concerns for chemical executives today.
At the same time, chemical brands fear eCommerce will not support their products, customer relationships, and selling processes. Other challenges include finding qualified staff, IT know-how, technical infrastructure, and rally teams behind their digital transformation initiatives.
How can eCommerce help chemical companies?
The pandemic forced many chemical distributors to rethink their go-to-market strategies. A flexible eCommerce platform can streamline supply chains, optimize inventory management, pivot to a different market, support additional capabilities, or scale quickly to meet demand.
Secondly, as competition increases, businesses must improve decision-making, introduce better products, and enhance the customer experience. B2B eCommerce platforms gather the data necessary to inform better decisions, assess product success, and determine customer satisfaction. Automation streamlines back-office processes for improved efficiency.
Consumers demand greater transparency and frictionless purchase journeys. An eCommerce software for the chemical industry can realize these experiences with personalized prices, products, and ordering processes. It enables intuitive self-service on desktop and mobile devices, and integration with business systems.
What makes OroCommerce a great B2B eCommerce platform?
A B2B eCommerce platform like OroCommerce provides at least 80% of the functionality that chemical manufacturers and distributors need right out of the box. You get to market faster to get your products in front of more customers.
OroCommerce automates customer onboarding, negotiation, order processing, invoicing, and fulfillment. The flexible workflow engine conforms to the way you do business. An API-first approach means that your eCommerce solution integrates with CRM, ERP, PIM, WHM, and other solutions you currently use.
With SEO-friendly and intuitive storefronts that work on desktop and mobile, businesses can build a destination around their brand. They can better reach their online audience, offering them personal browsing, ordering, order tracking, and after-sales experiences.
Why does OroCommerce have an open-source philosophy?
An open-source strategy offers innovation, security, scalability, and most importantly, the required flexibility for any chemical company.
With open-source code, OroCommerce leverages a strong community of knowledgable experts, technology vendors, service providers, independent developers, and customers that improve the platform every day. It allows the platform to launch quickly and accommodate complex and diverging B2B marketing, selling, and customer experience needs.With this approach, Oro controls product development, quality, and compliance. It generates a product roadmap with the help of a community of solution integrators and partners that represent various B2B practice areas. So far, this business model has been proven useful by companies like WordPress, MySQL, Aquia, and others.
Not sure where to start?
Use these resources to help boost chemical products sales with eCommerce
Free RFP Template to evaluate eCommerce Solutions
If you know the chemical business but are new to the eCommerce software business, picking the right solution can be intimidating. Download this free RFP template, customize it to your needs, and use it to guide your selection process.
Download the CopyHow to get offline customers to purchase online
This guide shares best practices on how to convert offline B2B buyers into online customers by overcoming resistance and effectively communicating them the benefits of B2B online portals.
Download the Copy Build a winning
B2B team from scratch
Your B2B eCommerce success starts with a great team. We created a list of recommendations you can implement now to offer the best environment for the people behind your business.
Download the Copy