B2B eCommerce for the Food and Beverage Industry

Maxise sales with fast online B2B ordering and self-service

A key proposition of eCommerce is increased speed and efficiency, with statistics showing that more customers will buy online if it saves them time. This applies even more so in an industry such as food and beverage due to the short shelf life of many products. The TrueCommerce B2B eCommerce platform embraces the need for speed with its order pad functionality enabling the automatic creation of customer specific order lists direct from your customer’s ERP system and the ability to create lists on behalf of customers.

Due to the opening hours of companies within the food and beverage sector often being outside of normal office hours, for example restaurants, take-aways and bars, a considerable benefit of B2B eCommerce is that customers can access and conduct all their post sales activities through their account online at a time that suits them. Managing account finances, returns, back orders, obtaining copy invoices and live statements of account are all tasks that can easily be automated online through the platform’s self-service functionality.

“TrueCommerce was chosen as our e-commerce partner due to their experience in the industry coupled with their flexibility in delivering to our tight timescales. The working partnership has been a positive example of how TrueCommerce engage with customers from the outset to share with long term strategic goals and ensure there is a viable digital roadmap.”Russell Danks
Strategic Partnership Director
Greene King

Increase efficiency with centralised ordering and multi-ship-to capabilities

Many food and beverage customers have multiple locations, for example a chain of restaurants or wine bars, which can cause complexity when placing orders. The TrueCommerce B2B food and beverage platform makes online ordering easy for customers with a large number of individual ship-to accounts with advanced account and order management functionality.

With the TrueCommerce solution, a head office can centrally manage and create orders on behalf of one, all, or a specific set of locations/accounts. They will also have the functionality available to delegate purchasing whilst still maintaining control over expenditure, with the ability to, for example, create buyer accounts with predefined settings and order pad lists, and run order analysis reports to check the locations expenditure. The TrueCommerce platform also allows global updates to be made to all locations, saving a huge amount of time for your largest clients.

Maintain control with customer specific catalogues and restricted products

The TrueCommerce B2B eCommerce platform allows you to cater for the exclusivity deals that are common in the food and beverage sector. Quickly and easily hide products from a customer’s catalogue or control the purchase of certain products with password protection.

Simplify the management of complex promotions

Whilst promotions are a key driver for increasing B2B sales and attracting customers in the food and beverage industry, they can be notoriously complex particularly in food and beverage wholesale. The advanced promotions engine within the TrueCommerce B2B eCommerce platform is intuitive and easy to use, providing you with the flexibility to run promotions against pricing, choice of reward items, must buy items, free POS material and more. The platform also makes it easy to keep track of promotions with detailed reports offering insight and analysis into the success of your promotions.

Empower your customers with a gross profit calculator

Understanding profit margins is essential for all businesses, but for B2B food and beverage customers who are purchasing a wide range of products, the process of calculating the selling price, required purchase price or profit margin when deciding which products to purchase can be a time consuming process. Allow your customers to quickly and easily calculate their profit margin when buying products on the site with a Gross Profit Calculator providing customers with an RRP based on the profit required or alternatively their gross profit based on the sales price.

Improve customer service with increased supply chain visibility

The TrueCommerce B2B eCommerce platform helps improve supply chain visibility so your customers can plan accordingly. For example, you can clearly identify if deliveries are only available in a customer’s area on a specific day, together with the cut off time for placing the order to ensure receipt on the required day. With options for third party premium delivery on irregular days and easy to use override options to cover bank holidays or any other exception, the customer has clarity of when its order will be received whilst reducing the overhead on internal staff who manage logistics.

Capture all your B2B orders with one platform

TrueCommerce enables you to capture all of your B2B orders on one single platform, increasing efficiency and visibility across your supply chain.

Our B2B eCommerce solution is ideal for your smaller customers that do not use EDI, however if your clients include large corporations, it is likely you need to trade with them via EDI (electronic data interchange). As well as our market-leading EDI solution, we also have a PDF order processing solution ensuring you have a solution for trading with all your customers regardless of their size or technical footprint.

All of your orders regardless of how they are received are converted into a standard digital format and sent to your business system for processing.

Food & beverage eCommerce platform

Here are some reasons why leading companies in the industry have chosen TrueCommerce as their B2B food and beverage eCommerce platform provider:

– All orders can be captured though a single food and beverage B2B web platform

– All channels to market and supply chain data can be unified on one platform through one connection to one provider

– Our global trading partner network makes it quick and easy to connect to the entire supply chain

– Our food and beverage eCommerce platform is recognised and trusted by leading manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers across the globe. Find out how they have benefitted with our food and beverage customer references