How Modern Technology Creates Personalized & Unified Wholesale Buying Experiences

B2B ecommerce refers to the process of businesses buying and selling to each other digitally. In wholesale fashion, this typically refers to brands selling inventory to retailers online.

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As technology drives innovation across wholesale, fashion brands can now enhance their digital buying experience with virtual showrooms, bespoke pricing, and personalized content to attract buyers and maximize sales. Today, modern buyers expect engaging, personalized online wholesale buying experiences. 

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What is a Personalized Wholesale Buying Experience?

Personalized wholesale buying experiences are tailored towards an individual retailer's bespoke needs. Brands might handpick an assortment they believe best suits a retailer’s market needs and design preferences, suggest unique pricing offers to fit a retailer's budget, or create bundles that align with the retailer's ordering patterns. 

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If brands use a B2B platform, they can further tailor the wholesale buying experience by allowing retailers to filter their offerings by region, product category, price, colour, and other criteria to find the pieces they need. 

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As procurement processes have digitized, B2B buyer expectations have risen, and features such as bespoke pricing and collection filtering have become standard expectations for many buyers. 

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Why Personalized Experiences Matter in Wholesale B2B

B2B buyers want their wholesale buying experience to match their personal B2C buying experience in terms of speed, convenience, and ease. Some of these are easy to replicate, such as simple ‘Add to cart’ functionality, while others are trickier, as wholesale buying has much more complex processes, buying cycles, and requires uniquely tailored interactions. 

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What is a Unified Wholesale Buying Experience? 

A unified buying experience involves connecting backend systems to create a seamless flow of data, so that brands can present retailers with the most appropriate solutions.

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A connected buying experience links together all the different tools a buyer may use when creating an order, so they can seamlessly complete the buying journey regardless of whether they book an in-person showroom appointment, use a synced iPad app, or log into an online B2B platform. 

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Why Uniform Experiences Matter in Wholesale B2B

Uniform wholesale buying experiences help retailers to quickly and more efficiently identify products that fulfill their needs and find and fill gaps in their assortments. 

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Key Benefits for B2B Sellers

Personalized B2B wholesale experiences don’t just benefit retailers. They also help the brands with:

• Higher conversion rates: personalization creates more relevant suggestions for buyers, making them more likely to buy.
  
  
• Increased order value: recommending relevant cross-sells and bundles also makes buyers more likely to place a bigger order.
  
  
• Improved customer loyalty and retention: if a buyer knows a brand offers a highly tailored buying experience, they are more likely to shop with them again.
  
  
• Better efficiency in procurement and ordering: brands using a B2B platform can expect streamlined processes that save them time and money.

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Key Technologies Powering Personalized Wholesale Experiences

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning

AI can help personalize the wholesale buying experience by spotting retailer patterns and making tailored suggestions based on its predictions. By collating data from retailers' previous order history, style selections, and average spends, AI tools can help brands create bespoke product recommendations. 

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Examples: Stylumia, Prediko

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Predictive Analytics & Big Data

Predictive analytics uses historical buying data to anticipate a retailer's future needs. Using formulas to predict when inventory will run out, these tools can provide personalized offers, pricing cues, reorder suggestions, and inventory insights to retailers. This reduces friction across the ordering process for both brands and buyers. 

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Examples: WGSN, Impact Analytics 

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Visual Assortment Planning

Being able to see every product from an assortment within a visual tool makes it much easier for buyers to quickly identify gaps or overlaps, so they can create more impactful orders and reduce duplications and overbuying. 

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JOOR’s visual assortment software creates a personalized buying experience by giving retailers the ability to review assortments with filters such as delivery window, brand, category, or color, so they can focus analysis on specific segments to support faster decision-making. 

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Example: JOOR

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Integrated ERP, CRM & Unified Data Platforms

Unified data flows can personalise the buying experience across pricing, inventory, customer roles, and approvals. By syncing backend systems within various departments of brand and retailer businesses, valuable information can be easily shared across tools, making buyer personalization more accurate and contextual. 

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Example: Zedonk, Salesforce, ApparelMagic

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How Businesses Can Start Personalizing Their Wholesale Experience

Interested in making your buying experience more bespoke? Follow this checklist to start the personalization process:

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• Collect your customer purchase history data and look for any obvious patterns.
  
  
• Segment customers meaningfully by industry, order frequency, or order value.
  
  
• Choose your personalization technologies or join a B2B platform that offers multiple capabilities.
  
  
• Integrate backend systems for real-time accuracy.
  
  
• Measure your success by tracking conversions, engagement, and AOV.

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Common Challenges & How to Overcome Them

Brands may face several challenges when trying to personalize the buying process, the most common being data silos. Disconnected systems can make it difficult to extract unified customer data insights and instead produce incorrect predictions. Not having access to the right systems and software can further exacerbate the issue, making effective personalization pretty much impossible.

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Brands should also think carefully about the B2B platform they use. Older, legacy platforms may not have the latest technologies or capabilities to support real-time personalization, which can cause challenges. In this case,  additional middleware software might be required to help systems connect. 

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Brands should also be open to adopting new tools to help build stronger cross-team collaboration between marketing, IT, and data departments. 

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FAQs

What does personalization mean in B2B wholesale?

Personalization within B2B wholesale generally refers to the process of making the buying and selling process as bespoke as possible. This often involves brands creating personalized assortment picks and pricing options per individual retailer, based on order history data and industry trends.

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How does technology improve the wholesale buying experience?

Multiple tech tools can help improve the wholesale buying experience; some of the most common include visual assortment software, predictive analytics, AI-tailored suggestions, and unified data systems. All of these can help to create a more personalized buying experience for retailers

Is predictive analytics important for personalization?

Yes. Predictive analytics can help brands to anticipate a retailer's future needs. This technology can help brands to predict when a retailer's inventory may be running low and offer pricing cues and reorder suggestions to increase repeat purchases. 

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How is personalized wholesale different from basic customer segmentation?

Customer segmentation in wholesale fashion simply refers to the act of grouping customers based on a certain set of characteristics. Wholesale customer personalization goes one step further and creates an experience designed to best serve the needs of this set of customers.