With the eCommerce landscape evolving at an increasingly rapid pace, wholesale merchants are always looking for new and innovative ways to differentiate themselves. At SparkLayer, we’re committed to developing and deploying new features in line with our ambitious roadmap - all aligned with B2B merchants’ feedback and industry needs. 

We’re proud to have partnered with Kubix on this guide and share some brilliant merchants with them across sports, automobile, and homeware. Let’s delve into SparkLayer’s most-used features, what motivated us to build them, and how our merchants use them to enhance their B2B sales and operations…

‍

Custom checkout fields

Need to collect additional information from your wholesale customers at checkout? Our new custom field feature enables brands to add drop-down ‘select’ menus at the checkout stage. This feature came from our B2B merchants wanting to offer various additional options for their customers at checkout.

For example, adding multiple options for shipping (like paying upfront or via invoice) and selecting delivery phases for upcoming seasonal collections via preorder. We’re currently supporting preordering for a large number of our wholesale merchants, most of whom sit within the apparel, homeware, and F&B industries and release seasonal wholesale collections a few times a year. 

‍

Stock-level display options

Correct stock levels are one of the most important aspects of running a successful B2B eCommerce store. That’s why we’ve made it easier for merchants to choose how they display their stock levels to their customers. B2B brands using SparkLayer can choose to show the specific number of units per product (eg ‘135 in stock’) or simply show if something is in stock, low in stock, or if only the last few units are available. Merchants can establish their own parameters for these 3 stock statuses - eg, ‘low’ shows when 10 or fewer items are remaining and ‘last’ will show when there are just 5 left. 

Even better - you can decide which view option to display on a per-customer-group basis! You might want some customers to see exactly how many units of each product you have in stock but want others to simply see a traffic-light system of availability. 

‍

Line item tax support

Earlier this year, we had some feedback from B2B merchants that they had product ranges with differing tax requirements and had been struggling to coordinate this on their previous B2B eCommerce platforms. This was especially complex for brands with multiple product ranges being sold from just one eCommerce store. 

So, to help them, we launched full support for line item tax - essentially ensuring B2B customers see accurate tax calculations when checking out. If you have complex or varying tax requirements, this enables you to sell safely in the knowledge that your customers are paying the correct tax on their orders. This feature was rapidly adopted by our brands that sell multiple product ranges from one store, like coffee and children’s clothing, which both have different tax requirements and have historically been tricky to manage! 

‍

Wholesale discounting

Safe to say, this was a game-changer over at SparkLayer! It’s been great to launch a feature that’s been so quickly adopted by our wholesale merchants - quite possibly because it was our most requested feature of all time. B2B merchants wanted to replicate the classic B2C discounts that so many of us are familiar with - order-level discounts, fixed or percentage-based discounts, free products based on order rules, and coupon codes; all the heavy hitters we know and love! 

There’s not been one specific vertical that has used this feature more than others (so far!) - we’ve seen pretty much blanket adoption of our discount engine for bigger brands looking to reward loyal customers and shift stock, and for smaller brands looking to incentivise new customers and encourage repeat business. Merchants are also using SparkLayer’s scheduled discount feature to support their marketing campaigns - we’ve seen a lot of brands setting up Black Friday timed discounts or aligning discounts to new product launches or events. Brands are using our customer-specific discount feature to create qualifiers for discounts, like targeting regular customers, VIPs, or disengaged customer groups, too. 

‍

File uploads

A huge percentage of our merchants wanted the ability to offer customisation of certain products - so we built a new feature within SparkLayer to enable it! B2B customers can upload file attachments at checkout, which has led to an increase in AOV for our brands within apparel and homeware especially - think names embroidered on personalised t-shirts and custom photos printed onto cushions! The fact that files can be added at a product level is proving to be a huge differentiator for our merchants. 

On a more operational level, our wholesale brands are also using this feature to collect additional information at checkout, like Purchase Order numbers, to speed up payment reconciliation and drive operational efficiency. 

‍

Stock location support

With a large proportion of our wholesalers in the scale-up phase, we were getting requests for advanced inventory management processes. Our merchants want to use SparkLayer not only to improve their customer experience but to streamline their operations, too. 

In response to this feedback, we built an inventory management feature that enables brands to specify which stock location their B2B customers’ orders will be shipped from. This has been a huge success for brands with multiple warehouses - merchants can establish which stock is shipped from where based on geographic location or internal workflows, like routing stock based on what type of customer is ordering! 

‍

Explore more

If you’re an existing SparkLayer user, please note a lot of these features will require you to be on the most recent version of our software - which is quick and easy to do! If you’re new to SparkLayer, or to B2B eCommerce overall, we’d be happy to chat through some of our functionality in real time and explore how it could benefit your business. Book a demo with us now! 

We’re proud to be partnering with Kubix and collaborating on some B2B best practice guides - check out Kubix’s guest post for SparkLayer’s resource hub!

‍