In the world of ecommerce, it’s no secret that the Q4 holiday season is king. It’s the veritable Super Bowl for online brands, and every single one is vying to come out better than ever.
But once the calendar flips to a new year, the clock restarts, the goal is reset, and growth teams go back to the drawing board to map out how to make even more cash flow next Q4.
Most strategies will call on your ecommerce growth classics. Expect to-do lists stuffed with craftier customer acquisition tactics, amped up marketing efforts, enhanced mobile experiences, and retargeting like you’ve never seen.
Most strategies, however, will also entirely ignore streamlining one of the most time-consuming yet lucrative channels: B2B sales.
Why has this cash cow gone overlooked for so long? And how can your ecommerce shop make the most of corporate gift sales during the holiday season while slashing the time it takes to seal a deal? Read on and find out.
B2B Gifting Has Been Stuck in the Stone Age
Have you seen how many platforms, apps, and tools exist in the ecommerce ecosystem lately? There are more than 18,000 software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies in the United States alone, serving more than 50 billion users. Some SaaS leaders like Salesforce have been around since the late ‘90s, while other decacorns like Chime, Miro, Canva, and Stripe came more than a decade later.
It’s not uncommon for enterprises to tap into roughly 450 different SaaS apps to ensure everything from employee onboarding to marketing campaigns runs smoothly. And before you start wondering if that’s maybe too many tools in the ol’ toolbox, consider the benefits of SaaS.
- SaaS apps are typically built to do one thing really, really well. When you’re running your company, you most likely have a long list of tasks that need to be done regularly — finances, project tracking, social media posting, etc. Thanks to SaaS, you can streamline that task list by calling on an app to do it. When you have one app per task, well, they add up pretty quickly.
- SaaS drives innovation. Nearly anyone can start a SaaS company with the right idea and resources. T his broad playing field means that people are continuously building apps that are better than existing ones, forcing existing apps to keep up and meet their users’ needs and demands. The second a SaaS company starts slipping, a more modern app is ready to take its place.
- SaaS rips open opportunities for startups. Many SaaS companies have a sliding pricing model that reflects usage. This means that a company with 25 users is going to pay more for a tool than a startup with one user. This baked-in ability for someone to scale usage and pricing based on their unique needs or goals means even solopreneurs can tap into the power of a highly focused tool to fill a role, which will almost always be less expensive than hiring a person to do that work.
SaaS tools have been developed to streamline practically every part of business, and 13% of these tools are made specifically for ecommerce. These tools make things like running an online store, launching ads, marketing to customers, inventory management, and more easier for the people in charge. But despite the sheer mountain of helpful apps out there, ecommerce gifting has barely been touched.
Today, most ecommerce brands handle their corporate business similarly to how they would if not a single SaaS app even existed. They use spreadsheets, one-off emails, word docs, a running checklist of tasks,manual invoices, and lots of backend spelunking to update inventory and whatnot.
It’s almost as if the entire ecommerce workflow has grown and modernized each passing year while corporate gifting has been locked into the days of dial-up.
And you know what? Ecommerce founders are sick of it. Launching and scaling a wildly lucrative growth channel for your ecommerce store shouldn’t cause you whiplash by dragging you back into time-consuming manual tasks. It’s time for a change.
Don’t Give Up: There’s Always Money in the Corporate Gifting Channel
When your ecommerce company sells super giftable products, it’s only a matter of time before Belinda from HR at Acme Co. reaches out because she wants to place a 500-item order for employee gifts. And when that time comes, are you prepared?
If you’re like most ecommerce brands we’ve spoken to, you make do with the resources you have, e.g., the aforementioned spreadsheet/email combo. And while you might be able to fulfill Belinda’s asks, slogging through Excel and endless back-and-forth emails is neither sustainable nor scalable.
So, like many companies, you simply shutter your corporate gifting channel and focus on your standard direct-to-consumer (DTC) shoppers and the glorious cornucopia of tools you have to make your standard customer experience sublime.
However, the corporate gifting market is expected to crest the $300 billion mark by the end of 2024, with more growth in sight. Employers are attracting and retaining talent with more thoughtful gifts, agencies are welcoming new clients, businesspeople are maintaining bonds with other businesspeople — and, simply put, they all want to send gifts that are cool.
Chip clips, can koozies, plain stress balls, and bland branded hats are all on their way out while your super hip, thoughtfully curated, artfully made products are in hot demand.
While you might think the easiest path forward for your brand to grow is through your DTC customer base, consider the power of a corporate gifting client.
- Large average order quantity
- Large average order value
- Year-round order frequency for holidays, anniversaries, etc.
- Exposure to a high number of recipients
- Opportunity to build more personal bond and long-term loyalty
In a nutshell, a single order from a corporate client could be the equivalent of hundreds of single DTC orders but with the added bonus of brand awareness with new people all around the country as they unwrap and experience their sweet gift.
So, how does an online brand find the balance between growing its corporate gifting channel with the amount of time needed to pull off each massive order successfully? The answer is technology.
B2B Gifting Marketplaces Vs. B2B Gifting SaaS
One way to get your products in front of more corporate gifters is to form partnerships with a B2B marketplace. Sendoso, Postal, Snappy, and Reachdesk are all platforms that have innovated the B2B gifting space by building one-stop shops for gifters.
These corporate gifting marketplaces feature huge catalogs of products that B2B clients can shop and send in one fell swoop. People use these platforms to personalize and send their B2B gifts to all their lucky recipients as part of a sales strategy, marketing play, or good ol' employee gifting. While there's a time and place for a gifting marketplace, they're built with gifters in mind, not brands. Because of this, ecommerce brands have to make a few sacrifices if they want to be featured:
- Gift marketplaces can be cost-prohibitive to gifters. Some platforms charge hefty fees for gifters to get access to their catalogs and gift-sending tools. This makes the pool of potential gift-buyers a bit shallow.
- Brands give up control of the experience. When featured in a B2B marketplace, the gifters' experience is going to be that of the marketplace’s — not the brand’s. That means ecommerce brands might not always be delivering the experience they desire to big-ticket customers.
- Brands don’t have access to gifters or recipients. One of the best parts of DTC ecommerce is when a brand has access to its customers after purchase. When someone opts into marketing, brands have a golden ticket to personalize the experience with each shopper and generate coveted customer loyalty. But when a brand places a product in a marketplace, they give up access to the customer. Every big corporate client who buys from the marketplace belongs to that respective platform.
- Brands are snugged up alongside competitors. Since these platforms are optimized for gifters, they have huge catalogs of items that users can peruse. While this is a great experience for the shopper, it also means your gifts are placed smack dab between the competition.
- Brands sacrifice profit margin. These marketplaces can lead to big sales and bigger brand exposure to shoppers using these platforms; however, each sale comes at a cost. Most of the time, getting a spot in one of these catalogs means that these platforms get a big cut of each gift sale, reducing profit margins dramatically for each gift sold.
Traditional corporate gifting marketplaces may drum up a lot of awareness with high-value gifters, and they do tackle the most severely time-consuming pain points of corporate gifting, but it does come at a cost to the brand. Ecommerce brands itching to grow their corporate gifting channels may feel like the choice is between partnering with a B2B gifting marketplace or simply scrapping the channel altogether.
Finally, in 2024, there is another option: Zest.
Zest is the first and only corporate gifting platform empowering ecommerce brands to launch and scale their corporate gifting channel directly from their own website (no third-party marketplaces needed). It’s a brand-first tool that aligns with an ecommerce site’s branding, customer experience, and post-purchase marketing efforts all while automating the most tedious tasks that made corporate gifting a pain.
Things like manual order entry, recipient address collection, gift personalization, scheduling, and communication with the corporate gifter have all been yoinked into the 21st century. In true SaaS platform style, Zest is hyper-focused on ecommerce gifting, which means it’s about as optimized as you can get in this category.
With a world-class, white-labeled corporate gifting tool in your ecommerce store’s tech stack, the opportunity to grow this channel overnight is well within reach. No more weeks-long B2B gift sales cycles. No more endless back-and-forth communication. No more sacrificing your branding, profits, and customer relationships to gifting marketplaces.
It’s time to experience the fastest way to land a corporate gift sale and turn this into your most bankable channel in time for the holiday shopping spree.
Slash the Cycle and Set Your Corporate Gift Sales to Hyperspeed
Until now, corporate gifting has been an entirely manual process for brands. Between potential B2B clients filling out a form buried in the footer of an ecommerce website to back-and-forth emails to endless tweaks to final touches, it’s not uncommon for the corporate gift sales cycles to drag on for weeks or months.
And it makes sense. Corporate clients are about to spend a ton of money on a huge gift order, so they’re relentlessly contacting you to ensure every address is right and every detail is set. Conversely, you can’t afford to drop everything and dedicate every minute of your time to one customer, no matter how big their order size.
Like with any ecommerce hurdle, the solution to this problem lies with technology. Zest has finally created a way for ecommerce companies to offer on-brand gifting experiences while giving corporate gifters control and total transparency into everything so they can see their order is exactly how they need it to be for the perfect gift every time.
Similar to how Shopify streamlined store setup, Klaviyo modernized email marketing, Stripe sped up payments, Drift revolutionized customer support (this list could go on for days), Zest is spearheading a new way to scale corporate gifting.
With Zest on your site, you are essentially creating a page entirely dedicated to gifting. This self-service model lets B2B gifters browse your catalog of gifts, choose a delivery method, bulk upload recipients, personalize the gift message, and pay all in one checkout. After checkout, gifters can access their free Zest account at any time so they can see receipts and gift statuses for ultimate peace of mind. Think of it as your always-on, 24/7 B2B sales partner.
This level of control and transparency dramatically reduces the number of times a corporate gifter is bogging down your inbox. And once a gift order is placed, Zest’s integration with your ecommerce platform automatically processes everything — no more manual order entry, no more double-checking long lists of recipient addresses, no more time-consuming conversations trying to decipher a gifter’s desires. Instead, experience the ease of fast and pain-free order processing.
By reducing the gift-buying process to an experience that feels akin to shopping for yourself, there’s no longer a need to start the process weeks or months ahead of schedule. Gifters can get in and place a self-service gift order for hundreds of recipients via a Zest-powered storefront in minutes versus months. And your team can process these orders, no matter how large, in a fraction of the time.
Don't take our word for it, though. The proof is in the gifting pudding (or...something like that).
In 2023, Milk Bar had their inaugural holiday season using Zest to power its corporate gifting channel. The team at Milk Bar had been searching for a solution that would reduce back-and-forth communication with every single customer as well as eliminate the need for the spreadsheets and manual to-do that took so long to do.
“Before Zest, the typical turnaround time for a corporate order was hovering around 2 weeks. Now, processing even large orders takes less than 2 days.”
— Amelia Heller, Corporate Sales Manager @ Milk Bar
In past years, Milk Bar’s corporate gifting cutoff was December 9, or two weeks before Christmas Eve. With a self-service corporate gifting page launched in plenty of time for the 2024 holiday gifting surge, Milk Bar was able to keep receiving orders to be delivered by Christmas Day all the way through December 18 — an extra nine days of large volume gift sales.
“Those extra nine days were our biggest days of the holiday season. Our sales grew incrementally, and these were all orders that otherwise would’ve been lost to competitors if we hadn’t been able to receive them.”
What’s more is that thanks to Zest’s e-gifting feature, Milk Bar was still able to accept holiday orders all the way through Christmas Day. The feature lets customers send gifts and personalized digital gift notes instantly via text, email, or link.
With Zest, Milk Bar slashed its corporate gift sales cycle by 86% and processed more than 70% of gift orders automatically through its new gift-centric SaaS tool.
The cherry on top of closing sales and processing gift orders at blazing speeds is the fact that gifters and their recipients were able to opt into marketing from Milk Bar as part of the Zest gift flow. Long after the holiday season, Milk Bar could reach out to these new audiences with gift offers and language that keeps the simple and sweet gifting storefront top of mind for this year’s holiday shopping.
The Fastest Way to Hit Corporate Gifting Growth in 2024
With your store’s newfound superpower to close and process corporate gift sales in days instead of weeks, you’re able to leave your holiday sale window open longer and drum up more high-value deals. Many times, the cutoff for placing corporate orders happens weeks before the holidays hit. With Zest, you’re outfitted with the tools that enable you to accept orders closer to the big day.
You’ve optimized every other part of your ecommerce website. You’ve seen growth in better web design, faster mobile speeds, and eerily personal email marketing. It’s time to sprinkle the magic of modern tech on your corporate gift channel to make sales every hour of the day.
