You start with an idea of your value

When you start working on your product, you’ll have an idea of the value that you will provide.

Some of the more generic reasons are:

• All in one place
• Trust
• Mediation
• Convenience

Merchant-centric benefits include:

• Collecting money upfront
• Not having to provide payment terms
• A marketing budget.

But you often provide additional value that you didn’t originally envision

As you understand the supply chain and improve your product, you increase the value beyond what you planned.

Finding out the additional value you provide is another reason to regularly talk to your customers.

If you understand why your users value your service, you can decide what direction to move in more accurately.

You’ll also potentially learn that the value you provide is not where you think it is. It might even be much greater than what you imagine.

A feature or process that you considered a nice-to-have bonus might be something that provides immense value.

With Supplybunny, we understood that besides the selling points we were aiming for, we’re also provided an avenue for suppliers to sell online in general. A lot of them were eager to get started online but were not sure how.

Since they’re B2B suppliers, they were never even approached by regular e-commerce sites.

Therefore we were positioned well to offer to set up their stores on B2C websites, as well. Some even opted to link directly to their Supplybunny profiles from their websites. Some went even a step further and created separate catalogs for business and customer orders.

Similarly, we underestimated the value of providing a quotation document for business buyers who require approval.