At ReStockIt.com where 75% of the company’s annual web sales come from small business, knowing who your corporate customers are and what they want is critical, ReStockIt Inc. co-founder and president David Redlich says.

In recent years ReStockIt.com has been catering to its small business customers with a series of initiatives designed to keep them coming back. “In business-to-business e-commerce, you need to know who your customers are,” he says.  The company sells office, janitorial and restaurant supplies along with related products.

In 2011 ReStockIt.com began working with OrderGroove, a New York e-commerce applications developer, to build an online ordering tool that enables small businesses to automatically reorder basic restaurant and janitorial supplies. “Instead of sending an employee to the warehouse club, now they can devote that individual’s time to growing the business,” Redlich says. The average ticket on a replenishment order is $160, which is in line with ReStockIt.com’s overall average order, he says. Last year ReStockIt.com did $23 million in total sales which includes sales on ReStockIt.com and marketplace sales on Amazon.com and elsewhere.

But instead of just a one-time consumer order of $160, most replenishment orders occur every month. “It’s a good source of recurring revenue,” Redlich says. Keeping small business customers happy and coming back in the face of competition from bigger competitors, such as Amazon.com Inc., is critical, he adds. Amazon, No. 1 in the Internet Retailer Top 500, which ranks companies by the annual web sales, sells product categories similar to ReStockIt’s through Amazon.com and AmazonSupply.com. ReStockIt is No. 485 in the Top 500.

In the summer of 2014 ReStockIt.com, rolled out a new business customer loyalty program with such incentives as the elimination of restocking fees, a dedicated account manager, exclusive promotions, and the chance to accumulate reward points good for redemption on upcoming purchases. In just over a few months, the program has signed up 500 small businesses, Redlich says.

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