Improve Your Customer Experience With B2B eCommerce

Prepare your business for success by improving your B2B customer experience.

If you’re like many B2B business model professionals, you may be interested in creating a new revenue stream and improving customer experiences with a B2B eCommerce solution. If so, you’re on the right track, especially because, according to the 2022 Gartner B2B Buyer Survey, 75% of B2B customers prefer a rep-free sales experience.^[1]

This highlights a key business problem: Even though three-quarters of B2B buyers prefer an eCommerce experience, many companies only sell using traditional, person-to-person methods. Using this guide, however, you can better understand what B2B eCommerce involves, its benefits and features, and how to prepare your company for implementation.

Using this information, you can remove the friction that often impedes the purchasing process, make it easier for buyers to purchase any time and on any device they have on hand, make the buying process more efficient, boost revenue, save money, and improve the customer experience.

What is B2B eCommerce?

Business-to-business (B2B) eCommerce refers to buying and selling between businesses using digital platforms or the Internet. For a small-to-medium-sized business (SMB), B2B eCommerce can be a crucial step toward boosting sales revenue. And many industries are headed towards using B2B eCommerce: By 2024, a projected 15% of B2B companies will be using digital platforms to support customers and sales reps. And by 2025, 80% of B2B sales interactions between buyers and suppliers will happen via digital channels.^[1]

The momentum towards eCommerce B2B addresses some sticky business problems, namely:

• B2B sales processes often don’t align with the smooth, convenient experiences B2C customers enjoy. When B2B buyers purchase from their partners, the experience may be far more cumbersome than when they buy home goods, clothing, or other items online.

• The B2B sales process is often too human-dependent. This means that you may have to wait until a live person is available to execute a transaction, which can extend the closing process.

• B2B sales are frequently inefficient. They may consist of long sales cycles and several communications when the buyer may just want to make a purchase and start using your product or service.

What are the benefits of B2B eCommerce?

B2B eCommerce comes with several benefits, all leading to increased revenue and the potential for stronger relationships with customers.

   Optimize costs

With B2B eCommerce, you can reduce the total cost of each sale by a considerable margin. In most cases, it would be fairly straightforward to set up a self-service portal where buyers can peruse, select, and pay for products and services.

Considering the hours that may be involved in closing a sale, self-service options can save your company a lot of time and, by extension, money. Your staff that would normally have to walk customers through the purchase process can spend that time improving customer experiences by checking in with clients or helping them get started using your offering. In this way, by reinvesting the time a B2B solution frees up, you can cut the costs associated with a range of activities.

   Optimize efficiency

A B2B eCommerce solution positions you to realize the efficiency benefits of order automation, which saves time for everyone involved in the process. For instance, instead of waiting for when both a sales associate and a customer are available to complete a sale, the customer can simply log into your site and hit the Buy Now button—or something similar.

You can also improve customer expectations around product delivery, especially if your eCommerce system verifies address information and provides the customer with tracking information or time-to-fulfillment stats.

The sales cycle also gets truncated with a B2B eCommerce solution because customers can check out your offering online and make a purchase completely on their own as soon as they’d like. Often, companies have a website that describes their service or product, but they lack an eCommerce solution. That’s akin to a retailer having a website but forcing you to go to their brick-and-mortar location or place a time-consuming phone call to make a purchase. An eCommerce solution saves those on both sides of the interaction time.

   Grow revenue

When the sales process happens via eCommerce, you pave the way for multiple revenue-boosting opportunities, such as:

• Increasing order values. By making it more convenient for your business customers to make purchases, you may increase the chances of them adding other products to their shopping carts, increasing the value of each order.

• Using subscription-based models. With a subscription model, customers that may need your service repeatedly don’t have to call up and order again. The system processes the sale automatically on their behalf.

• Accessing a wider range of accounts. With an eCommerce B2B solution, people can purchase from you no matter where they are, as long as they have an internet connection. This opens the door to a wider selection of customers, regardless of their physical locations.

• Expanding into online marketplaces. Once you have an eCommerce solution in place, you get exposure to businesses that shop via online marketplaces. This further broadens your client base.

   Improve the customer experience

An eCommerce solution also introduces the possibility for a greater range of customer experience-boosting features. For instance, you get the ability to:

• Tailor our offerings to specific customers or groups of customers based on buying history, location, or other products they’ve shown interest in.

• Communicate directly with customers regarding their purchase decisions. For example, you can track activity on your eCommerce page and then follow up with customers that have shown an interest in certain products.

• Provide mobile-friendly offerings. An eCommerce system also introduces the possibility of providing options designed for those who may be shopping while on the go. For example, you can show them offerings that coincide with their physical location or offer discounts to those who buy online.

• Customize product offerings. Using the customer data you can collect in an eCommerce system, you can set up packages that fit the needs of particular customers. This could involve a variety of factors, such as groups of products that may fit their needs or discounts on repeat purchases based on how frequently they’ve purchased in the past.

What are the key features of B2B eCommerce?

Many B2B eCommerce features give you a unique competitive advantage over others without eCommerce capability, especially when it comes to making the buying process easier for customers. Here are some that companies often find effective:

Prepare your business for B2B eCommerce

Most businesses benefit from a systematic entry into the B2B eCommerce space, as opposed to diving into it headlong. Here are some things you can do now to enable a smooth, short runway for your project’s takeoff:

• Develop cross-functional strategy teams. There are several stakeholders whose input may be valuable when strategizing a B2B eCommerce implementation, such as marketing, sales, product design, and finance.

• Launch a minimum viable product (MVP) version of the commerce site and measure performance. Using an MVP eCommerce site, you can facilitate sales and get initial feedback from customers about how the experience felt and aligned with expectations.

• Target customers in a beta launch to gather feedback. Despite the initial success of your MVP, a beta launch can provide you with a helpful batch of feedback data. In a beta launch, you make the solution available for use in its near-final/finished state instead of one that’s merely viable.

• Incentivize initial buyers. Incentivizing early buyers helps build momentum for your site and invites more opportunities for gathering additional feedback. It’s also an effective way of getting the word out about your new eCommerce solution.

• Incentivize and compensate sales teams appropriately. By offering sales teams bonuses or commissions early on, you encourage buy-in—even from those who may have been used to a more traditional sales structure.