Is B2B E-Commerce a Side Project? Think Again

A great web store experience is critical to growth for business-to-business (B2B) companies. However, many B2B sellers are failing to meet buyer expectations, which is a significant business risk.

According to insights from our B2B Buyer Report, 91 percent of buyers in the U.S. would switch suppliers after a bad experience trying to purchase on their web shop.

So why are B2B sellers not keeping pace with customer demands?

The short answer is it’s very hard to bring complex processes that drive their business online.

Most manufacturers, distributors, and wholesalers have built up sophisticated consultative sales processes and provide top-notch customer service to their customer base. Their product ranges have multiple layers of complexity, including thousands of SKUs, complicated product assortments, and customer-specific pricing arrangements. Most commerce tools aren't able to effectively digitize this complexity.

The outcome of this poor product-market fit is that nine in 10 buyers have at least one reason preventing them from placing orders online. These include accurate pricing, stock availability and delivery time information. Many B2B customers need just-in-time delivery of mission-critical products to keep production running smoothly, making accurate, up-to-date information a requirement, not a nice-to-have. In fact, 28 percent of buyers say that a lack of product information is a blocker to online procurement.

A big lesson for sellers is that B2B e-commerce is no longer a side project to the main business. It needs to be put at the core of B2B commerce as that is how today’s customers make purchases. B2B buyers are looking for ways to complete their purchasing tasks efficiently and correctly — today, and in the future, that's online.

The solution to help B2B sellers meet customer expectations starts with understanding the use cases that are most important to customers and addressing those first. The second step is to involve the right teams. Successful digital transformation programs are usually a company-wide affair and not confined to just the e-commerce department or the IT department.

The other critical ingredient for success is having the right real-time data and single source of truth that powers all channels, eliminating data silos and data lags. Unified data is a prerequisite to the big promises of digital transformation, like hyperpersonalization, that come from an in-depth understanding of customers' offline and online behaviors.

Gartner predicts that by 2025 80 percent of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will happen via digital channels. The hard work is still ahead of us to digitize that last complex mile, but I'm excited for that challenge to transform how professionals buy and sell.

Sebastiaan Verhaar is the CEO of Sana Commerce, a ready-to-use commerce platform engineered for B2B.