Two-Thirds of B2B Buyers Plan to Shop Online More. Is Your Site Ready?

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When was the last time you bought something from the Sears catalog?

I figured as much. Yet even today, many B2B retailers remain stuck in that distant past. Rather than showcase products on their website, they still send out printed catalogs to customers or email them PDFs and spreadsheets. As a result, B2B sellers are missing the boat on making their offerings attractive to online buyers.

That’s a big problem. After all, half of B2B spending takes place online, where more than two-thirds of buyers start their journey. And three-quarters of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free purchasing experience — piling on even more pressure to deliver digitally.?

For most B2B sellers, creating a decent ecommerce site needn’t be expensive or difficult. So what are they waiting for?

Traditional B2B sellers are focused on building direct personal relationships with buyers. On one level, that’s great. Every company should be obsessed with its customers. But too many B2B sellers ignore the fact they can make those relationships even stronger — by leveraging the same affordable ecommerce tech that B2C brands use every day.

Taking that step is crucial, given that two-thirds of B2B buyers expect a consumer-like online purchasing experience. With roughly the same share planning to boost their use of B2B digital shopping channels, there’s no time to waste.

Here’s why B2B sellers without a solid ecommerce play are asking for trouble — and how they can raise their game.?

A better way to do B2B sales

When B2B sellers don’t optimize their website for ecommerce, they create challenges for their company, staff and customers.?

For starters, if sales increase, so will the administrative workload. Without information systems that scale to keep pace with growth, you can almost guarantee bottlenecks. For example, when product knowledge is stored in spreadsheets or in the heads of a few employees, sharing it with numerous customers becomes difficult and time-consuming. Likewise, taking purchase orders by email can tie up several team members with boring, manual work.

Compare that hot mess with a B2B site that sells exactly the same products — but takes a B2C approach. Like a consumer retail brand, it showcases those products with compelling photos and product descriptions. Automation simplifies ordering, and both customers and staff enjoy a smoother, more efficient process with fewer mistakes.

To avoid losing customers, B2B sellers must prioritize ecommerce features like automated ordering, strong product content and easy site navigation. Any B2B seller whose site doesn’t tick those boxes is making it dead easy for the competition to steal their business. Just ask B2B buyers: In the US, nine out of 10 would jump ship to another supplier if its website offered a better experience.

Construction equipment giant Caterpillar is a good example of a seller that transitioned its B2B business to a winning ecommerce platform. Caterpillar shifted to an automated, self-service portal, modernizing its operations in an industry known for traditional, manual sales processes. It recently doubled down on ecommerce transactions — making them faster, simpler and more enjoyable — by deepening integration with dealers, streamlining purchases and personalizing the buying experience.?

Last year, Caterpillar launched a mobile ecommerce app that serves as a one-stop shop for finding and ordering parts, as well as order tracking and customer support.?

As important as good tech is, many B2B sellers forget that their website is also a showroom. I know, creating high-quality photos and descriptions to showcase your products is a ton of work — and on its own, it won’t bring you online sales success. But it’s worth the trouble. The better you represent your products, the smoother the customer journey.

Investing in words and pictures also lets sellers gain more control of the narrative around their products. As the producer or importer, who better to show those wares in the best light? If the marketing content is good, retailers who purchase from a B2B seller might start using it themselves, which could drive sales all the way up the chain.

In a recent survey, B2B companies with a positive buying experience saw sales rise by over 60%, retained 20% more customers and nearly doubled customer satisfaction rates.

How to choose the right ecommerce tech for B2B

For B2B sellers, getting ecommerce tech right means thinking outside the box.

Often, that box is the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that many sellers use to run their internal processes like inventory management. While ERPs are great at behind-the-scenes logistics, they’re lousy at creating a customer-facing experience. Trying to extend an ERP to handle ecommerce will result in a clunky, outdated interface that frustrates your customers.

Instead, a B2B seller should find an ecommerce platform that can integrate with and complement its existing technology. To make the most of back-end management and a user-friendly storefront, I suggest turning to an ecommerce expert who understands how to apply solutions for B2B.

ERP-ecommerce integration delivers results: In a recent survey, B2B companies with a positive buying experience saw sales rise by over 60%, retained 20% more customers and nearly doubled customer satisfaction rates.

The less technologically advanced a B2B seller is, the more freedom it has to choose just about any ecommerce solution on the market. That could be Wix, for example, or WordPress with WooCommerce. For a bigger company with more back-end systems that need smooth integration, it makes sense to choose a more comprehensive platform like Shopify.

For Caterpillar, investing in ecommerce tech has been a growth engine. After online parts sales topped $2 billion in 2021, the company aimed to increase digital revenue via dealers by another 50% in three years. By 2023, it exceeded that goal and added 100,000 customers to its platform.

Ultimately, the evidence is clear: If a B2B seller doesn’t get itself and its site up to speed with digital retail, it will lose business to rivals that did. A good online buying experience isn’t cutting-edge, it’s table stakes. So rather than resist change — and watch customers and profits go elsewhere — it’s time to invest strategically in ecommerce. The longer a B2B retailer depends on spreadsheets and mail-out catalogs to make sales, the shorter its lifespan could be.

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(Content from this post was originally featured in Forbes).