B2B e-commerce

The digitalisation of sales in the B2B sector is gathering pace, as Gartner predicted several years ago. It's a big breakthrough and one of the biggest leaps forward in digital commerce in the current decade.

In its latest forecast, Gartner stresses that the future of sales is still in a constant state of flux. Drivers of change include new technologies, changing buyer expectations, and the increasing complexity of the B2B environment. Sales leaders must lead their organisations forward in a landscape where human expertise and digital tools combine, and where agility and customer focus are critical to success. (source)

To improve customer service, more B2B organisations are adopting eCommerce alongside salespeople, offering a number of benefits to speed up the organisation's sales processes and improve the quality of customer service.

1. What is B2B eCommerce?

B2B eCommerce refers to business-to-business trade through digital channels. Unlike consumer trade, where the buyer is an individual, B2B eCommerce involves a customer who is another company.

While B2C eCommerce often focuses on single products and one-off purchases, B2B focuses on long-term customer relationships, contract pricing, customised product ranges, and repeat orders.

B2B eCommerce is an efficient self-service portal where business customers can browse the range, place orders, check contract terms, prices, and delivery times at their convenience. Ordering requires a login, allowing customer-specific price lists, product ranges, payment methods, and delivery patterns to be precisely targeted to each business customer.

B2B organisations often decide to consider setting up an online store when the bottlenecks in the sales process become too narrow and prevent business growth.

You can read more about typical bottlenecks here.

2. The benefits of B2B eCommerce

What are the concrete benefits of B2B e-commerce? Here are some of them!

Up-to-date product information, prices and stock balances make it easier to buy

Customers can see in real time the products available for ordering in the eCoomerce, their prices, and the product information they need. Updates made to the online store are visible to all customers, avoiding overselling or fragmentation of changed product data into separate files and Excel files.

Easy management of customer-specific prices

When a business customer in a B2B organisation logs into the online store with their company-specific ID, they will automatically see the price lists that have been set up for them. Prices are centrally located and easy to change. This reduces the number of complaints and pricing errors.

Salespeople's holidays and vacations do not prevent customers from buying

Traditionally, customers could only order doors from salespersons during their working hours. During evenings, weekends, public holidays, and other holiday periods, the availability of sales staff is limited, making it impossible to buy. More and more customers appreciate being able to place orders when it suits them, and B2B eCommerce makes this possible.

eCommerce frees up salespeople's time for specialist work and new customer acquisition

Thanks to the eCommerce digital sales path, salespeople in a B2B organisation are freeing up their time from manual tasks to more productive activities such as providing expertise and acquiring new customers.

Manually moving data between systems and documents doesn’t create value for the customer. By automating that work through eCommerce, productivity increases, and sales teams can focus their time where it truly matters.

Accumulating purchase data for more effective sales and marketing

B2B eCommerce collects valuable data on the buying behaviour of consumers, which can be used to optimise purchase paths and market more effectively. The analytics can be used to study the ordering behaviour of businesses to optimise inventory management and recommend other products of interest to improve cross-selling.

Marketing can use the data to create customer segments that can be more effectively targeted with marketing efforts and engaging content.

Customers can easily find the information they need

B2B eCommerce can provide customers with all the information they need to support their purchasing decisions. The product page maintains up-to-date information on product features, dimensions, materials, packaging size, and other attributes.

The eCoomerce can also create a range of content pages and blog posts that provide in-depth information to support the buying process and help the eCommerce to be found by new customers in search engines.

We put the benefits of a medium-sized B2B organisation into numerical form. In the case study, the benefits were calculated at over €500,000 per year. Read the full case study here.

3. How to become a B2B eCommerce merchant?

Adding eCommerce to your organisation's sales tools is not just a one-off project, but requires careful consideration of how to make it a permanent part of your sales process.

It is important to understand the challenges that eCommerce is intended to address and how to engage the whole organisation in the new way of working.

The whole team needs to be clear about what the eCommerce is intended to achieve in the long term, and the metrics by which success will be measured.

In our blog, we listed 7 steps on how to become a B2B ecommerce merchant.

4. Choose the right technology for your B2B eCommerce

Once the initial mapping, strategy, and objectives have been set, and the whole organisation has been engaged, it is time to start thinking about the technical solutions for your B2B eCommerce. Your goals will go a long way in determining which eCommerce platform is the best choice, and what additional features or modules you should be able to add to it.

There are many different eCommerce platforms available today, and choosing one can be a daunting task at first.

Pinja's pre-study will help you determine the best option for your business.

Modern Headless and Composable eCommerce solutions

One modern option is to adopt a headless and composable architecture, where an eCommerce solution is built from modules that are tailored to the specific business. The back-end system of the eCommerce store, such as Adobe Commerce, is connected via API interfaces to a user interface layer, a content production module, and, for example, a cash register.

Headless and Composable architectures offer many business benefits, such as flexibility and customisation, as different components can be changed and customised over time more easily than in a traditional eCommerce system.

5. Scale your B2B eCommerce with ERP and PIM

ECommerce alone can boost your business to a certain point. However, as your product range and order volumes grow, the limits of scalability are reached unless you integrate other systems essential for digital commerce, such as ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and PIM (Product Information Management).

ERP - Enterprise Resource Planning

ERP is the backbone system for your entire digital B2B business, managing key business processes such as customer data, pricing, stock balances, order processing, and invoicing.

The online store takes advantage of real-time data from the ERP and delivers it to the end customer through the eCommerce interface. When a customer places an order in the online shop, the order is transferred directly to the ERP, where delivery, invoicing, and payment tracking are handled. Read more here.

PIM - Product Information Management System

A Product Information Management (PIM) system helps you maintain and update your product data in a centralised way. PIM acts as a product data master, where product data is enriched as much as possible by adding, among other things, various attributes, category information, attachments, videos, and images to the product data in addition to textual product data.

From PIMs, product information is exported as up-to-date information through integrations with e-commerce and other product information systems.

6. Leveraging AI in B2B eCommerce

Product information management

On the product knowledge management side, AI can be used to help with efficient language translations and writing product descriptions. Product images can be edited and created using AI, or alternatively, the background of the finished product image can be changed or the AI-generated model can be dressed with the clothes of your own brand. Videos are also evolving at a rapid pace.

Product recommendations

With AI, eCommerce customers can be offered products that appeal to them and thus create personalised shopping experiences.

Customer service

An eCommerce chatbot is another part of the shopping journey to leverage AI. A chatbot can be trained to answer customer questions and act as a sales assistant in your store 24/7. Advanced chatbots can already act as true shopping assistants, making the customer's buying decision easier.

Summary

B2B eCommerce enhances business-to-business digital commerce, characterised by customised product selection and pricing, long-term contracts, and an efficient order-to-delivery chain. The benefits of eCommerce range from improved customer experience to more efficient sales and process automation.

A successful B2B eCommerce launch requires customer-centric planning, full staff engagement, high-quality technical implementation, and continuous post-launch development. The use of artificial intelligence, for example, in product recommendations and purchase data analytics, takes B2B eCommerce to a new level of competitiveness.

What are the four main problems that B2B eCommerce can solve?

Problem: Manual processes and error-proneness
Orders are often received by email or phone, and information is manually transferred between systems. This makes the process slow and prone to human error.

👉 Solution. Customers place orders directly online, which means that data is transferred to other systems in real time and errors are significantly reduced.
Problem: Interdependency and service disruption
Customer relationships are often built on individual salespeople, and their absence can interrupt customer service or sales progress.

👉 Solution: the online store is an always-on, self-service channel where customers can place orders and check information without relying only on a single salesperson.
Problem: Fragmentation of information
Customer-specific price and product information is scattered across different systems or files, making data management difficult and prone to errors.

👉 Solution: the online store centralises customer-specific prices, contracts, and up-to-date product information in one place. Integrations with ERP and PIM systems ensure data accuracy and easy maintenance.
Problem: Inefficiency of repetitive orders
Both customers and vendors spend time manually repeating similar orders.

👉 Solution: The online store enables the automation of recurring orders, for example through order pads, favourites lists and automatic deliveries, which speeds up ordering and frees up resources for more important work.