In 2021, Deloitte declared that customer experience had entered “the B2B battlefield.” Since then, more and more distributors have realized that buyers want a high-quality and innovative digital customer experience from their suppliers.
Unfortunately, many of them fall for the myth that B2B and B2C digital customer experiences are comparable. Some software vendors support this myth as they position their B2C platforms for the B2B market. They often try to impose approaches that have proven themselves well in B2C but are rarely appropriate in B2B. Instead, distributors should focus on gaining a deep understanding of their customers’ specific customer experience needs and building a portal that meets them.
Serving the specialist
The buying process in B2B is much more complicated than in B2C. It can vary from industry to industry and even from company to company. In many industries, a B2B ecommerce portal should be a business application for procurement specialists rather than a conversion-focused, B2C-style website – not a store, but a tool that helps employees of the client company (users) solve purchasing tasks.
Users who make purchases in B2B portals have different roles, restrictions and KPIs, and they’re often overloaded with multiple tasks. They work in an omnichannel environment and expect that online channels will increase their overall effectiveness. A B2B portal that helps buyers do their work will earn their loyalty and generate more sales.
Bringing real value to the buyer
Providing a B2C-like experience – something seamless and user-friendly – is a good idea. The problem is that many distributors think the way to do that is by making their B2B portal operate just like a B2C online store. This neglects the core motivations of the buyers who will be using their digital channel, and the result is usually poor CX implementation.
A colleague of mine recently worked on the digital commerce solution team for a large metals distributor in an emerging market. The customers included builders, industrial enterprises and retailers who buy rolled metal in small- and medium-sized lots.
This was the first project of its kind in the industry on the local market, and the supplier’s team was confident that launching a B2B digital commerce channel would give them a significant competitive advantage. They wanted to ensure that clients received the level of comfort and transparency they expect from the best online B2C stores. Sounds great, right?
The problem was that the team blindly trusted the mantra about a B2C-like customer experience and failed to investigate the real needs of their future buyers. By the time they actually got those buyers involved in the implementation process, it was too late.
When they rolled out an early version of the platform, the results were disastrous: Customers didn’t value the traditional B2C functions the team had included, such as product customer reviews, one-click checkout and abandoned carts. They thought all the high-quality photos of metal sheets, rods and fittings were useless, and they thought the big promotional banners were annoying.
Meanwhile, the functionality that the customers actually wanted was nowhere to be found. There was no way to quickly order hundreds of items, create approval workflows, see inventory by warehouse or break an order into multiple shipments with different delivery dates and destinations – and their custom contract catalogs and prices weren’t included, either.
The team lost a lot of time, effort and money because they focused on the wrong things.
Understanding buyers’ business processes
My colleague’s team would have done well to remember that, unlike B2C buyers, users who make purchases on B2B portals are focused on completing their work tasks. They have limited time, work within a limited budget and often have no freedom to choose products. The only thing they want is to quickly complete their tasks with a minimum of effort and errors. Distributors need to understand the complexities of the customer’s end-to-end procurement process and design their ecommerce portals with them in mind.
I once worked with the procurement department at a large factory that manufactures unique equipment for the oil and gas industry. The procurement process started with engineers designing another complex, unique product in the corporate product lifecycle management (PLM) system based on the unique customer’s requirements. The product could consist of thousands of mechanical and electronic components.
Based on the technical documentation, the manufacturing department created a purchase order. The purchase order prescribed the purchasing plan and the budget for thousands of components that needed to be delivered by schedule over the next few months to manufacture hundreds of product items. The purchasing department employees then interacted with dozens of suppliers, compared their offerings and attempted to find the best combination of cost, delivery times and payment conditions. In most cases, replacing components was impossible without the engineering department’s approval.
That’s a bit more complex than a consumer buying a new pair of shoes from their couch. So what would be the point of B2C staples like upsell and cross-sell recommendations, abandoned cart follow-ups, promotion banners, beautiful product photos and one-click checkout? Why focus so much on conversion?
When investigating a B2B customer’s business processes, distributors should think about what makes their ecommerce customer experience different than that of consumers. Ask yourself:
- What is the purpose of product recommendations? Are we trying to upsell to the employee who purchases according to the received specification? Or do we want to save them time and protect them from mistakes?
- Is it appropriate to place advertising banners? How should they influence user’s behavior?
- What should the shopping cart (or, to be more B2B-specific, “order draft”) look like? How many drafts does one buyer manage in parallel? Can employees see each other’s drafts?
- Do customers need an order-approving workflow?
- Should a product be reserved when users add it to the cart (draft order)? For how long? Should this period be the same for all customers?
Don’t sell to customers – help them buy
When it comes to B2B customer experience, successful companies carefully analyze the customer’s work and invest in functionality that simplifies it.
A product manager from a niche B2B marketplace focused on fragmented grocery retail once told me that he implemented a function that allows his customers to quickly calculate the optimal procurement structure, considering suppliers outside the B2B marketplace. Customers upload price lists from third-party suppliers to the marketplace, and the system automatically compares third-party price lists and marketplace offers. The marketplace engine then tells the client whether each product would be better to buy on the marketplace or from third-party suppliers.
At first glance, it may seem strange that a product manager would add a feature to the marketplace that advises clients to buy some products elsewhere instead. But here’s what they told me:
“Firstly, my clients work in a low-margin market, and a low price is vitally important to them. We allow them to save time and money, which is the best guarantee that they will never leave us. Secondly, using the data we receive in this scenario, we allow distributors that sell on the marketplace to see where they are losing revenue due to high prices and allow them to improve the situation.
“As it turns out, this strategy is efficient, and the rapid growth of their marketplace revenue proves it.”
Rethinking the B2B customer experience
If you’re looking to build a B2B ecommerce portal that brings real value to customers, follow these steps:
- Clearly define your audience. This includes not only which companies will buy from you, but also which roles within the company will work with the B2B portal, and their tasks, pains and interests.
- Select several companies from your audience and thoroughly investigate their purchasing processes. Remember that your ecommerce solution should help the user do their job and relieve some of their pains (or at least not create new ones).
- Talk to future users as much as possible. Ask questions about how they work and involve them in testing at the earliest stages of system design – preferably before the code is written.
In B2B, delivering B2C-like experience is about offering the quality and comfort we got used to as B2C buyers, not replicating B2C-specific features. The distributors who understand this are much more likely to emerge from the “B2B battlefield” victorious.
Nikolay Sidelnikov is the Head of Product Marketing and Analysts Relations at Virto Commerce, a B2B eCommerce platform that empowers manufacturers and distributors worldwide. With a focus on streamlining complex B2B transactions, Virto Commerce delivers tailored solutions to enhance operational efficiency and drive growth, enabling distributors to meet the evolving demands of the digital marketplace. Learn more at https://www.linkedin.com/in/sidelnikov/t