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Top 7 B2B E-commerce Best Practices in 2024

Last Updated: March 2024

B2B e-commerce is much more than just selling products and services. It’s also about understanding customer needs and fulfilling their expectations throughout their customer journey.

In fact, in our survey, 85% of consumers said they want brands to exceed their expectations across their entire customer journey, and not just while purchasing with them.

So, for your B2B business to fulfill the evolving customer expectations and increase revenue, considering B2B practices improving your B2B eCommerce can be important.

In this post, we have put together 7 B2B eCommerce best practices you should use in 2024:

  1. Making the website pleasant to look at and easy to use
  2. Detailed product descriptions
  3. Convenient checkout process
  4. Personalization as per the customer
  5. Making eCommerce mobile-friendly
  6. Building an ecosystem
  7. Using analytics

1. Making the website pleasant to look at and easy to use

Your online store/website is an important part of your B2B business model as a storefront is for an offline business!

As per Hubspot, 76% of customers say the most important factor in a website’s design is “the website makes it easy for me to find what I want:

Making your website visually appealing and easy to navigate, is not just going to make your customers’ experiences happy but it can make your customers stay longer on your website as well.

Hence, increasing the chances of visitors buying from you. Here are some tips to make your B2B e-commerce site visually pleasant and easy to use:

  • Understand color psychology and choose colors wisely. People perceive different colors differently. Make sure the color matches your brand’s messaging. 
  • Use visuals on your site, they can attract users and increase engagement. 
  • Make the site personalized and adjustable to the needs of the customer. As per research, B2B websites serving the needs of other B2B customers outline the average conversion rate at 10%.
  • Add a simple-to-navigate product catalog to your site. In fact, 69% of B2B businesses are already expecting to stop printing their catalogs within 5 years.
  • Include reviews and testimonials as almost eighty-nine percent of B2B buyers conduct online research and check reviews before making a purchase.
  • Collaborate with an authorized trust seal provider like PayPal, McAfee, etc. Because 55% of consumers didn’t shop online due to missing trust logos.

The above tips can help you make your website one of the best eCommerce platforms for your B2B business

2. Detailed product descriptions

Unlike B2C customers, B2B customers might look for products with detailed product descriptions.

Why? Let’s understand with an example.

Suppose you need an LCD screen for your office and visit an e-commerce website that appeared in search results. The product prices on the website are quite aggressive but the website doesn’t provide enough details about the products.

Would you buy from this website? Most likely not.

That’s because B2B includes products and services with high Average Order Value (AOV) that are bought for the medium to long term.

Moreover, detailed product descriptions can also help you look authoritative and build a sense of trust.

So if you want to be one of the top B2B e-commerce companies out there, write detailed product descriptions so that consumers end up buying from your website.

To help you identify the areas that need your focus, we will provide you with the following steps that you can use to make each of these areas a little better:

a. Use keywords for SEO

Using the relevant keywords in the product descriptions can help your website rank higher in the search results.

In fact, on average, 89% of B2B buyers use the Internet to do research and conduct 12 searches prior to engaging with a specific brand’s site, with 73 percent of these searches originating from search engines.

b. Add videos and images

Simply by including a few videos and images, you can add credibility to your product as well as your business. Visually telling the descriptions closes the gap between online and in-store shopping for your customers.

c. Add FAQs for quick responses

As per studies, 45 percent of customer phone calls revolve around three topics.

Adding FAQs can make it convenient for the customers to get answers to common questions they have helping them in their purchase decisions. Hence, making it convenient and increasing the sales conversion rate.

Also, check these tips by Google on optimizing product data on your website.

3. Convenient checkout process

Checkout on your website should be convenient so that your prospective customers don’t get annoyed and leave your website without completing a purchase.

Following are a few simple yet effective tips to make the checkouts way simpler and more convenient:

  • Add a reorder button
  • Provide multiple channels for payment
  • Provide option to pay later (if possible)
  • Provide easy option to add GST information
  • Automatic location tracker
  • Optimize checkout for mobiles
  • Guest checkouts
  • Saving previous information to make ordering easy.
  • Make it easy to add addresses.

4. Personalization as per the customer

With almost 50% of buyers building connections with suppliers that offer personalization, it becomes a key practice to personalize your website and services as per the customers’ needs. 

Tracking consumer behavior on your website and keeping a record of their purchase history can help you provide a personalized experience to your customers.

Creating a pleasant customer journey and providing a pleasurable experience to your customers will help you gain their trust much more efficiently. 4 simple tips on how to make your B2B customer’s journey better can be found here.

Here are some best practices you can use to offer personalization:

  • Customized offers.
  • Products and services based upon the previous orders.
  • Preferred checkout options as per customers’ history.
  • Rewards and discounts on products that they usually order.

Along with personalization, being empathetic with your customers is also important.

In a study by Rare Consulting, it was found that 86% of consumers say that their loyalty is mainly due to sympathy and 83% of consumers also refer to trust as an important factor in being loyal.

Bonus Tip: Add a blog to your e-commerce website and publish personalized content. Along with offering personalization, blogs can help generate 67% more leads per month.

5. Making eCommerce mobile-friendly

As per studies, 80 percent of B2B companies Believe that customer expectations have changed because of their B2C experience. Additional studies revealed that 57% of the buying process is done prior to engaging with sales representatives.

With the growing number of smartphone users worldwide, it becomes crucial for you to optimize your B2B business for the mobile view along with desktop, and provide B2B shoppers with an omnichannel experience.

Making your eCommerce website mobile-friendly can help you target and grab the attention of B2B buyers who mostly use smartphones to make a purchase.

In fact, almost 60% of B2B buyers report that mobile played a significant role in a recent purchase, making mobile-friendliness crucial for your B2B e-commerce business.

Also, make sure to optimize for website loading speed.

Image source

Here are a few simple steps that can help you make your website mobile-friendly:

  • Use a mobile-friendly theme for your website.
  • Build responsive product pages.
  • Building a mobile-friendly checkout.
  • Build a dedicated mobile app for your eCommerce business.

6. Building an ecosystem

When it comes to B2B eCommerce, joining all the business frameworks and cycles into an ecosystem is the way to amplify your online revenues and is a B2B eCommerce best practice.

As indicated by eCommerce&B2B Trends, 60% of B2B CEOs consider integrating an eCommerce platform with ERP and Accounting systems to be their paramount technology priority. 

There are many programs that you can use to enhance users as well as your experience with your business. A few programs that can help are:

  • Product Information and Management systems
  • ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning)
  • CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
  • Pricing Analytic Engine

These tools can help you keep a track of your products, merchants, stock, pricing, etc., ultimately empowering you to provide your customers with a great B2B e-commerce experience.

7. Using analytics

The best B2B e-commerce practice is to analyze the performance of your business and online website. Analytics help you to know where you are lacking behind and improvise accordingly. 

To analyze the performance of your business, you should regularly analyze your customer success using these metrics.

And to analyze the performance of your website, you will need tools set up to gather precise information on the entirety of your practices, from your site to online media to SEO. Two of the most widely used tools are:

  • Google Analytics is a fundamental tool for estimating and investigating your site traffic. 
  • MOZ can assist you with examining and further developing your SEO results, while tools like Hootsuite give point by point online media examination.

Conclusion

To stay competitive, your business should continually survey your B2B marketing techniques and track down ways of improving.

Also, marketing has been changing a lot over the years and is bound to change continuously as the world is continuously moving forward. 

But as it changes, it becomes very important to consider a change in marketing strategy too when you think of your business’ growth. A simple way to work on your marketing can be read here.

And also do not forget to engage with your customers on social media as 75% of B2B buyers and 84% of C-level/vice president (VP) executives surveyed use social media to make purchasing decisions, as per IDC.

And most importantly, do not forget to keep investing in customer service. If you are short of money or time, you can always delegate your customer service to Helplama’s specialized ecommerce customer service team starting from just $399/month.

Also, try the Saufter – the customer service software that can help you automate and scale your customer support.

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