Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
Planning a B2B e-commerce site? Start here.
So, you’ve decided your business needs a B2B e-commerce site.
You may already be looking at platforms, agencies, demos and feature lists. You may have heard that you need customer-specific pricing, ERP integration, a PIM, punchout, headless commerce and several other things nobody had mentioned to you last week.
You might need some of them.
You might need none of them.
Before choosing technology, answer a simpler question:
How should buying from your company actually work online?
That is where I would start.
Start with the business you already have
Your website will not exist in isolation.
You already have customers, products, prices, salespeople, warehouses, spreadsheets, ERP records and little rules everybody knows but nobody has ever written down.
Before talking about platforms, understand:
- Who buys from you?
- Do all customers see the same products and prices?
- Where do product information, pricing and stock come from?
- What happens after an order is placed?
- Which parts of the process are still manual?
- Which existing systems need to be involved?
- What causes your team trouble today?
None of these questions is particularly technical.
But the answers determine most of what you need to build.
You don’t need to arrive with a specification
You know your business. That is the useful part.
You should be able to explain how you sell, how customers buy, what is awkward today and what you want to improve.
Turning that into e-commerce requirements is part of the job.
Writing a detailed specification too early can actually make things worse. You can spend weeks describing a solution before anybody has asked whether it is the right solution.
The same applies to feature lists.
B2B platforms can offer customer-specific catalogues, contract pricing, quotes, approvals, multiple buyers, purchase orders, credit limits, bulk ordering, punchout and much more.
Wonderful.
But every feature adds configuration, testing, maintenance and another thing that can eventually break.
The useful question is not:
“Can the platform do this?”
It is:
“Does our business actually need this?”
If a manual task takes ten minutes a week, automating it for €15,000 may not be a particularly clever first investment.
Sometimes the right solution is less technology.
That is allowed.
Pricing needs an honest conversation
B2C pricing is usually easy to understand.
A product costs €100. Perhaps there is a discount. Done.
B2B can be different.
One customer may have a negotiated price. Another uses a price list. A distributor gets a discount. A key account has contract pricing. Prices may come from ERP, from the website or from somewhere else entirely.
Before building anything, work out where the truth lives.
If ERP says one price and the website says another, which one wins?
That sounds like a small technical detail until your best customer places an order at the wrong price.
Then it suddenly becomes very important.
“Show stock” is not a requirement either
What does “in stock” actually mean in your business?
Physically sitting in a warehouse?
Available to this customer?
Available after existing orders are reserved?
Available from another location?
Available in five days?
Something your supplier says they have?
A website can display any number you give it. That does not mean the number is useful.
First decide what customers genuinely need in order to make a buying decision.
Sometimes “Available” and a reliable lead time are more useful than a precise number that happens to be wrong.
Think about what happens after checkout
There is a tendency to treat the order confirmation page as the finish line.
For your company, that is often where the interesting part begins.
Where does the order go?
Does it enter ERP automatically?
Can it fail?
Who notices if it fails?
Does somebody need to add something manually?
What happens if an item is unavailable?
How does the customer find out?
A beautiful ordering experience followed by three days of internal confusion is not a good e-commerce system.
The front end and the operation behind it need to agree with each other.
Integration is not the goal
At some point somebody will probably say:
“We need to integrate it with the ERP.”
Maybe.
But “integrate with ERP” is not a requirement. It is a heading.
What information needs to move?
In which direction?
How often?
What happens when it is missing?
What happens when the systems disagree?
Who owns it?
Products, customers, prices, stock, orders and invoices may all have different answers.
The useful work is deciding those answers before somebody starts connecting APIs.
Your product data may be harder than the website
This catches companies surprisingly often.
The website is ready.
The design looks good.
The integration works.
Then somebody discovers that half the catalogue has inconsistent names, missing dimensions, poor photographs and descriptions copied from PDFs years ago.
A platform cannot magically create good product information.
If customers need technical specifications, compatibility information, drawings, certificates, filters or downloadable documents, find out whether that information actually exists and who will maintain it.
For businesses with large catalogues, this can become one of the biggest parts of the project.
It is much nicer to discover that before launch.
Talk to the people who already know the problems
Your salespeople and customer service team often know things that analytics never will.
Talk to them.
And, if possible, talk to a few customers too.
Ask what people repeatedly look for.
Ask what makes ordering annoying.
Ask what they normally phone or email about.
You may discover that the feature everybody inside the company is excited about means very little to customers, while something wonderfully boring, such as finding the correct replacement part quickly, matters enormously.
B2B buyers are still people.
Most of them simply want to finish what they came to do and get on with their day.
Choosing a platform for your B2B e-commerce site
This is usually where people expect me to name a platform.
I won’t.
Not yet.
BigCommerce may be an excellent fit for one company and completely unnecessary for another. The same applies to every other platform.
The right choice depends on your catalogue, pricing, customers, integrations, internal resources, growth plans, budget and how much control you need.
There is no universally best B2B platform.
And sometimes the platform you already have is perfectly capable of doing the job.
When you speak to an agency or developer, bring your business problems instead of technical terminology.
This:
“We have 600 trade customers. About 80 have individual pricing. Prices live in ERP. Most repeat orders still arrive by email. Customers regularly call because they cannot tell whether parts are compatible.”
is much more useful than:
“We need an API-driven composable architecture with advanced B2B functionality.”
A good technical team can work with the first one.
If you are migrating, don’t rebuild the mess
Old systems contain years of decisions.
Some are bad.
Some are outdated.
Some exist for very good reasons nobody remembers anymore.
Before recreating a feature or process, ask why it exists.
Keep what still makes sense.
Fix what does not.
And resist the temptation to reproduce ten years of workarounds on a nicer platform.
A migration is one of the few opportunities you get to clean the house.
Use it.
Test the awkward situations
Before launch, somebody will test whether Add to Cart works.
Good.
Now test the things that actually make B2B interesting:
A customer with special pricing.
An item that has just gone out of stock.
A buyer who needs approval.
An order containing products from different warehouses.
A returning customer reordering something from six months ago.
A failed integration.
A product with incomplete data.
Real businesses contain edge cases.
Your testing should too.
Decide who owns the system after launch
Launch day is not the end of the project.
Prices change. Products change. Employees leave. Integrations fail. New customers arrive. Somebody wants a new field.
Before launch, decide:
Who manages products?
Who manages customers?
Who investigates an incorrect price?
Who talks to the developer?
Who decides whether a requested change is worth doing?
It does not need to be complicated.
It just needs to be clear.
So where should you start?
Not with a platform demo.
Not with a 90-page specification.
And probably not with a list of everything your competitors have.
Start with how your business and customers work today.
Decide what should be better tomorrow.
Then work out what needs to happen behind the scenes to make that possible.
Only then choose what to build.
It sounds obvious.
You would be surprised how often projects do it the other way around.
Planning one now?
If you are thinking about a new B2B e-commerce site or replacing an existing one, you do not need to have all the answers before getting in touch.
Tell me how your business works and what you are trying to achieve.
We can work out the technology afterwards.
Tell me about your project →