THE PILLARS OF B2B ECOMMERCE

Meeting B2B Buyer Expectations & Your Business Needs Online

Jared Seitz, Business Development leader at Acro, and Nicole Donnelly, American Manufacturing keynote speaker and podcast host, recently held a webinar called “10 Things We Love About B2B Ecommerce”. This quick outtake takes a look at common objections to ecommerce for B2B and explains how overcoming those objections will lead B2B manufacturers to better sales and customer experiences. Watch now!

Transcript of the video

Hey, it's Jared from Acro. Recently, I sat down with Nicole Donnelly for our “10 Things We Love About B2B Ecommerce” webinar. Here's part of our conversation:

Jared: I think the B2B industry has kind of been scrambling to be like, well, like, give us a break; it's not as easy as B2C! There are a few more spinning plates to figure out here. But in the background, we have to be figuring that out. It's kind of like all the behind-the-scenes things. As an example, I was thinking of this:  in a house, no one really cares about all the plumbing that's behind their walls. They just care that hot water comes out. And then, if the status quo jumps up to where it's hot water on demand -  like I don't want to wait 20 seconds for my shower to be hot, I want that instant hot water. So, it's we're all getting better and better each day that goes by. We all have to make sure we're upping our game, or you can quickly fall behind.

Nicole: I love that point so much. You're absolutely right that, like B2B buyers, they have the same expectations as consumers when they're purchasing online.

And you're absolutely right Amazon has created this amazing customer experience where the checkout process is just so seamless. And so those people at these B2B companies they're used to that; they're used to buying on Amazon all the time and having one-click checkout. So, especially as the younger generations are moving up, it's becoming more and more of this higher expectation in B2B.

But to your point earlier, like yes there are some complexities and challenges that are inherent in the B2B purchasing processes. But there are solutions for all of them! That's what's so wonderful: there's been so many great advances in B2B ecommerce with a lot of the shopping carts, just in the last three years, that's just really accelerated and made it so much easier for these B2B companies to really implement an ecommerce solution that can take into effect all of those very unique maybe specific custom business rules that these organizations have.

I can't tell you how many times I've sat down with a client, and they're like, B2B ecommerce won't work for our business because, well, we have custom pricing books for every single customer. Well, you can fix that. You can actually create custom pricing books for every customer through B2B ecommerce. You know, there are solutions to some of these challenges.

B2B ecommerce won't work because we ship these huge, you know, pieces of equipment, and we need LTL and freight, and it's so hard to figure out the shipping quote, you know, for those products. Well, there are partners that can actually help you set up instant quotes for shipping by weights and dims, and it's incredible. I've seen it. Just like at the click of a button, you can get a shipping quote through amazing Partners like ShipperHQ.

So, a lot of these, like you know, kind of objections that I've heard from these B2B companies, they're becoming, they're no longer, there's a solution for them which is really quite exciting to see how that's all happening.