The new Digital Commerce 360 report, “B2B Ecommerce Handbook: Formulas for Digital Growth,” lays out many of the steps businesses are taking, from identifying customer needs to managing useful product and customer data and providing a user-friendly, personalized buying experience — and growth in sales to boot.

Case studies in the B2B Ecommerce Handbook

Enzo Rabante, head of digital solutions, Dayco

At Dayco, an international engine parts manufacturer for various industries, “Our customers expect a personalized journey that generates value at each touchpoint, enhancing the brand in every line of business,” Enzo Rabante, head of digital solutions, says in the report.

To reach that point, Dayco gathered specifics on what its distributor customers wanted in an online buying experience, including quick access to product pages and related technical documents. It also determined the kind of customer experience it needed to provide and laid out the key performance indicators it wanted to reach, such as increased conversion rates for marketing campaigns and levels of customer loyalty.

Fine-tuning the B2B marketplace model

Also featured in the report are fast-growing chemicals marketplace ChemDirect and GearSource, a live-events gear supplier.

Dave Haase, president, ChemDirect

As B2B marketplaces expand in number and volume to serve every industry, the companies building and operating them are perfecting their strategies.

ChemDirect, a marketplace for the chemicals industry, last year expanded its catalog to more than 500,000 specialty chemical products. It’s on course this year to triple gross merchandise value to between $40 million and $50 million.

President Dave Haase notes that ChemDirect is backing that growth by addressing two critical needs of chemicals industry buyers: pricing transparency and, through a shipping network developed with trucking company Schneider National, more control over their shipping.

Marcel Fairbairn, founder and CEO, GearSource

If you’ve viewed a Super Bowl half-time show recently, you’ve seen the kind of results provided by GearSource.com, a supplier of lighting, audio and related equipment for live events and clients like Google and Apple.

Recent plans to tap expanded growth opportunities led GearSource to replace its long-running legacy ecommerce platform with a new one capable of handling transactions of complex orders, many of which involved multiple currencies.

Founder and CEO Marcel Fairbairn says the new platform gives GearSource the necessary speed and flexibility to grow and keep its customers’ events on stage and under the lights.

The B2B Ecommerce Handbook: Formulas for Digital Growth report is available for a free download.

Dave Haase, president of ChemDirect, will speak B2B marketplace strategy at Digital Commerce 360’s EnvisionB2B 2023 Conference & Exhibition in June in Chicago.

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Kathleen Lewarchick

“Visual commerce,” or online buying that uses 360-degree image views, interactive 3D models, and in some cases, augmented reality, has made the jump to B2B ecommerce. Introduced by the gaming world, visual commerce became more mainstream when B2C brands began offering enhanced visual experiences. Think eyewear retailing, where consumers “try on” frames, or furniture buying, where buyers preview products in their virtual home. It was only a matter of time before those experiences appeared in B2B.

How visual commerce helps B2B buyers

Buyers look for clarity as they step through an online customer journey. Ordering and reordering can be straightforward, but increasingly distributors and manufacturers have turned to “solution selling” of interconnected products using a visual approach. Buyers appreciate seeing a more fully integrated list of materials. It removes the guesswork and saves time. Sometimes it even saves them money.

In some categories, visual commerce provides wholesalers (and even their consumers) with engaging experiences. It might be a virtual showroom with curated collections that support full online buying. Other times it is a mixed-use tool, a digital assist: buyers peruse fixtures and materials in a real showroom and place items in an online cart, on a device, as they shop. This can save buyers time and it can be a wonderful way to cross-sell them throughout the customer journey.

New technology tools

One tool — exploded-view diagrams, or schematics showing parts together — was a mainstay for engineers. But they are more common now throughout B2B ecommerce.  Buyers can now see the entire solution, both holistically and individually, and order with them. Per the parts diagram below, the exploded view integrates with the order management system. See a part that you need? Check. See the whole solution? Check, check. In either case, just click and place it in the cart.

An exploded-view diagram, which is becoming more common in B2B ecommerce, lets buyers view and click to buy individual parts of complex equipment.

One B2B company incorporated this technology into their user experience flow. The goal was twofold:

1. to make it easier for B2B sellers in their organization to explain larger, integrated solutions; and
2. to make it easier for their customers, B2B procurement teams, to visualize the outcome.

By creating an integrated visual tied to the company’s order management system, they reduced steps in the customer journey. As the ecommerce manager says, “There’s a wonderful moment when buyers say: ‘Aha! I see how it all works.’ We want to delight and relieve buyers during the process.”

While not all B2B categories are a match for transactional visual commerce, other augmented reality tools are on the cusp of changing the way that overall B2B business performs. Again, driven by experiences in gaming, buyers like MRO (maintenance, repair and operations) engineers can now don A/R headgear or use tablets to “see” solutions in their natural environment.  As a result, they may uncover potential barriers earlier in the buying process, maybe even prior to ordering. This accelerates the knowledge build and helps save time and money with returns.

MRO engineers use visual commerce to view products in their natural environment before placing an order.

Preparing for the future

Visual commerce may never fully replace traditional ecommerce, just as “voice commerce” hasn’t become the dominant way to place B2B orders yet. However, visual commerce will continue to be incorporated into many facets of B2B digital commerce given the appetite that online users have for strong visuals. A great place for your organization to start is with a strategic discussion about use cases. These provide the foundation alongside good product data, and with technologies like Digital Asset Management systems, you evolve toward the Visual Commerce experiences that your customers increasingly expect.

About the author

Kathleen Leigh Lewarchick is the VP of Marketing for Xngage LLC, a B2B digital commerce services company with more than 60 clients across the industrial trades. She is the former PURELL® Hand Sanitizer Brand Director, has co-created automated replenishment products with Amazon Business, and created telehealth solutions for a company that she later helped sell to CVS Health. 

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But how they use these channels are in contrast between the ages groups, says a new report from Forrester Research.

“Forrester’s research shows that younger buyers bring those behaviors and attitudes to B2B buying, and are more likely to use digital and self-serve transaction channels than their older counterparts,” the report says.

Younger buyers use digital channels more

Millennial and Generation Z buyers are much more digital in their channel usage than their older counterparts. For example, 35% of younger buyers say they will use an enterprise app to make corporate purchases. 24% of older B2B buyers prefer placing orders with an inside sales representative. That compares with just 19% of Millennial and Generation Z buyers.

“Across all phases of the buyer’s journey, older buyers most frequently identified in-person vendor sales interactions, peer conversations, and visiting vendor websites as the most meaningful or impactful sources of information,” the Forrester report says. “Two of these three information sources represent vendor-owned interaction types. But no vendor-owned interactions were selected at the same frequency by younger buyers.”

“Generational shifts in the workplace are turning the business buying process on its head,” says Amy Hayes, vice president and research director at Forrester. “Lack of understanding about millennial and Gen Z buying behaviors can adversely affect providers’ ability to reach, engage, and ultimately win these buyers over.”

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Millennial refers to people born between 1981 and 1996. Gen Z refers to those born between 1996 and 2012.

Amy Hayes, vice president and research director, Forrester Research

“Generational shifts in the workplace are turning the business buying process on its head,” says Amy Hayes, vice president and research director at Forrester. “Lack of understanding about millennial and Gen Z buying behaviors can adversely affect providers’ ability to reach, engage, and ultimately win these buyers over.”

Millennials and Gen Z zoomers constitute 64% of business buyers. Furthermore, millennials make up more than half of all business buyers, Forrester says.

“These younger buyers are more demanding, engaging in more buying activities, and more willing to express their dissatisfaction with the buying process,” Forrester says. “These changing buying behaviors, combined with continued economic uncertainty and tighter budgets, necessitate that sales and marketing leaders adapt their go-to-market strategies.”

Millennial and Gen Z B2B buyers also have high standards for engaging and purchasing online from sellers

• Younger buyers carry new demands and expectations for B2B buying. Forrester predicts that in two years, more than a third of millennial and Gen Z business buyers will purchase through self-guided digital channels. Those include vendor websites, marketplaces, app stores, or directly from an existing product.
• Millennials and Gen Z B2B buyers are active information seekers. Younger buyers go to more sources and find third-party resources more impactful than vendor resources.
• This group is quicker to express dissatisfaction with the buying experience. 90% of younger buyers cite dissatisfaction with their vendor in at least one area compared to 71% of older buyers.

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Arjun Narayan

According to Business of Apps, “Amazon is by far the largest store in the world, with nearly 200 million customers accessing its website each month” — so  it’s only natural to want your product to be displayed in front of all of these potential customers. To give your business a fighting chance, Amazon offers Advertising and Promotions that you can offer to future customers. So how do you decide which is the right fit for your business?

Because they are time-sensitive and foster a sense of urgency, discounts may be an effective tactic. Offering discounts or promotions is not a way to cheapen your goods; instead, consider them a great advertisement! We recommend discounting the best-selling items in your subcategory to see how crucial pricing is to your customers’ purchasing decisions in that market. The next step is determining which days you want to provide them. To get rid of your surplus inventory, discounting  may be seasonal, on sale days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Prime Days, or it may be based on consumer patterns you find on your Brand Analytics dashboard.

Your Amazon business may develop significantly if you utilize discounts wisely in conjunction with Amazon Advertising. Here are some examples to help illustrate this:

The First Scenario

Determine your marketing budget if, for example, your primary objective is to increase brand awareness for your products, and return on investment is unimportant because there is a good fit between the two. Then create Sponsored Product Campaigns with a maximum bid on the top of the search results and Sponsored Brand campaigns with a landing page of either the new products you have launched or the Brand Page. Let’s say the budget is 50% to 60% of your product’s MSRP, with a goal of X units sold in three months. In addition, you can run a Sponsored Display Campaign focusing on the ASINs of your rivals.

The result: This kind of advertising strategy increases your items’ visibility so that they appear on the top page of the search results for the relevant keywords. If there is a product-market fit, it may have a modest ROI initially. Still, over time, as you convert a significant number of reviews into sales, your chances of having your product appear naturally on the first page increase.

The Second Scenario

If your rivals’ lower prices are causing you to lose customers — even if your items rank first or second in search results — it’s time to explore your options. The best way to get back on track is to launch Discount Promotions and use Sponsored Display Campaigns with a budget of 2% to 3% of your monthly sales to target the product detail pages of your rivals. This will allow customers to see that your pricing is more advantageous than your rivals’.

The result: If your products have received similar reviews to those of your rivals’ products in conjunction with a greater discount offer, a lower expenditure is recommended. (This approach is not recommended for products with low reviews and ratings.)

The Third Scenario

It is essential to determine the amount of money you could spend on each unit if your product sales and glance views are trending downward due to reduced prices from your competitors, which you cannot match owing to profitability. Once you know how much advertising for each unit costs, you may divide that amount between Amazon advertisements and discount promotions.

The ideal budget allocation in these cases would be to spend 70% on sponsored products and 30% on sponsored displays.

The result: With budgeting split between campaigns that increase sales and campaigns that enhance product visibility, a discount can also act as an additional sales driver. With 75% of sellers on Amazon using at least one type of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, this discount strategy improves both the visibility of your products compared to those of your competitors and provides the best ROI.

Arjun Narayan is the founder and CEO of Salesduo, an automated multichannel commerce platform that assists companies with Amazon account management, Amazon advertising, Amazon SEO and brand pages, and Amazon EDI and shortage claims.

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The chain retailer says B2B digital sales make up a big chunk of its customer sales. It is adding new perks to its loyalty program.

The Home Depot Inc. ranks No. 4 in Digital Commerce 360’s Top 1000 database. The Top 1000 ranks North American e-retailers by web sales.

Home Depot’s new loyalty program perks include:

• A new elite support line for prioritized, exclusive assistance for business needs, VIP experiences, and account management services
• Personalized purchase support from Home Depot experts
• Preferred pricing

The retailer said it will release additional benefits for members throughout the year.

“Pros make up about 10% of The Home Depot’s customer base and approximately half of our sales,” says Hector Padilla, executive vice president of outside sales and service for The Home Depot. “To serve the pro, it’s about removing friction through a variety of products and capabilities — whether they visit a Home Depot store for a last-minute need on the way to a job or plan a larger purchase in advance to be delivered to the job site.”

Pro Xtra and professional contractors

Professional contractors represent a $450 billion marketplace. So, The Home Depot is building a unique, interconnected ecosystem to help them build their businesses, the retailer says. The company has introduced new product offerings and capabilities. They include:

• Job-lot quantities of the right assortment of brands, digital tools and personalized experiences
• A variety of fulfillment options with reliable delivery and prioritization for Pros
• Other value-added offerings like credit, tool rental, and quote center.

“We’re always looking for ways to enhance Pro Xtra to best support Pros as their needs grow and evolve, along with their businesses,” says Molly Battin, senior vice president and chief marketing officer. “This tiered loyalty system unlocks a new experience of rewards and savings for our Pro customers with more benefits than ever, right at their fingertips.”

Since launching Pro Xtra in 2012, the program has continued to expand its benefits and rewards with more ways to support contractors, Home Depot says.

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Vinny Maurici

The opt-in era poses new challenges for online advertising. But by offering ecommerce sites that provide a helpful customer experience, B2B companies can rely less on online ads, writes Vinny Maurici, vice president, data strategy and services, Pivotree.

For years, companies have been able to track their users’ website and app activity across other companies’ apps and websites, using the resulting data for advertising purposes or for sharing with data brokers.

Last year, Apple launched a highly anticipated privacy feature: App Tracking Transparency (ATT). With this policy change, Apple users now have to opt-in to Apple’s Identifier for Advertising (IDFA), a unique code assigned to mobile devices, which data brokers and ad marketers use to track users across apps. Using this code, they can combine their users’ behavior into one comprehensive profile, providing companies with the information they need to send targeted ads.

Historically, this process took place behind the scenes, with most users generally unaware of what data was being collected and how it was being used. Now, users receive prompts the first time they open an app, letting them know how the app is tracking their data and giving them the option to opt-in.

Unsurprisingly, Apple’s ATT policy was met with outrage from platforms like Facebook and Snap, who rely on their users’ data to send targeted ads and generate revenue. And their fears became a reality – in the United States, data from analytics company Flurry showed that users chose not to opt-in of app tracking 96 per cent of the time, following the implementation of ATT.

Now, in 2022, nearly every direct-to-consumer (DTC) company is dealing with revenue contraction, shrinking margins and runaway losses. In combination with supply chain costs, heightened interest rates and shrinking venture capital investments, DTC companies are in trouble.

It’s important to note that B2B organizations are different in their focus compared with retail and DTC. While retail and DTC home in on price and customer acquisition,  B2B focuses on digital product experience and elements like punchout, which lets B2B buyers link from their procurement/spend management software to a preferred seller’s ecommerce site.

B2B organizations have long understood their customers, however, and have been less reliant on paid advertisements or targeted ads as a source of revenue. On top of that, they have been focusing especially on the product experience of finding, selecting and ordering products.

For that reason, B2B companies, once viewed as the dinosaurs of digital commerce, are now at the forefront of digital commerce strategy with many B2B distributors building more complete, in depth, and intuitive shopping experiences than retail giants like Amazon, Walmart, Etsy or Wayfair.

For once it seems, retail has to catch up on the digital front when compared to leaders in the B2B digital commerce space.

About the author:

Vinny Maurici is vice president, data strategy and services, at Pivotree, which  designs, builds and manages digital platforms in commerce, data management, and supply chains for branded manufacturers, distributors and retailers.

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Moreover, millennials, born between 1981 and 1996, have already joined the management ranks of B2B buyers, and zoomers (or Gen Z, born between 1997 and 2012) are becoming more common among the buyer population.

Not surprisingly, the surveys found than B2B marketers and demand-gen pros are emphasizing the need to go more digital and virtual in sales and marketing efforts.

Among these trends:

• Marketing and demand generation professionals will focus on the quality rather than the quantity of their leads, according to 86% of survey respondents.
• Buyers and prospects will consume more digital content in their buyer journey (72%).

Among digital content, blogs (cited by 74% of respondents), infographics (73%) and videos (65%) top the list of content types that marketers and demand gen professionals say will be most effective at the top of the marketing funnel, the point where marketers first engage potential buyers.

At the bottom of the funnel, when customers are ready to buy, in-person events (25%) are among the top three strategies. But they come in third after customer case studies (48%) and white papers or e-books (47%).

More Charts & Data Stories

Check back soon for more Charts & Data Stories. We add new content regularly. 

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John Strawn, chief marketing officer, Kele

And it’s gotten more difficult during the pandemic, when supply chain disruptions mean some products inevitably will be out of stock at any time, says John Strawn, Kele’s chief marketing officer.

What’s more, increasingly Kele must make the right recommendations to customers it’s never spoken with, potential buyers who are visiting Kele.com rather than calling a sales rep.

“The shift to digital is prominent,” Strawn says. “While the phone channel has remained consistent, all the major growth has been in the web channel.” He says ecommerce sales grew 30% from 2020 to 2021 and are up another 60% this year.

Kele expects revenue to exceed $250 million this year, with 55% coming from self-service electronic channels. Of that, 75% comes from Kele.com and the rest from custom integrations with large customers’ internal ordering systems that allow buyers to punch out to Kele.com or transmit orders via EDI.

To sustain growth, Kele is building an automated system designed to make the best recommendation to a customer instantly, whether that buyer is on Kele.com, the distributor’s ecommerce site, looking at email or on the phone with a sales representative. To do that, Kele is enriching its customer data, marrying that data with product information and inventory status, and layering on artificial intelligence capabilities that can make automated recommendations.

proof-of-concept in recent months has produced conversion rates ranging from 40-60% for AI-driven recommendations based on customer behavior data. With that success in hand, Strawn says, Kele is preparing to embark on a larger project that will draw in additional customer data along with information about previous transactions and interactions on the phone and via live chat, email and text.

The aim is to provide even more personalized content by identifying unknown visitors and creating a rich customer file for all customers and prospects. “What we’re doing is to not just turning unknowns to knowns, but turning legacy knowns to really known customers.”

B2B personalization is more complex than B2C

Among the data that Kele plans to incorporate into the expanded customer file is information about the role of the buying group the visitor is part of and that individual’s role within that group.

“They could be a building automation controls contractor on a site trying to estimate a project or looking for the right part,” Strawn says. “Or it may be a project administrator who places the order. It’s a little different experience. One is more informative and one more transactional.”

Understanding the specific role of the website visitor is more important in B2B ecommerce, where many people may be involved in a buying decision, than in B2C, where typically consumers make their selections on their own.

Jessie Johnson, principal analyst, Forrester Research

In B2B ecommerce, “the optimized customer experience isn’t just personal — it’s contextual,” says Jessie Johnson, a principal analyst at Forrester Research Inc. who specializes in digital interactions with customers. “In B2B, that context comes from the added complexity of the decision-making process, where that individual on the website is actually playing a role inside a buying group with members that need to move together through the customer lifecycle, from discovery and evaluation to purchase, renewal, and even advocacy.”

“In addition to product interest, companies like Kele need to know or infer—in the moment—whether that website visitor is an engineer or architect, or contractor or supplier to better understand that individual’s role in the buying group, their information requirements, and when they’re most likely to be engaged.”

Identifying the website visitor is the first step

Kele, which was acquired by investment firm The Stephens Group LLC in 2020, aims to achieve that level of sophistication. But first it had to find a way to track website visitors who do not identify themselves and have not purchased before or created accounts.

Before starting this project early this year, Kele could not identify 80% of the visitors to its website, Strawn says. He says the distributor was already personalizing content for the 20% it could identify, segmenting them into 866 distinct buckets. But it was unable to tailor content for the four in five visitors it did not recognize.

To remedy that, Kele.com began assigning a unique identifier to each unrecognized user, and building what it calls a “customer contact card” for that individual. That’s a file that tracks what the individual searches for and clicks on, how long they spend on the site, how frequently they visit, the product categories and manufacturers that interest them, and more.

If a person registers for an account or purchases, the system captures their name, email address and company. Strawn says the site also pops up offers designed to capture email addresses. That can help Kele identify the company the visitor works for and in some cases identify the individual based on in-house customer information or data from outside sources. All that information goes into the individual’s contact file.

Knowing the branch of a large company where the customer works also helps Kele customize site content and recommendations. One branch may specialize in providing control systems for hospitals,  another for data centers and a third for service industries. Knowing the branch’s specialty enables Kele to fine-tune what it shows each customer.

Identifying the visitor’s sales region also enables the system to add in the name of the Kele salesperson who handles that account, giving that rep more information about the customer. Plus, identifying a visitor’s location can immediately enable Kele to market across channels its promise to deliver within two days to 74% of the U.S.

AI-driven recommendations boost conversion rates

In the testing phase this year, Kele has stored those customer files within Salesforce Personalization (formerly called Interaction Studio) from Salesforce Inc., whose software Kele also uses for customer relationship management and other applications. It’s also added into that software product information, such as which items often are purchased together, and which ones may be delayed by supply chain issues.

As an example, Strawn says, “most of our customers are working a job and need parts fast despite the global supply challenge, so when they view an out-of-stock SKU, we fly a placement that shows an in-stock alternative that can get to them in two days or less.”

The personalization system also makes up-sell and cross-sell recommendations based on the product being purchased, and these recommendations are producing conversion rates well above the strong 4.25% average for Kele.com. When the system recommends additional products typically required with the purchased item, the conversion rate is 62%, and it’s 42% for related products, Strawn says.

The role of a customer data platform in B2B ecommerce

That success has convinced Kele to move forward with a more ambitious project that will allow it to incorporate more information about each customer and to provide recommendations to sales reps and anyone else who interacts with that individual.

Kele is currently with vendors of customer data platform software that would house first-, second-, and third-party customer information that can be paired with cross-channel intent signals. Kele will use this CDP to recommend the best product or action for the customer to take next, based on the channel they’re interacting with. Strawn says he plans to have the new application up and running by the second quarter of 2023.

Where the customer files in Salesforce Personalization store about 100 attributes of each individual, the CDP will be far more robust, enabling Kele to collect considerably more data points about each individual, Strawn says.

It will also enable Kele to collect information about recent interactions, such as if a customer raised an issue with a delivery in a recent phone call or on-site live chat. In that case, Strawn says, a scheduled marketing email may be replaced with one that offers the customer help in resolving the current problem.

Once the personalization system is operational for the building-automation side of Kele, Strawn says it will be extended to industrial control systems. In recent years, Kele has made two acquisitions of companies that provide industrial controls.

Enabling sales reps to help customers more effectively

The overall aim, Strawn says, is to help customers find just what they need as quickly as possible. One way Kele plans to do that is to add a click-to-call button to Kele.com so that a customer struggling to find something can be immediately connected to their Kele sales rep, who will have access to the customer’s data and be able to see where the person is on the website.

“We’re looking at more real-time integration with our phone system so the customer can click to call, and the rep can see where they are in the session while the AI and machine learning spits out recommendations,” he says. “The rep can lead with that, as opposed to spending five minutes figuring out where they’re at and what the problem is.”

The goal, Strawn says, is to enable Kele’s sales reps to provide a more real-time, relevant recommendation to the customer, no matter what channel they start and finish in.

“This is about creating a customer-centric experience that is highly personalized based on all the data we have available to us and passing the next best action or offer into whatever channel the customer prefers to use,” Strawn says.

“That could be Kele.com, so we will surface personalized recommendations at key points in their shopping experience. It could be calling into our sales team, so we will pass that data to the sales rep so they can have an informed conversation with the customer and get them what they want faster, or it could be an email if they abandon the shopping experience in order to pull them back into the funnel.”

Business buyers increasingly expect such intelligent recommendations and digital content tailored to their interests, says Forrester’s Johnson.

“From their experiences as consumers, B2B buyers and customers are already accustomed to receiving relevant content and product recommendations curated by algorithms and delivered at the right time and in their preferred channels and formats,” she says. “B2B organizations are finding new ways to leverage AI and automation to better understand, engage, and enable their buyers through more personalized and connected interactions.”

Kele already is seeing the benefits of its personalization efforts in higher conversion rates. And it hopes to see even better results across more channels as it builds a system with more data about its interactions with customers and prospects.

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• Adopting scalable ecommerce technology infrastructures that are nimble, agile, and solves big problems, like easily supporting multiple business models
• Providing digital business buyers, the Amazon-like user experience they expect
• How to contemplate marketplace approaches after battling channel conflict for many years
• Creating ecommerce opportunities that leverage a modern commerce technology stack
• Providing stakeholders with online tools that they need to execute complex business transactions easier and faster

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