How to Develop a B2B Ecommerce Website that Reaches and Engages Today’s Buyers

Today’s buyers have rapidly evolving and expanding online shopping expectations—even in the world of B2B retail. By next year, 80% of B2B sales will be completed through ecommerce websites. A large majority of the buyers are projected to be millennials who expect a robust, interactive, and streamlined buying experience. 

B2B sales through ecommerce websites are now worth $7.7 trillion—more than double the total of D2C sales ($3.8 trillion). So if you haven’t upgraded your B2B ecommerce website in a while, you could be missing a huge opportunity for revenue growth and increased engagement from this new generation of B2B buyers.

In this article, we’ll review everything you need to keep in mind when developing a modern B2B ecommerce website, starting with a look at how your B2B business model informs your website strategy. Then we’ll dive into what it takes to develop and launch a website that delivers everything your buyers are looking for today—and can add new capabilities as your buyers’ expectations evolve.

Build your site based on your B2B ecommerce model 

The first step in developing a new ecommerce website starts with the very foundation of your business. Understanding how your ecommerce model impacts your technical requirements will help you make more strategic decisions throughout the process. There are three broad ecommerce categories that will inform your overall website development strategy: wholesale, business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C), and business-to-consumer-to-business (B2C2B). 

What is wholesale B2B ecommerce?

In wholesale B2B, a business sells products in bulk to other businesses, typically retailers or distributors. Wholesale B2B websites often need to accommodate complex pricing structures and discounting, high order quantities, and options for private labeling or customization.

What is B2B2C ecommerce?

B2B2C ecommerce involves selling products to businesses (B2B) who then resell them to consumers (B2C). These businesses develop partnerships with D2C brands that resell products online or in-store, such as branded resellers or white-label products. B2B2C ecommerce websites often require multiple integrations with ERP, CRM, and inventory management systems. A B2B2C website must also be able to manage highly complex pricing structures and multiple types of users. The high purchase volumes and large customer bases require robust hosting with high uptimes and fast performance.

What is B2C2B ecommerce?

B2C2B ecommerce involves selling products or services directly to consumers, who then resell those products or services to other businesses. Examples of B2C2B businesses include crafting suppliers and print-on-demand platforms. A B2C2B website will need clear segmentation, consistent brand experiences for each type of customer, easy reseller onboarding, and reliable, up-to-date inventory. Multiple systems will need to be integrated and tightly coordinated to deliver seamless buying experiences to both consumers and resellers.

Note: Businesses can also adopt a hybrid approach and run multiple models simultaneously. These hybrid retailers are often B2B businesses who have a dominant D2C presence, and prioritize a streamlined, carefully branded, and fully engaging customer experience. 

The type of B2B business you run will inform your website strategy by defining your technical requirements in detail. There are some key features all good B2B ecommerce websites should have, such as a top-notch inventory management, flexible payment options, seamless integrations, and automation where possible. Other decisions will stem from how many types of customers you have, what external systems you are integrating, how much self-service you want to enable, and more. 

Your ecommerce model and requirements will also help you decide if a blended or dedicated storefront is the right approach for your website. This key decision needs to be made early in the process so you aren’t stuck duplicating efforts down the line.

What is a blended store?

A blended storefront is a single ecommerce website and administrative backend that supports all of your customers, whether they are direct consumers or businesses. This unified approach provides a cohesive, efficient way to manage all of your customer types and orders. Blended stores allow B2B retailers to streamline their workflows from a single back-end, while still being able to differentiate between B2B and D2C orders and customers.

Even with a unified back-end, you can still customize the experience for B2B and D2C customers with a blended store. You can show each type of customer unique store content, products, and pricing, as well as different payment and delivery options. 

What is a dedicated store?

A dedicated store is a B2B-only ecommerce website that caters exclusively to your B2B customers. This allows you to create a fully curated and tailored experience for your B2B buyers, because the entire site and administration is solely focused on B2B operations. 

It’s important to note that there is no right answer—just the one that makes the most sense for your business. However, it is a choice that should be carefully considered, because if you eventually have to move from blended to dedicated, or vice versa, you will end up duplicating work and spending valuable time and resources just to rebuild existing functions and capabilities. 

At Shopify, we typically recommend merchants go with a blended approach, for the efficiency gains it offers. However, there are some cases in which we recommend a dedicated approach:

• Your B2B and D2C customers need to have fully distinct store branding and design. A blended store can only have one theme. 
• Your B2B and DTC inventory is allocated separately. Inventory is shared across B2B and DTC in a blended store.
• If you have entirely separate teams that manage either side of your business, it can often be easier to have each team work with separate admins with their own respective websites.

Most other parts of the shopping experience can be fully customized for B2B and D2C users with a blended store, without needing to maintain two administrative back-ends.

12 B2B ecommerce website development best practices

After you have aligned your business model to your website strategy, it’s time to start the website development process. Building a modern, streamlined B2B ecommerce website that appeals to today's buyers is key to setting yourself up for ongoing success. Here are some quick best practices to guide your process so nothing gets overlooked.

Define your business goals and objectives

The first step in the process is setting the goals you want your new B2B ecommerce website to help you meet. They could include improving engagement with better user experiences, increasing online sales, or improving customer loyalty and repeat business.

Make sure you’ve defined a target audience for each goal so you can add precision to your website strategy. For example, if you want to improve loyalty in a certain type of business buyer, you develop features, content, and experiences that appeal to that audience. Consider ways your website can highlight the unique values your business brings to your customers to help you stand out from the competition.

Conduct market research and target audience analysis

Once you have your goals established and your audiences identified, it’s time to get to know them better. Not every type of website experience appeals to every type of buyer—and you need to know which aspects of your business you should highlight first..

Take some time to conduct market research on your audience, identifying their challenges, preferences, and needs. Research trends in your industry to ensure your new website is equipped to adapt as your industry and buyers evolve.

Finally, create individual user personas based on your audiences, and consider bringing them to life by giving each a name. Imagine them interacting with your new website and what they would want to be able to do easily, and what type of design strategy and user experience would draw them in.

Incorporate responsive design and prioritize a great user experience

Every day, an increasing number of B2B transactions are conducted online, from a range of devices. Forward-thinking B2B retailers are adopting a mobile-first strategy to ensure they don’t lose potential customers due to clunky, outdated buying experiences. 

That’s why it’s critical to build your user experience and design from the ground up to function seamlessly on all devices, from the smallest phone screen to widescreen desktop monitors. With various phones and tablets coming in a wide range of sizes, it may take some time to optimize your design for every size—you will likely need to implement different page designs based on device type, and create a specific mobile-friendly navigation and search experience.

Mobile devices don’t have the same screen capacity as desktops and laptops, so you want to be sure you have clear, concise product descriptions, images, and pricing. This will allow your buyers to browse more easily no matter what device they are using.

Optimize for easy, efficient search and navigation

A key to better website engagement is to make your product catalog easy to browse. You want to ensure your customers can search quickly to find a specific item they need, but also be able to intuitively navigate your catalog and easily see everything you offer.

To provide an optimal search and browsing experience, start by organizing your products into clear, logical categories and subcategories. Make sure your customers can filter and sort to refine their searches easily. Finally, make sure your products are optimized for search engines, including meta tags and descriptions, to increase their visibility in web searches.

Integrate your customer relationship management (CRM) system

A foundational part of creating a robust customer experience is a seamless integration between your CRM system and your website. This allows customers to have a consistent experience with your business, whether they are interacting with your website or directly with a sales associate. This integration can help provide your customers with personalized recommendations and promotions, relevant content, simplified checkout with pre-filled fields, and a unified support experience.

When you implement real-time data synchronization between your CRM and website, you can automate tasks like order tracking and customer notifications. You can also analyze your customers’ behavior to inform your overall marketing strategies to drive revenue and engagement.

Integrate your enterprise resource planning (ERPs) systems

If you are a larger B2B retailer, your website will need a seamless integration with your ERP systems. This will provide your customers with real-time inventory visibility, accurate pricing, and unified order processing. Customers also have greater self-service opportunities when they can view their account details and order history directly through your website. 

Integrating your B2B ERP will allow you to better manage your business processes, such as managing your inventory and supply chain. You can also set up automations for order fulfillment, notifications, and shipping. Depending on the ERP and platform provider, these integrations can be complex to implement, so be sure to keep any large-scale integrations in mind as you plan your development strategy.

Implement secure payment processing and ensure compliance

Implementing rigorous security and compliance controls can have a big impact on your website development strategy. To securely process transactions, you need to implement secure payment processing, with SSL encryption and secure payment gateways. 

You also need to identify which compliance regulations you need to adhere to based on your industry. PCI-DSS applies to any business that accepts, handles, stores, or transmits cardholder data, and GDPR comes into play if you have a global customer base. Prioritize security in your website development strategy, and take active steps to protect sensitive customer data, including credit card information and personal details.

Optimize your site for search engines (SEO)

Before you go live, it’s important to take the time to consider how you will optimize your website for search engines. Incorporating SEO best practices in your development process will give you much greater visibility in the marketplace without having to spend as much on advertising. 

Research the keywords your customers are using to find the type of products you sell. B2B customers are often very specific in their searches, such as “wholesale silver glass beads,” so it can be easier to rank for them. A lot can be involved in creating a comprehensive SEO strategy for new B2B ecommerce website development, so we recommend you check out our guide on B2B ecommerce SEO for more details and next steps.

Develop a content marketing strategy 

B2B ecommerce content marketing can work hand in hand with your SEO strategy to drive organic traffic to your site on an ongoing basis. Using specialized knowledge about your products and industry, you can publish helpful blogs, product guides, and “how-to” articles. This creates the foundation of a content marketing strategy that educates potential new customers and establishes your expertise and trustworthiness as a vendor.

Once created, use your content to drive email campaigns and boost your social media presence. You can link to content throughout your site, in emails, and on social profiles, and encourage others to link to your articles as well. Over time, you can analyze which content is the highest performing so you know where to focus your efforts.

Thoroughly test your site before launch 

As site development gets underway, you may be tempted to launch your new website as soon as possible. However, it’s critical to include time for thorough testing, especially if you are incorporating new features and functionality into your site.

Consider gathering a group of customers to beta test a staging site and provide feedback about the new functionality and overall site usability—you might be surprised at what you learn from them. You also want to be 100% sure you have tested payment processing and order fulfillment to ensure you don’t lose any sales to technical problems once you launch 

Analyze performance and optimize regularly 

Once your site is launched, establish a regular schedule for analyzing your website’s performance. You’ll need to keep an eye on your site speed, traffic, and conversion rates, and address issues quickly as they come up over time. 

Customer preferences, search engine algorithms, and markets all evolve over time, so you need to plan for continual optimization, updates, and improvements. This will help keep your brand visibility and user engagement rates high over time.

Plan for scale and growth

Ideally, your website will continue to perform as you add more customers. Sometimes, growth can come more rapidly than expected—you want to be sure your hosting provider is ready for unexpected boosts in traffic so you don’t lose customers during peak buying seasons or flash sales. 

You also want to stay up to date on trends in your industry and your customers’ buying preferences so you can add new features and functionality to your website over time. Never “set and forget” your website, or you’ll lose sales to competitors that offer a better buying experience. You can browse our guide to creating a successful ecommerce strategy for more details.

What are the current challenges in B2B ecommerce website development?

As you craft your website development strategy, it’s helpful to consider the challenges B2B retailers are currently facing. There are many ways a robust B2B ecommerce website can help you overcome these challenges. Having the right strategies and technologies in place from the start will help your business thrive as the marketplace continues to evolve.

Prepare for changing buyer behaviors

Every year, the demographics of those making B2B purchases online change. According to Forrester, 71% of those involved in B2B purchasing decisions today are millennials. Soon, Gen Z will become part of the mix. These are buyers with high expectations for the online shopping experience, and they’ll expect B2B transactions to be similar to their personal shopping experiences. 

To keep up, build your website to be flexible enough that development time doesn’t hold you back from adding new features and functionality. Choosing the right architecture is key to a future-proof development strategy. It’s also important to build your site on a platform that is continually growing its marketplace of resources. Partnering with the right ecommerce partner can help you rapidly update and improve your website to meet new buyer expectations.

Look for alternatives to legacy B2B ecommerce platforms

B2B ecommerce platforms were originally built to handle large volumes of transactions and data. These legacy providers focused solely on uptime, security, and stability, and they often have limited integration capabilities, outdated UI, and increasing costs to keep them up to date.

It’s easy to see how a legacy platform can hold back retailers looking for a competitive edge in today’s B2B marketplace. The new generation of buyers prefer memorable brand experiences, intuitive user interfaces, and self-service tools. If your platform is standing in the way of delivering a robust buying experience with a modern look and feel, it’s often worth the time and effort to migrate to a new platform like Shopify that is continually upgraded and optimized for B2B online retail.

Be more strategic with your developer resources

In today’s job market, skilled developers can be expensive to hire or contract with. If you are on an older B2B ecommerce platform, your developers might be facing outdated, complex code bases that require a lot of time to execute any updates you want to make. Legacy platforms can also have limited options for updating your website to provide a modern buying experience, or add months to new development timelines.

With the right provider, migrating to a platform with more out-of-the-box features can be faster and more straightforward than you might think. You’ll get greater access to preconfigured capabilities, with the foundations of speed, uptime, and performance already in place. This allows your developers to build and deliver a robust, immersive, and engaging website more quickly. Adding new capabilities will also be faster with a platform that doesn’t require extensive knowledge in legacy codebases to add new products, promotions, and content.

Streamline your ecommerce tech stack and eliminate manual work

Despite advances in ecommerce technology, many of today’s B2B transactions are still performed manually. According to McKinsey, up to one-third of B2B transactions are completed via manual methods like phone, fax, and email. These transactions can use up valuable time, especially when they could be completed with a few clicks on an optimized B2B ecommerce website.

If you are a merchant that serves both businesses and direct consumers, it’s easy to find yourself with a bloated tech stack from ad hoc omnichannel efforts. You may have different customer types and channels on different platforms that require extensive manual work to keep disparate systems up to date. 

With the right ecommerce website strategy, you can integrate different channels into your website and streamline your efforts. You can encourage self-service with a simplified, easy-to-use UI and automations that update customers throughout the purchase process. A unified commerce engine can power multiple channels and storefronts, allowing you to expand your customer base, products, and services without adding bloat to your tech stack.

Getting your B2B ecommerce website strategy right

With the evolution of buyer preferences and the proliferation of new technologies, there has never been a better time to build and launch a new B2B ecommerce website. Upgrading your customers’ buying experience will allow you to capture new customers and reach further into growing markets.

While there are many elements to consider when developing a new ecommerce website, one of the most important is the platform that will power your new site. Legacy platforms are more costly than ever, holding retailers back with added costs and slow development times. Camping supplier DARCHE faced just this challenge—and by migrating to Shopify, was able to reduce manual B2B orders and streamline their purchasing process into one unified ecommerce website.

With Shopify, B2B retailers get everything they need to run both wholesale and direct-to-consumer businesses on a single platform. Out of the box, Shopify can help a wide range of B2B retailers deliver a modern, intuitive experience for every customer with curated catalogs, custom pricing, personalized storefronts, flexible payment terms, and a robust self-serve portal.