B2B eCommerce Trends 2024 and Beyond
The business-to-business (B2B) eCommerce landscape is rapidly evolving. With digital transformation accelerating across industries, B2B organizations must stay updated on the latest B2B eCommerce trends and technologies to remain competitive.
This guide will provide an overview of the current state of B2B eCommerce and highlight the key trends that are expected to shape the industry in 2024. Understanding these B2B eCommerce developments will help B2B companies craft targeted strategies to boost revenue, efficiency, and customer experiences in the coming years.
What is B2B eCommerce?
B2B eCommerce refers to the online sale of products and services between businesses rather than between businesses and consumers (B2C). It enables B2B organizations to streamline procurement, widen their reach, improve data driven decision making, and offer omni-channel buying experiences.
B2B eCommerce platforms and functionalities allow businesses to:
- Showcase and sell their offerings online
- Enable self-service account management
- Offer discounts, quotations, and bulk pricing
- Provide seamless integration with inventory, logistics, and ERP systems
- Unify data across channels to understand buyer journeys
Why Stay Updated on Emerging Trends?
For B2B companies, it is crucial to stay updated on the latest eCommerce trends and technologies. This allows them to:
- Identify opportunities for revenue growth, operational efficiency, and cost savings
- Enhance customer experience across channels to drive loyalty and retention
- Remain competitive by adapting to changing buyer expectations
- Proactively address upcoming challenges in B2B commerce
- Benchmark strategies against industry best practices
- Capitalize on new capabilities offered by emerging technologies
In 2024, the pace of innovation will accelerate across the B2B eCommerce sector. Companies that lag in adoption stand to lose market share to nimble competitors. This makes it imperative for organizations to start planning today.
Current B2B eCommerce Statistics
The Growth of B2B eCommerce
While B2C commerce garners more headlines, B2B eCommerce is rapidly catching up:
- The global B2B eCommerce market is estimated to reach $20.9 trillion by 2024. (Research and Markets)
- By 2025, 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers are expected to occur through digital channels. (Gartner)
- The average B2B eCommerce order value is $491, compared to $147 for B2C.
Several factors driving this growth include:
- Digitizing Buyer Journeys: B2B buyers increasingly research and purchase online before engaging with sales reps.
- Online Marketplaces: Platforms like Amazon Business and Alibaba connect B2B buyers and sellers.
- Customer Expectations: B2C experiences shape B2B buyer expectations for self-service and omni-channel commerce.
- Margins Pressures: eCommerce allows businesses to cut sales costs by automating parts of the buyer journey.
- Globalization: Digital channels enable B2B companies to expand into new geographies and customer segments.
Challenges Faced by B2B Companies
While B2B commerce growth presents a significant opportunity, it also poses challenges that businesses must address:
- Complex sales processes: B2B journeys involve multiple stakeholders and touchpoints. eCommerce platforms need to map to existing CRM and sales workflows.
- Lack of personalization: Generic experiences frustrate B2B buyers who expect personalized recommendations and pricing.
- Channel conflicts: Sales teams perceive eCommerce as competing with, rather than complementing, their efforts. Clear indexing is needed to balance online and offline channels.
- Difficulty unifying data: Disparate data across sales, customer service, web, and inventory systems prevents a 360-degree customer view.
- Compliance and security: Strict regulatory and data security requirements apply to B2B transactions involving sensitive business data.
Solutions that help overcome these barriers will shape the next wave of B2B eCommerce innovation.
Top 8 B2B eCommerce Trends (2024)
B2B organizations looking to stay ahead of the curve need to track and adopt these eight key trends expected to disrupt the industry over the next 2-3 years:
- Improving Efficiency through Better eCommerce Adoption
- Leveraging Artificial Intelligence
- Personalization and Customization
- Prioritizing Data Management
- Embracing Headless Commerce
- Embedding Commerce Functionality
- Omnichannel Experiences
- Mobile Commerce
1. Improving Efficiency through Better eCommerce Adoption
B2B companies finally realize the efficiency gains, streamlined operations, and cost savings that properly-implemented B2B eCommerce marketing strategies can deliver.
Key developments in this area include:
- Integrating systems and data: Connecting procurement, ERP, inventory, logistics, accounting, CRM, and web platforms provides a unified view of business information. This bolsters insights optimize stock levels and improves order fulfillment rates.
- Centralizing product data: Managing product information in a unified catalog makes it accessible across sales, service, and eCommerce touchpoints. This reduces redundancies and minimizes errors caused by outdated specs.
- Offering self-service account management: Self-service portals that allow customers to track orders, view previous purchases, reorder items, check stock availability, and manage their account details can dramatically improve satisfaction and loyalty.
- Increasing mobile functionality: Optimizing for mobile and expanding the eCommerce feature set available on mobile apps empowers field reps and deskless workers to drive sales.
The right eCommerce investments will boost KPIs like revenue per sales rep, sales cycle length, reorder rates, stockout risks, and customer retention.
2. Leveraging Artificial Intelligence
AI and machine learning adoption will accelerate across B2B organizations to drive two key benefits:
Boosting Employee Productivity
AI can take on time-consuming administrative and analytical tasks, allowing human employees to focus on high-value activities:
- Processing and analyzing customer data to surface impactful insights
- Automating order status updates, email responses, and customer service requests
- Reviewing contracts and documents to flag important clauses and obligations
- Managing campaign targeting, personalization, and budget allocation
Enhancing Experiences
Sophisticated AI algorithms help provide tailored, relevant experiences to each B2B buyer:
- Predictive lead scoring identifies high-intent prospects to prioritize sales outreach.
- Individualized product recommendations increase eCommerce upselling and cross selling.
- Chatbots handle common customer queries to improve support efficiency.
- Voice search enables hands-free business transactions.
3. Personalization and Customization
With customers accustomed to personalized B2C experiences, B2B buyers now expect the same:
- Personalized product recommendations: Behavioral data, search history, and past purchases can inform product suggestions for each customer. This prevents showing irrelevant items.
- Custom pricing and bulk discounts: B2B purchases often warrant volume-based or negotiated pricing. Smart eCommerce systems can provide customized quotes.
- Targeted promotions: Individual buyer preferences and buying stage can determine suitable cross-sell promotions, helping avoid untargeted sales spam.
- Tailored content experiences: Buyers expect content like guides, case studies, and thought leadership tailored to their industry and interests.
With personalization engines and predictive analytics maturing, custom B2B buyer experiences will become the norm rather than the exception.
4. Prioritizing Data Management
Many B2B firms struggle to leverage data due to issues like information silos, outdated legacy systems, and inaccurate data.
Key focus areas for improvement include:
- Increasing integration: Tight couplings between sales systems like CRM, finance platforms like ERP, inventory databases, and eCommerce front-ends break down data silos. This provides unified profiles of customers, products, orders, and assets.
- Improving data hygiene: Methods like deduplication, normalization, and enrichment make databases more accurate, minimizing errors in reporting and analytics.
- Unlocking value through analytics: Investments in business intelligence, automation, and data science help convert raw data into actionable insights that drive growth.
Top-notch data practices will separate the B2B leaders from the laggards. Companies that leverage data-driven strategies will make smarter business decisions and boost customer experiences.
5. Embracing Headless Commerce
Headless commerce decouples the frontend e-commerce experience from the backend systems that power it. This approach provides major advantages:
- Flexibility: The presentation layer can be changed without altering the backend order management and payments infrastructure, which speeds up iterating the buyer experience.
- Omnichannel readiness: Headless makes it easier to have a unified commerce engine serving multiple touchpoints, such as the web, mobile, marketplace, and in-store kiosks.
- Innovation acceleration: New capabilities get added to modular backend services and made available instantly across all frontends. Features aren’t locked into monolithic eCommerce platforms.
As businesses seek flexibility in blending digital and physical interactions, headless and cloud-native architectures will gain favor.
6. Embedding Commerce Functionality
Leading B2B sellers are baking commerce directly into the tools their customers use, turning them into engagement channels:
- Product portals: Catalogs, specifications, support materials, and manuals can include one-click reorder or subscription options.
- Partner portals and account management platforms: Self-service administration consoles incorporate the ability to transact, renew contracts, or upgrade subscriptions.
- Mobile field service apps: Technicians can quickly reorder spare parts and consumables from within their existing workflow apps.
- Sales enablement and CRM tools: Embedding commerce capabilities into sales tools rather than making them switch contexts improves rep productivity.
This embedded approach stretches the concept of “omnichannel” beyond a website, physical store, and contact center. In 2024, commerce will merge deeper into B2B software.
7. Omnichannel Experiences
Speaking of omnichannel, seamlessly blending digital and physical interactions across the buyer journey remains a priority:
- Consistent branding and messaging offer a unified brand experience that builds recognition and trust regardless of which channel the prospect engages in.
- Shared order/transaction histories: Buyers expect uniform visibility into past purchases, orders, returns, and prices paid across channels.
- Click and collect/buy online, pick up in-store: Flexible fulfillment models provide convenience and leverage physical retail presence.
- In-store pick-up or return for online orders: Reduces shipping costs for large or bulky items.
- Store associates access online information: This enables checking other locations’ inventory, online order tracking, customer purchase history, etc.
Omni-channel coordination remains a crucial issue. However, the trend now is towards experiences that blur the boundaries between online and offline.
8. Mobile Commerce
Mobile-first is cemented as the mindset B2B organizations need to adopt across eCommerce, sales enablement, and customer engagement. Mobile maturity will continue increasing through 2024.
- Buyers are increasingly mobile: 42% of B2B researchers start their journeys on mobile devices. Mobile is a top digital channel for researching and discovering new suppliers.
- Remote sellers rely on mobile: Field sellers, technicians, and telesales reps need mobile apps and RWAs (retail web apps) for on-the-go productivity.
- B2B Mobile Apps: According to recent industry insights, 78% of B2B eCommerce companies believe that mobile apps are the future of B2B sales and purchasing, and 65% of B2B companies already have mobile apps.
Final Thoughts
The B2B eCommerce is rapidly evolving, and the trends highlighted in this article are set to shape the industry in 2024 and beyond. B2B organizations must stay ahead of the curve by adopting these key trends to drive efficiency, enhance customer experiences, and maintain a competitive edge.
From leveraging artificial intelligence and data-driven personalization to embracing headless commerce and omnichannel experiences, the successful B2B companies of the future will be those that are agile and adaptable. By prioritizing the integration of systems, the unification of data, and the optimization of mobile experiences, B2B firms can unlock the full potential of their eCommerce strategies.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the future of B2B eCommerce?
The B2B eCommerce market is projected to grow rapidly, reaching over $20.9 trillion globally by 2024. Key trends shaping the future include personalization, mobile commerce, omnichannel integration, increased use of data and analytics, and technologies like AI and machine learning.
Why is B2B eCommerce adoption increasing?
B2B buyers increasingly expect B2C-like digital experiences. eCommerce also helps businesses reduce sales costs, reach new markets, and integrate systems for unified data. Competition is forcing slower adopters to embrace digital channels.
What are the benefits of eCommerce for B2B firms?
Major benefits include lower sales and administrative costs, broader market reach, higher customer retention from self-service account management, insight from buyer data, and revenue growth from new customer acquisition.
How can B2B companies deliver personalized experiences?
Tactics like predictive lead scoring, customized product recommendations, tailored content campaigns, flexible pricing and promotions, and omnichannel integration with shared order history enable personalization.
Why is mobile important for B2B companies?
Mobile phones are vital to empowering remote workers and enabling on-the-go productivity. B2B buyers also frequently research and discover suppliers using mobile devices. Mobile-first is key for customer engagement.
What is headless commerce in B2B?
Headless commerce decouples the frontend eCommerce experience from backend order management systems. This provides greater flexibility, omnichannel agility, and speed of innovation.
How can AI help B2B commerce?
AI can automate tasks, analyze data, provide predictive insights, power chatbots, deliver personalized recommendations, and handle processes like inventory and order management. This boosts employee productivity and customer experience.