Why Manufacturers Should Invest in B2B Ecommerce Today

Wholesale buyers are not the buyers of yesterday. The majority are now Millennials who expect all purchasing experiences to be seamless, fast, and digitally robust—whether they are buying for themselves or for their business. And providing a better online buying experience than your competitors can win you new business. A recent survey found that 74% of global B2B buyers said they would switch suppliers if another B2B ecommerce website offered a better experience. This was even more pronounced in the United States: nearly all buyers (91%) were willing to change their suppliers for easier online ordering.

That’s why manufacturers must prioritize ecommerce and deliver modern buying experiences, just as they're investing in back-end operations. Today, Deloitte reports that manufacturers are already investing in technological upgrades: 

• 62% plan to invest in robotics and automation
• 60% cite plans to invest in data analytics to improve forecasting and spot supply shortages before they affect the manufacturing line
• 39% plan to invest in the Internet of Things (IoT) to collect data from sensors in the factory floor and embedded in industrial equipment.

It’s critical that manufacturers add investing in their ecommerce buying experiences to that list—or they run the risk of losing business to those who do. Gartner recently found that 83% of B2B buyers prefer to manage their orders and accounts online themselves, instead of working directly with sales reps. Manufacturers that move their customers to online ordering will not only retain and attract new customers, they can also save on costs, streamline their operations, and free up their sales teams to build relationships with new customers.

In this article, we will look at the benefits of upgrading your ecommerce experience and key features and capabilities you should consider. We’ll also share some manufacturing case studies to show what is possible with modern technology and ecommerce platforms.

What are the benefits of ecommerce for manufacturers?

By far, the biggest benefit of upgraded ecommerce for manufacturers is the impact on your bottom line. A new generation of buyers demands a seamless, intuitive, and efficient buying experience. As we mentioned earlier, these buyers are willing to shift their spending to suppliers that make it easy and efficient to place and manage orders online.

There are many strategic benefits to improving your B2B ecommerce website and modernizing your enterprise tech stack. Let’s take a look at the most important ones that make it worth the investment.

Greater operational efficiency and lower costs

Improving your website and encouraging online ordering will reduce your operational costs. Every transaction that happens online requires less work from your sales associates, with less paperwork and manual data entry. Errors are also minimized, increasing customer satisfaction, and eliminating the extra costs involved with correcting orders.

A modern ecommerce tech stack lets you automate processes, integrate with your key business systems, and can reduce development costs so your technical teams can dedicate their time more strategically. This allows you to communicate and collaborate with your customers much faster and more strategically. Order statuses can be easily tracked, notifications generated and sent, and past orders can be easily reordered with just a click or two. You can increase the speed of your order fulfillment processes, reduce lead times, and drive both efficiency and revenue.

Easily open new sales channels and attract more customers

With ecommerce, you gain a powerful channel to increase your margins by selling directly to businesses or even individual customers. With each direct sale, you can capture a larger share of the transaction’s revenue. With greater control of pricing from a unified back end, you can flexibly make changes, allowing you to respond to market demand and changes in the competitive landscape.

In addition to driving profitability, ecommerce provides you with insights into consumer behavior, brand perception, and emerging trends. By moving to online ordering and fulfillment, you can aggregate and analyze data on your customers’ needs, preferences, and buying patterns. This gives you the insights you need to inform data-driven strategies on what to sell, who to sell it to, and how to best market your products.

Ecommerce also provides far more control over your brand and story, so you can infuse it throughout the online buying process. With ecommerce, manufacturers can build and deliver unique, authentic brand experiences that resonate with customers. By moving sales online, you can cultivate stronger, more direct relationships with your customers, driving both brand loyalty and long-term profits.

Tap into new customer bases quickly

Today's buyers reward suppliers that meet their high bar for online ordering. Providing the right online buying experience the first time is critical for retaining and growing your customer base. With a flexible, robust B2B ecommerce platform in place, you can pivot quickly and meet buyer expectations as they evolve—with experiences that make their lives easier.

With a platform like Shopify, B2B manufacturers can quickly set up new stores for new markets and product lines with a comprehensive set of out-of-the-box features and capabilities. Even more complex storefront builds can be streamlined and deployed faster with ready-to-use developer tools, composable frameworks, and robust APIs. 

One example is climate and energy solution provider Carrier. Not long ago, they were paying dearly in time and direct costs every time they wanted to launch a new storefront: nearly $1.2 million over 10 months of time. After migrating to Shopify and OneCommerce, they were able to launch new storefronts far faster and at a much lower cost: $100,000 and in just one month. Getting to market nine months faster while saving hundreds of thousands of dollars per storefront has been game-changing for their agility and bottom line.

Increased sales from self-service and empowered sales teams

Online orders happen with far greater speed and accuracy than manual orders. By transitioning your customer base to self-service ordering, your business can become more customer-focused and sales-driven. 

A streamlined, easy-to-use, and integrated ecommerce website lets your customers:

• Browse your entire catalog of products with ease with real-time inventory details
• Place orders in minutes without emailing or calling someone
• Manage their accounts and update payment information, shipping addresses, and other details on their own
• View order status and shipment tracking in real-time
• Buy from your business on any device that is convenient, including phones and tablets

As your customers move to self-managing their orders and accounts, your sales team will remain a vital part of the process. Empowered with a wealth of data and real-time insights, your sales reps will have the time and resources to focus on strategic initiatives. They can dedicate their time to handling complex or one-off orders, upselling and cross-selling products, and introducing new offerings.

For customers that still want to call in orders, representatives can view a customer’s details and order history in seconds to make targeted recommendations, answer questions more accurately, and place orders using an intuitive user interface.

What features and capabilities are vital for manufacturers' success in ecommerce?

Once you’ve made the strategic choice to invest in ecommerce, you need to evaluate and implement the right tools and technology. The marketplace for ecommerce is continually evolving, so it’s important to make sure you work with the tools and providers that can meet your needs now—and in the years to come. Here are some of the key features and capabilities to look for:

Tailored wholesale buying

Tailored buying experiences are essential for building strong relationships with your wholesale customers and driving repeat business. When evaluating ecommerce technology and platforms, consider how well it equips you to customize buying experiences without lengthy development times or upfront costs. 

Some critical out-of-the-box features that will allow you to meet the unique needs of your buyers includes:

• Ability to display tailored pricing, currencies, and store content to specific users
• Creation of unlimited product catalogs with custom pricing and product availability
• Support of fixed prices, percentage discounts, volume pricing, and quantity rules

Ideally, the right solution will help you streamline the purchasing process while also giving you the tools to offer customized products, pricing, and services that drive customer satisfaction and loyalty. 

Personalized storefronts

B2B manufacturers should choose ecommerce solutions that allow them to build personalized storefronts without high development costs and long implementation times. Choose a platform that allows you to personalize store content for each of your customers and the context they're buying in, so they see information that addresses their needs and challenges. It should also support the development approach that works best for your business, whether it is using a storefront theme built for B2B or headless architectures powered by APIs. 

Self-serve purchasing

The largest benefit of ecommerce for B2B manufacturers is having wholesale orders placed online, avoiding a lengthy back-and-forth with sales reps. Any ecommerce solution you choose should offer intuitive, customizable portals for each of your buyers. They should be able to quickly and easily manage their own accounts, update their details, and make re-ordering a breeze. 

A unified source of truth for sales reps

An ecommerce solution should equip your sales representatives to provide personalized, proactive support and build better customer relationships. Every rep should be able to instantly access up-to-date product, pricing, and customer data to inform their customer interactions. The platform should offer an intuitive admin interface allowing your reps to quickly place orders on a customers’ behalf instead of manually inputting orders into an ERP or spreadsheet. Finally, each sales rep ideally should have their own assigned account with permission levels specific to your business requirements.

Unified commerce

A great way to drive efficiency in B2B manufacturing ecommerce is by adopting a unified commerce approach. By operating both B2B and direct-to-consumer (D2C) storefronts on the same platform, you can streamline business operations and lower development costs and resources. You can also save significantly on both upfront and ongoing operational costs by using a unified platform like Shopify to easily deploy and manage all of your channels from a single admin.

Robust integrations

Integrations are critical to ecommerce success for B2B manufacturers. You should choose a solution that can easily integrate with your preferred ERP, OMS, and CMS tools for seamless data, inventory, and product syncing. The provider should offer a complete set of APIs, primitives, and developer tools that allow you to build seamless integrations with your systems.

Platforms like Shopify make integrations even simpler through strategic partnerships. Ready-made integrations with leading ERP providers like Acumatica, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Brightpearl allow you to quickly connect your storefronts with key systems without a lot of developer support. For businesses with unique integration requirements, Shopify supports the use of connectors like Boomi, Jitterbit, and Celigo. The right provider and solution will make integrating your key business systems easier and faster to drive agility and lower overall costs.

Flexibility and speed

Keeping up with the evolving needs of buyers requires investing in ecommerce solutions that offer speed and flexibility. In today’s competitive market, B2B manufacturers must be able to introduce new products, adjust pricing strategies, and implement promotions and marketing campaigns rapidly. Customers expect timely responses, streamlined interfaces, fast user experiences, and efficient order fulfillment. 

Meeting these expectations is critical to stay competitive in years to come. But without the right ecommerce solution, it can add up to a lot of technical work and high costs. That’s why providers like Shopify support a range of technical approaches, from turnkey, out-of-the box solutions to composable frameworks, and even headless development with APIs. 

Without extensive coding, Shopify enables manufacturers to:

• Set up a new storefront in record time with a scaled composable framework
• Manage both sides of their business with an intuitive admin and first-party features
• Use our intuitive admin to test new promotions, messaging, markets, segments
• Make updates and launch new features quickly based on customer feedback
• Customize the buying experience with first party features and third party apps
• Create even more unique buying experiences with headless storefront APIs, custom data, custom logic, and customizable checkout

When you have the right solutions and providers in place, you can scale, innovate, and adapt to a changing marketplace much more easily. A robust ecommerce strategy powered by modern features and capabilities will drive growth and customer loyalty, and allow you to go to market faster and with far lower costs.

Three examples of ecommerce success for B2B manufacturers

B2B manufacturers have a lot of gain by embracing and investing in ecommerce. When a comprehensive ecommerce strategy is powered by the right solutions and providers, the results can be game-changing. Here are three manufacturers that saw major impacts to their business with ecommerce.

Carrier drives ecommerce success with go-to-market speed

Carrier got a mention earlier in this article because adjusting their ecommerce strategy and tech stack saved them so much time and money. Carrier has an incredibly diverse set of buyers across 180 countries, including dealers, distributors, service technicians, national accounts, and homeowners. They knew providing tailored ecommerce experiences would drive sales and improve customer loyalty, but their existing ecommerce tech stack was incredibly complex, which drove development times and costs sky-high.

To save millions of dollars, and cut launch times to just 30 days, Carrier launched OneCommerce, a central global Shopify accelerator to streamline and accelerate the process of setting up online storefronts. Today, they can test ideas, iterate, and ship new go-to-market motions at the pace of a startup, instead of a typical large manufacturer.

“There’s a massive opportunity for us to unlock new selling motions, channel partners, and other areas of the business… For us to monetize a new idea in 30 days is essentially an opportunity to test billion dollar ideas. Instead of waiting years to do it, Shopify allows us to do it in weeks,” said Steve Duran, Associate Director of Global Commerce at Carrier.

Filtrous streamlines operations by improving their online order experience

Filtrous is a B2B laboratory supply company with a range of global customers, from small laboratories to institutions like UCLA. They wanted to modernize their wholesale buying experience to stand out from the competition in an antiquated industry. However, their previous ecommerce solution wasn’t the right choice—and the results were disastrous. Customers found their website so hard to use that they contacted customer service to place orders over the phone instead.

However, Filtrous remained committed to their ecommerce strategy, and migrated to Shopify. They were able to quickly configure features such as customer-specific catalogs, custom discounts, and payment options. Using Shopify’s suite of core features, they automated many of their back office operations, including the sending and payment of invoices. Filtrous built and launched their improved storefront quickly, and received their first B2B order on the new site just 63 days after signing with Shopify

Today, customers can place their own orders and manage their accounts within Shopify's platform, saving Filtrous’ support team about 10 hours per week. On the sales side, their new ecommerce solution saves sales reps an average of two hours per week by streamlining their ordering process. With more free time, these teams now focus on the jobs they were hired to do—selling and building customer relationships.

“Everything is more streamlined with Shopify. I have so much more time to focus on marketing and growing the business,”

Industry West provides a DTC experience for new B2B buyers

Industry West is a supplier of unique, high end furniture to businesses. The founders originally built their online store–and their only full product catalog–on Magento. However, a lack of customization options meant they couldn’t ever properly display the wide range of furniture sizes and types they sold. Their unique brand experience never quite came through.

Worse, the company faced significant challenges in managing its B2B customer flow. The unique requirements of B2B customers, such as trade account logins, discount registrations, and direct sales representative interactions, couldn’t easily be handled by the existing back end. Many B2B buyers resorted to filling their cart, taking a screenshot, and calling for discounts. A workaround was created by sending B2B buyers to a separate subdomain for their trade login. Then, each of these buyers had to be handled individually, at the account level. None of this was sustainable.

Eventually, they chose to migrate to Shopify, where they were able to flexibly build multiple unique landing page formats for their various furniture sizes. Shopify’s B2B suite of services allowed them to build a fully customized experience. Today, Industry West can sell to their B2B consumers in increments, as well as in quantity discount tiers.

Today, they also have the ability to group companies that have many email addresses associated with them into a single catalog with set pricing for that particular company. Not only does this streamline the experience on the backend, but it also ensures efficiency and consistency for each B2B company buying within the system.

Since launch, Industry West has seen major results: a 90% lift in the share of B2B revenue, and a 10% lift in new B2B accounts. The average order value (AOV) has increased by 20%, and there’s been a 15% lift in the average number of items placed in a cart.

Future-proof your B2B manufacturing with the right ecommerce provider

Being the easiest, fastest, and most convenient to do business with is the key to success in today’s market. Manufacturers that don’t embrace and invest in ecommerce risk losing business to competitors who deliver the online experiences today’s buyers want.

Investing in ecommerce is not just about delivering a great ordering experience to attract and retain customers—it also offers significant operational benefits. By streamlining online ordering and account management, manufacturers can reduce costs, increase efficiency, and gain valuable insights into customer behavior. The right combination of ecommerce technology and platform can empower sales teams to provide personalized support and drive sales.

That’s why it is critical to choose a platform provider that can help you deliver an exceptional B2B experience without high costs, complexity, or long lead times. With Shopify, manufacturers get access to a suite of B2B ecommerce features to deliver curated catalogs, custom pricing, personalized storefronts, flexible payment terms, and seamless self-service ordering. They also gain access to powerful themes, modular frameworks, and robust APIs to quickly build and launch tailored storefronts. You can learn more about how Shopify drives B2B ecommerce success for manufacturers.