What you should look for when shop­ping for a B2B Ecom­merce Platform

OK, now that you’re sold

As Lewis Car­roll (and George Har­ri­son) say, ​“if you don’t know where you’re going, any road can take you there”. Choos­ing the right B2B ecom­merce plat­form becomes eas­i­er, and more suc­cess­ful, if you know what to look for. 

Anoth­er key fac­tor is your team’s tech­ni­cal knowl­edge. Plat­forms have dif­fer­ent inter­faces and require dif­fer­ent lev­els of tech­ni­cal exper­tise. The best plat­form is the one your team can make the most of.

Hav­ing said that, irre­spec­tive of indus­try, loca­tion, or size, online mer­chants need to build shop­ping expe­ri­ences that increase engage­ment, attract mod­ern shop­pers where they are ‑that means mul­ti­ple chan­nels- and make them become loy­al, repeat buy­ers. And whichev­er the solu­tion, it must allow busi­ness­es to strate­gi­cal­ly expand to grow mar­ket share and rev­enue streams, all while stream­lin­ing oper­a­tions and low­er­ing costs and risk. Here are things to con­sid­er to achieve these imper­a­tive goals.

Flex­i­bil­i­ty and scal­a­bil­i­ty to be able to move

Flex­i­bil­i­ty and scal­a­bil­i­ty are buzz­words, and for good reason. 

Your list of non-nego­tiables must include choos­ing a B2B ecom­merce plat­form that grows with you with­out hitch­es or glitch­es. That’s non-negotiable.

And a mil­lion lit­tle things

Pow­er-up your set­up on a bud­get: Ecom­merce integrations

Choos­ing a plat­form that can inte­grate with your essen­tial busi­ness soft­ware is cru­cial. You prob­a­bly are using –or con­sid­er­ing using – PIMs, ERPs, CRMs, etc. You don’t want to invest time and mon­ey only to end up stuck with an eCom­merce plat­form that can’t con­nect to the sys­tems you rely on for smooth oper­a­tions. That’s why it’s impor­tant to find a plat­form that seam­less­ly inte­grates with all your soft­ware with­out hold­ing you back.

Choos­ing the right plat­form and the right part­ners is tough with­out help. Check out our pros and cons of hir­ing a B2B ecom­merce expert agency.

Cre­ative free­dom to improve engage­ment: eCom­merce design

Look for a solu­tion that allows you to tai­lor your site’s look, feel, and func­tion to mir­ror your brand’s per­son­al­i­ty. There are plen­ty of fish in the eCom­merce sea, so stand­ing out requires an eCom­merce site as unique as your busi­ness proposition.

Fric­tion, or the lack there­of: eCom­merce conversion

A good B2B eCom­merce plat­form should sim­pli­fy the buy­ing process, even when deal­ing with com­plex cat­a­logs. Cus­tomiza­tion capa­bil­i­ties are key to ensure clients can nav­i­gate offer­ings as eas­i­ly as possible.

The need for speed: eCom­merce performance

A slow plat­form is a los­ing plat­form. The speed of your eCom­merce plat­form can make or break the user expe­ri­ence. A plat­form that loads pages slow­ly, strug­gles with pro­cess­ing orders, or expe­ri­ences down­time will frus­trate users and dri­ve poten­tial buy­ers away.

Speed is not just a tech­ni­cal fea­ture. It’s a crit­i­cal com­po­nent of cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion. A fast-load­ing site ensures B2B buy­ers can find what they need with­out delay, enhanc­ing their over­all expe­ri­ence and increas­ing the like­li­hood of con­ver­sion. Time is money.

Time is mon­ey. Mon­ey is mon­ey too: eCom­merce cost of ownership

When eval­u­at­ing B2B eCom­merce plat­forms, con­sid­er not just the upfront costs but the total cost of own­er­ship (TCO) over time. TCO encom­pass­es all the direct and indi­rect costs asso­ci­at­ed with acquir­ing, imple­ment­ing, and main­tain­ing the plat­form — soft­ware licens­es, host­ing fees, inte­gra­tion expens­es, train­ing, and support.

A plat­form with a low­er ini­tial price might end up being more expen­sive in the long run if it requires sig­nif­i­cant cus­tomiza­tion, addi­tion­al soft­ware pur­chas­es, or fre­quent upgrades.

Con­verse­ly, a solu­tion that seems expen­sive upfront might offer greater val­ue through robust fea­tures, scal­a­bil­i­ty, and low­er ongo­ing main­te­nance costs. Assess­ing TCO helps busi­ness­es make informed deci­sions — ensur­ing the cho­sen eCom­merce plat­form deliv­ers the best return on invest­ment while meet­ing their spe­cif­ic needs and growth objectives.

The bald kid was wrong. There’s def­i­nite­ly a box.

What there isn’t is a set amount of fea­tures that must come out of it, let alone a defin­i­tive list of which those should be. It will depend on your spe­cif­ic needs. How­ev­er, there are some essen­tial out-of-the-box fea­tures for a B2B business.

B2B eCom­merce essen­tial features

A cru­cial one is cus­tomiza­tion and account man­age­ment fea­tures that allow for dif­fer­ent roles and respon­si­bil­i­ties, requir­ing var­ied lev­els of access and author­i­ty. An eCom­merce plat­form for B2B should sup­port bulk pur­chas­ing, allow­ing B2B cus­tomers to buy in large quan­ti­ties eas­i­ly. This includes quick order place­ment and discounts.

Since B2B trans­ac­tions often involve nego­ti­at­ed pric­ing and repeat orders, the plat­form should sup­port cus­tom pric­ing for each cus­tomer and pro­vide reorder func­tion­al­i­ty. This flex­i­bil­i­ty is cru­cial for accom­mo­dat­ing the diverse pric­ing strate­gies inher­ent in B2B transactions.

But wait, there’s more

Oth­er vital fea­tures include BOPIS (Buy Online, Pick-up In-Store), a.k.a. Click and Col­lect for hybrid con­ve­nience, and mul­ti­ple store­fronts to cater to your mul­ti-brand strat­e­gy, if you man­age more than one brand or are con­sid­er­ing it.

Final­ly, even if DTC (Direct-to-Con­sumer) isn’t on your radar now, who’s to say it won’t be? Choose a plat­form that offers hybrid capa­bil­i­ties, ensur­ing you’re not boxed in as your busi­ness mod­el evolves.

Red flags dur­ing the demo

The best plat­forms show well in a demo. So do the worst ones. The ones to watch are the ones that depend on the demo being a show. A short list of what to watch for:

• The sales engi­neer can’t answer the inte­gra­tion ques­tion.​“We’ll get back to you on that” means ​“we don’t know if this works with your ERP and we don’t want to say so on camera.”
• The script­ed demo is sus­pi­cious­ly smooth. Ask them to do some­thing off-script — cre­ate a cus­tom price list for a spe­cif­ic cus­tomer seg­ment on the spot, for exam­ple. Flu­en­cy under impro­vi­sa­tion is real. Rehearsed flu­en­cy is a performance.
• Pric­ing that dodges specifics.​“It depends on your vol­ume” is rea­son­able. ​“We’ll send you a tai­lored quote after the next call” three calls in a row is a tell.
• No migra­tion time­line. If they can’t give you a rough shape of a migra­tion plan after under­stand­ing your cur­rent stack, they haven’t thought it through — or they know it’s going to hurt.
• “Our roadmap has that com­ing soon.” Some things are legit­i­mate­ly roadmapped. Oth­ers are roadmapped because they don’t exist yet and won’t in time to mat­ter. Ask for the ver­sion where it shipped.

Ques­tions your ven­dor does­n’t want you to ask

Ask them anyway.

• “What does this cost at 3x our cur­rent vol­ume?” — reveals how pric­ing scales with success.
• “Who on your team works on our account after go-live, and what’s their case­load?” — reveals whether you’ll have a human or a tick­et­ing system.
• “Can I talk to a cus­tomer who left you and ask why?” — the pros will point you to one. The rest will pre­tend nobody has.
• “What’s your uptime SLA, and what hap­pens when you miss it?” — ​“we’ve nev­er missed” is not an answer. The answer is the clause.
• “What’s the real migra­tion time­line, not the sales one?” — if they won’t sep­a­rate the two, assume the sales one.

This plat­form is for you if…

• You need a sys­tem that will grow with your busi­ness, not one you’ll be replac­ing in three years.
• You want your team to spend time run­ning the busi­ness, not run­ning the platform.
• You care about total cost of own­er­ship, not only the stick­er price.
• You need real inte­gra­tion with the tools your oper­a­tion already runs on.

This plat­form is not for you if…

• You want the cheap­est thing that tech­ni­cal­ly works. Cheap­est and B2B-ready rarely overlap.
• You treat the plat­form as a fin­ished project rather than a liv­ing oper­a­tion. B2B eCom­merce is a con­tin­u­ous practice.
• You want a ven­dor who tells you what you want to hear. Good ven­dors tell you where it hurts.

The short­list

Print this. Bring it to the demo.

• Inte­gra­tions with your PIM, ERP, CRM, tax, ship­ping — con­firmed and documented.
• Scal­a­bil­i­ty head­room for 3 – 5x your cur­rent traf­fic and catalog.
• Speed under real­is­tic load (not a test envi­ron­ment with 10 SKUs).
• TCO mod­eled across 36 months, not just year one.
• Cus­tomer account man­age­ment: roles, per­mis­sions, cus­tom pric­ing, reorder.
• Hybrid capa­bil­i­ty: B2B and DTC in one operation.
• Migra­tion plan with a real time­line and a named project lead.
• Ref­er­ence cus­tomers will­ing to take your call.
• A clear answer to: what hap­pens when this breaks at 3am?

In a way, pick­ing a B2B eCom­merce plat­form is not that dif­fer­ent from choos­ing a busi­ness — or life — part­ner: you want one that sup­ports you, makes you bet­ter, and is in it for the long haul. It’s not about find­ing a plat­form that just meets your needs today but one that will also love you tomor­row.

What comes next

Once the plat­form ques­tion is nar­rowed, the archi­tec­ture ques­tion fol­lows. All-in-one mono­lith, head­less, ful­ly com­pos­able — each has trade­offs that mat­ter for a B2B oper­a­tion. Com­pos­able or not com­pos­able, that is the ques­tion.