Are you planning to increase your sales through B2B e-commerce? Congratulations, you're building a presence among the majority – more than half of Finnish B2B companies are considering digitalising their sales channels in the coming years. At the same time, you're responding to growing customer demand: the share of digital channels in the revenue of Nordic B2B companies is on the rise, estimated to reach 45 percent by the end of this year.

B2B sales and processes can be digitalised in various ways. An e-commerce solution tailored to the needs of a B2B company enhances business outcomes through cost savings and efficiency. E-commerce provides opportunities for international expansion and piloting new products. Digital customer acquisition also helps in anticipating trends and fluctuations in purchasing behaviour.

Now is the right time to tighten your shoelaces and refine your company's e-commerce strategy. Read on to understand what to consider in B2B e-commerce!

Steps to Establishing a B2B E-commerce – Starting with People and Emotion

B2B operations often have specific characteristics that guide the sales process. However, customer experience should be thought of in the same way as in B2C commerce. In B2B as well, purchasing decisions are made by people. Emotions influence all of us – regardless of whether we are buying on behalf of a company or for personal needs. A successful B2B e-commerce is customer-oriented and offers a seamless, emotional experience, which increases customer satisfaction, boosts sales, and strengthens the company's brand.

1. Realistic and Clear Goals – Don't Forget the Sanity Check

Rome wasn't built in a day, but a well-planned effort often goes a long way. Start from your clients and clarify goals and steps for the long term. Goal setting should be realistic: continually doubling sales year on year can be unrealistic without substantial investments. If aiming for triple growth, strong integrations and support structures beyond mere e-commerce are often necessary.

Ask yourself:

• Does your company already have B2B customers?

• Is your company acquiring B2B customers? Or perhaps D2C customers? 

• What additional value can B2B e-commerce offer them? For instance, do you want to enhance customer experience, streamline the order process, or access new markets and customer segments?

Continue from here to clarify your target:

• Where does your company want to be in five years?

  • Don't consider anything less than five years: Develop a realistic five-year plan and a clear roadmap to achieve it. Remember to ensure that plans are based on actual figures and informed assumptions.

  • Set measurable business objectives: Realistic growth percentages for e-commerce should be set for each year, in line with necessary resources like marketing and recruitment investments.

Example: If the first year's revenue target for e-commerce is 100,000 euros and the second year's target is 200,000 euros, there should be at least a part-time employee resource allocated and ideally a partner focused on e-commerce development when reaching the 200,000 euros goal.

2. Remember MVP – Start Light, Scale Agilely 

Plans can be ambitious, but in e-commerce projects, the best results are achieved through agile and piloting approaches. With an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) mindset, you can start with a basic e-commerce focusing on core functionalities, testing the market and customer needs early on. This helps avoid unnecessary investments and enables the construction of essential functions without a large initial investment.

When selecting an e-commerce platform, ensure it scales with growth and integrates smoothly with other systems. The platform should enable integrations such as ERP and CRM and expansibility with new functionalities as needs and business grow. This way, you can build a commerce solution that works well in a light MVP phase but easily expands with new features when required.

The MVP approach is especially valuable in B2B commerce, where customer needs can vary significantly between different customer segments. The smallest viable solution allows testing of the purchase path, provides crucial feedback, and lays the foundation for sustainable growth when scaling is initiated carefully.

3. Test and Develop E-commerce – Never Stop

Testing is primarily cheap and easy, but forgetting it can be costly. In a successful e-commerce setup, testing and development become an ongoing process actively seeking new goal opportunities and growth possibilities. This is important even when things seem to be running smoothly and sales are strong. The market changes quickly, and neglecting testing, development, and technical innovation can result in falling behind competitors and accumulating digital debt.

Modern e-commerce platforms lower the threshold for testing both in terms of time and costs. Many platforms, such as Shopify, support built-in A/B testing and analytics tools. These allow easy experimentation with different pricing, product placement, and interface elements without heavy technical implementation. When A/B testing is continuously used, the company can leverage data to understand what works best and what brings tangible improvements to customer experience and conversion rates.

MVP and testing go hand in hand – small experiments can achieve significant results. For instance, a standalone trade fair e-commerce can be established at low costs for piloting and selling special editions. Overall, optimizing e-commerce is akin to refining game strategy: boldly experimenting and testing different options helps uncover the best approaches and solutions to keep e-commerce competitive and responsive to changing customer needs.

4. Take Advantage of E-commerce Integrations – Move Step by Step

Efficiency, accuracy, and customer satisfaction – integrations are a key factor in the success of B2B e-commerce and make the e-commerce platform flexible for growth. The implementation of integrations should be planned as part of the B2B e-commerce growth strategy. Initial integrations with ERP and inventory management systems typically bring the most significant immediate operational benefits and significantly reduce the amount of manual work, as product prices and stock levels are always up to date.

CRM system integration becomes necessary as the e-commerce customer base grows so that customer data can be utilized in marketing automation and targeting sales efforts to different customer profiles and segments. Depending on e-commerce development, this may come into play around the 1–2 year mark. Additional integrations like logistics systems and analytics tools attached to the e-commerce support especially during growth phases, when there is sufficient data for deeper analysis and optimization of delivery processes.

Integrations propel the success and growth of e-commerce in the long term. When orders, logistics, billing, and customer service operate as a single entity, the e-commerce scales easily and adapts better to changing demand. This way, customer experience remains high even as order volumes grow.

5. Remember E-commerce Management and Marketing

While we talk about integrations and the importance of marketing automation for B2B e-commerce success, ultimately growth is driven by people. Just as a good plan, thoughtful roadmap, and carefully selected tools build the playing field, to make goals happen, you need a competent and dedicated e-commerce manager who rolls up their sleeves and takes responsibility for the growth of the e-commerce. A skilled e-commerce manager has, alongside running operations, understanding of marketing, B2B sales processes and stakeholders, and their roles for business.

In addition, you need multi-channel digital marketing to ensure customers find and return to your e-commerce site. Search engine optimisation (SEO), content marketing, email campaigns, and social media advertising can all bring customers to the e-commerce site. Analytics should be used actively to optimise targeting and track closely where conversions are coming from. Personalized marketing and targeted campaigns often provide added value to B2B customers and engage them over the long term.

Interested? Would you like to hear more about the possibilities of e-commerce for your B2B business? Get in touch!