Article by Shannon Ingrey, Vice President & General Manager, APAC at Commerce
Here’s the truth: many manufacturers feel like they are meeting customer expectations better than reality suggests.
The majority of B2B manufacturers have already done the hard yards executing a digital transformation in the last decade. It’s no easy feat getting a website and buyers’ portal live, reformatting catalogues, upskilling staff and automating legacy processes.
But as the industry continues to be hit with rapidly changing technologies and shifting buyer behaviours, the need to constantly evolve the online experience is a commercial reality.
Take this statistic, which should make every manufacturer pause. According to Deloitte’s 2026 B2B Commerce Research1, 72% of B2B suppliers believe their sales processes are mostly or highly automated, yet only 47% of buyers agree. Buyers are also three times as likely to say it’s difficult to do business with their suppliers.
In other words, many manufacturers are overestimating how consistently they’re meeting customer expectations. Deloitte also found that suppliers with high digital commerce maturity beat their annual sales goals by a margin 110% greater than low-maturity suppliers.
So, getting ahead in the next era of B2B commerce means having a superior digital offering than your competitors. Operationally this depends on the digital infrastructure supporting your business, because a website is a starting point not the destination.
The real question is whether your ecommerce platform can genuinely handle the complexity of thousands of stock keeping units, account-specific pricing, multi-site procurement teams, approval workflows, and ERP integration that’s accurate in real time. For most manufacturers running on platforms that weren’t built for that complexity, the honest answer is no, and their buyers know it before their sales team does.
What makes this harder is that the buying process itself is becoming more complex. Forrester’s State of Business Buying 20262 report found that the typical B2B purchase now involves 13 internal stakeholders and nine external influencers, with procurement professionals acting as decision-makers in 53% of buying cycles from day one.
As a result, your B2B buyers portal needs to tailor to more than just a single buyer, and instead to multiple decision-makers, as each user has different access levels and approval authorities. This complexity needs to be built into your website from the ground up, and when it isn’t, there are commercial ramifications.
And I understand the frustration – this is a pattern that plays out consistently.
The biggest issue is starting from the wrong foundation. A platform without strong out-of-the-box B2B functionality and open APIs turns every unique business requirement into a costly workaround, and integration to existing ERP, OMS, or CRM systems into an ongoing liability rather than a solved problem.
Ineffective systems also create a variety of financial headaches for businesses. The first is total cost of ownership, or the ongoing cost of running a platform that wasn’t purpose-built to manage B2B complexity. When core tasks are not handled effectively and efficiently, the upshot is costs that compound over time.
The second is the revenue impact of getting the buyer experience wrong. Deloitte found that suppliers lose an estimated 13% of sales bids due to negative buyer experiences, while those who get it right see a 36% revenue uplift, while buyers spend 29% more with suppliers who make purchasing genuinely easy.
Essentially, one of these challenges drains your margin from below. The other limits your growth from above. But both trace back to the same platform decision.
UK security distributor Videcon3 knew this feeling well when its previous ecommerce system was retired. With 40,000 products across 300 brands and thousands of trade accounts, each with their own negotiated pricing, rebuilding wasn’t straightforward.
Videcon’s platform needed to handle millions of price combinations in real time while staying tightly connected to its NetSuite ERP. Moving to a purpose-built B2B platform with custom ERP integration changed the commercial picture entirely. Conversion rates increased 217%, customer acquisition costs fell 93%, and new trade customers could suddenly apply, get approved, and place their first order in under 40 minutes.
The first step towards getting a great outcome like Videcon’s is an honest audit of where the current buying experience slows down. The tension between what the customer wants and the delay of that process is where your revenue is likely to be leaking. When the weak points are identified, you can then focus on building the infrastructure to support them.
The opportunity for manufacturers who get this right is significant, with global B2B ecommerce sales reaching $2.3 trillion by the end of 2024, growing more than 10% year-over-year and projected to surpass $3 trillion by 20284.
In an era where buyers will quietly move on before you even know there’s a problem, the manufacturers who act now will be the ones tapping into how B2B buyers actually procure.
