Whatever industry or vertical you serve, business-to-business (B2B) ecommerce represents a lucrative and largely untapped opportunity. And if you’re already operating on a B2B ecommerce platform but haven’t yet optimized your customer journey for an increasingly online world, the opportunity is even more profitable.

That said, B2B ecommerce is far more complicated than B2C transactions. The number of decision-makers is larger, the length of the sales cycle is longer, and the stakes are higher.

The entire process of selling to other businesses also remains archaic. It’s loaded with friction for corporate buyers—companies often get bogged down by manual and tedious business processes that draw valuable resources from other higher impact tasks. As such, it’s important to map out the specific B2B ecommerce features you need for acquiring, selling, and retaining B2B customers at scale. This guide shares eight of the most important to look for.

Eight essential B2B ecommerce features

Password-protected B2B storefront
Company accounts
B2B product catalogs and inventory management
Wholesale price lists
Flexible payment options
Vaulted credit cards
Ecommerce automations
Integrations

1. Password-protected B2B storefront

Every B2B ecommerce customer also shops at consumer websites. That person’s expectations of B2B ecommerce are conditioned by their experience with B2C ecommerce. This trend is known as the consumerization of B2B buying.

Issues arise because the further down the funnel a buyer goes, the more they expect a tailored customer experience, personalized reordering, and negotiated terms.

A password-protected B2B storefront caters to the DTC-style experiences that wholesale customers long for, while limiting the time you spend explaining products or negotiating deals on a one-to-one basis. This sets the stage for a scalable B2B business model that appeases both self-serve corporate buyers and those who need more support. You can display universally applicable pricing tiers while inviting B2B leads to connect directly for negotiated terms or account specific pricing.

When you restrict access with password protection on your wholesale site, the general public also can’t see how much of a discount wholesalers get. Use a registration form to collect key information about potential customers. Only those who pass this verification can see your wholesale product catalog and price lists.

Lean on conversion rate optimization principles often reserved for DTC ecommerce when building your B2B storefront, including:

Wholesale customer registration form that asks for their business name, sales channels, and primary contact. — Kulani Kinis can serve multiple customers with this wholesale registration form.

Luxury swimwear brand Kulani Kinis took this approach when expanding their B2B operations. They wanted to create a B2B website that wholesalers could use to browse, compare, and purchase from their catalog of over 800 products. Already a business on the Shopify Plus plan, the B2B channel was the logical next step.

“We’re all about branding, appeal, and aesthetic, and with Shopify, we’ve been able to make the wholesale store feel like us,” says Alex Babich, managing director and cofounder. “Shopify’s B2B capabilities have given us the cohesive brand experience we wanted and customization options that meet the needs of our wholesale partners. We’re not bound by others’ constraints.”

The expansion into B2B has been a positive one for Kulani Kinis. Their user-friendly storefront has enticed more wholesalers into placing orders. Online transaction revenue increased by 300% and wholesale revenue grew by 60%.

2. Company accounts

A seamless B2B ecommerce experience should allow visitors to instantly create B2B accounts in order to access non-universal pricing tiers and products. After all, if only approved accounts can view your catalog and customer-specific pricing, but your approval process isn’t responsive, potential customers who haven’t been approved will wander off to an alternative.

Remember that most enterprise B2B sales decisions involve more than eight stakeholders, and some wholesalers will use the same account to stock inventory across multiple resale locations. Make it as easy as possible for your primary point of contact to gather feedback from other decision makers with B2B ecommerce platforms that support flexible user permissions.

With B2B on Shopify, for example, wholesalers can manage corporate accounts by inviting stakeholders to access the B2B ecommerce platform using one of the following permission levels:

Ordering only. Someone with this role and make purchases on behalf of the company and view previous orders.
Location and admin. This role gives someone access to order-related data, as well as the ability to edit billing, shipping, and location details.

The added benefit of company accounts is that previous order history is easily referenceable. Let’s say a B2B customer last purchased 50 units of a particular product. They should be able to sign into their company profile, immediately locate the inventory they want to replenish, and make a subsequent order. This speedy reordering process limits the likelihood that they’ll second guess their decision or walk away due to frustration in not being able to find the products they need.

Your B2B sales team can also reference customer data to use in outreach or marketing campaigns. It’s a tactic used by hospitality brand Brooklinen, as Kelly Hallinan, their senior vice president of emerging channels, says: “Now, we can see that a large hospitality group purchased from us six months ago. We know the average amount of time in between orders, and we can say, okay, we’re at that point where we can send them an email asking about placing a reorder. It’s much harder to do that without Shopify’s back end system.”

Company profiles in Shopify’s B2B channel.

3. B2B product catalogs and inventory management

Your B2B ecommerce platform should support product catalogs that showcase the inventory that’s available for wholesale customers to buy. Problems arise, however, if this online catalog is extensive and difficult to navigate. A huge wholesale catalog with multiple SKUs and product variations needs to be easily searchable.

Help B2B customers easily locate items they’re looking for with search filters such as:

Context: search should be personalized by who the user is (industry, company, role)
Past orders: search and filter based on what the user has purchased in the past
Contract: what products they can buy and agreed upon price
Warehouse inventory
Manufacturer part number
Competitor cross reference
Part number matching (strip out special characters)
Automated spell check

Some B2B businesses have exclusive deals or licenses with their customers as a way to charge a premium for their inventory. If that’s the case for your online business, check that your B2B ecommerce platform allows you to create customer-specific product listings. This will ensure that each customer account only sees inventory that’s available for them to buy, whittling down complex product catalogs into smaller collections that are easier to make decisions about.

4. Wholesale price lists

B2B orders tend to have more variables than B2C orders. Sometimes larger customers might want first dibs on or exclusive access to products. Other times, it’s volume discounts. These variations mean you need flexible pricing as a B2B ecommerce feature.

Effectively, you want to set up an ecommerce system that can automatically display personalized pricing tiers, depending on the B2B customer. This includes the ability to automatically generate fixed price, percentage-off, tiered, or volume-based discounts for customers.

Your B2B pricing feature should also consider factors such as minimum and maximum quantities, quantity increments, and minimum purchase. These guidelines prohibit wholesalers from placing low value orders which eat away at your profits.

Within Shopify, checkout rules—like minimum order value or product quantities—can be automatically set to render either traditional invoicing or immediate checkout. You can then edit larger orders above the set threshold for negotiated pricing and process payments through a customer’s existing account in the back end.

Example price list for candles with a minimum and maximum order quantity. — Shopify allows you to create wholesale price lists that incentivize bulk orders.

5. Flexible payment options

The biggest difference between B2B and B2C ecommerce is the way in which customers prefer to pay for orders. Personal debit and credit cards are the top choice for DTC transactions, and while the trend indicates that B2B payments are heading this way, most wholesalers still prefer to make B2B payments through traditional methods like check or the Automated Clearing House (ACH).

While these different payment methods might sound like a small change, the process of accepting either option differs dramatically. Debit and credit cards are simpler: the customer just enters their name, billing address, and shipping details into the checkout to place an order.

But wholesalers that request to pay by check or ACH require an invoice—something that isn’t commonplace in DTC ecommerce. This invoice gets passed onto the B2B customer’s accounts payable department who writes a check or initiates the ACH payment, making it a critical part of the purchasing process. Confirm that your ecommerce platform has the capability to generate these invoices automatically to alleviate pressure on your sales team.

B2B ecommerce also differs in the sense that wholesalers tend to pay for their orders after receiving them. Net 30 is commonplace in B2B ecommerce because it gives customers enough time to resell the products and use that influx of cash to pay for the inventory.

Check that your platform of choice supports net payment terms that are specific to each customer. With B2B on Shopify, you can choose from the following payment terms for every wholesaler profile:

Immediate payment at checkout (similar to DTC orders)
Due on fulfillment
Net 7, 15, 30, 60, or 90

6. Vaulted credit cards

Some B2B customers will opt to pay for their orders using a corporate credit card. Your B2B ecommerce platform should be able to securely store these credit card details and retrieve them when placing any future orders—provided wholesalers opt into their data being stored.

Retailers are often victims of ecommerce fraud. Scammers who obtain stolen credit card information steal a collective $38 billion from retailers every year, so you’ll need a secure payment gateway to safeguard your customer’s sensitive information.

B2B storefronts created with Shopify have instant access to Shopify Payments, a PCI-DSS compliant payment gateway that can securely vault your customer’s payment information and offer a convenient shopping experience for business buyers. If they opt for net payment terms at checkout, B2B customers can choose to vault their credit card at checkout and give you approval to charge the card on file as soon as their payment is due—no manual chasing required.

7. Ecommerce automations

If we were to sum up traditional B2B ecommerce in a single statement, it’d be “time consuming.” Wholesale buyers typically require more assistance than general consumers. Their order volumes and purchase prices are higher, and with more decision makers involved in the buying process, some retailers pivot back to DTC-only because B2B demands too much of their already-limited resources.

Advancements in technology make B2B less of a logistical hassle by passing on repetitive tasks to automation tools. Requiring no human intervention (other than throughout the set up), brands like Filtrous estimate that they can save up to two hours per week by streamlining order processes with automation tools like Shopify Flow.

“Thanks to an exceptional self-serve experience and features like Shopify Flow, the team can spend more of its time selling,” says Yin Fu, Filtrous’s director of ecommerce. “We’re confident that no matter how big we grow, or how many orders we get on a given day, that Shopify could handle it.”

8. Integrations

Finding a B2B ecommerce platform that includes every feature you need throughout the entire B2B sales cycle can be difficult. Most platforms prioritize key features that directly tie to ecommerce. That’s not to say it’s not the best option on the market. Shopify fills the gaps with integrations that connect your store with apps that specialize in other areas, helping you gain access to best-in-class technology for each use case, such as:

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems like Netsuite that synchronize data from accounting software, inventory tools, and warehouse management systems into a central repository.
B2B marketplaces like Faire to sync inventory and fulfill orders from a single back end.
Customer relationship management (CRM) tools like Gorgias that store important information about customers and leads.

Apps in the Shopify App Store integrate directly with the Shopify admin and your B2B storefront. There’s no need to switch between multiple tabs or locate information that’s stored separately. Everything is visible from your Shopify admin.

B2B ecommerce features that you can use today

Despite the potentially lucrative rewards, B2B ecommerce doesn’t have to be complicated. There are plenty of solutions that make this market accessible to each and every merchant. Whatever you do, make sure that your platform and business are ready to face the future with these essential features.

Big brands like Carrier, bareMinerals, Laura Mercier, and Kraft Heinz have already chosen Shopify for their wholesale businesses. Some use our unified admin to connect their B2B and DTC stores, others run B2B only, and still others combine all their commerce on to a single store.

In the first three months of 2024, total B2B sales by businesses on Shopify were up 130% year-over-year. We received status as a Leader in The Forrester WaveTM: Commerce Solutions B2B, Q2 2024 in our first year of participation.

“I love seeing the look on people’s faces when we show them B2B on Shopify,” said Mani Fazeli, VP of product at Shopify. “When they see how Shopify turned a painful and manual process into something that feels like a personal shopping experience, there’s this magical ‘aha moment.’ It feels like this is the way B2B should’ve always been done.”

Checklist: How to pick the right B2B ecommerce platform for your business

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FAQ on B2B ecommerce features

What are the main features of B2B ecommerce?

Customizable B2B online store with protected access Self-service accounts Company profiles with user permissions to access shared account information Wholesale product catalogs B2B price lists, including minimum order quantities Support for purchase orders and invoicing Optimized checkout Vaulted credit cards Integrations with other software, such as ERPs and CRMs

What is essential for B2B commerce?

The most effective way to sell B2B is to provide customers with their own company profiles to access a self-service ecommerce store. Your platform should support wholesale product catalogs and price lists, preferred B2B payment methods like Net 30 terms, and automations to take care of repetitive tasks.

What is the key for B2B ecommerce?

B2B customers tend to make larger purchases on a regular basis, so it’s crucial to have an ecommerce site that allows them to easily reference previous orders and make repeat purchases using stored payment details.

Anthony Kentris