Checklist to Maximize Conversion and Delight in B2B eCommerce Checkouts
The biggest differences between consumer buyers (B2C) and business buyers (B2B) is that the volume that is purchased and their preferences with pricing and being invoiced on payment terms over credit cards.
As the product manager for Acme Corporation, you just got the roadmap prioritized to open up our B2B sales strategy on our eCommerce, so you need to make a prioritized backlog of awesomeness for identifying leads and ensuring their checkout is B2B-centric.
As you gathered your new team members, you explained the WHY:
- Why should a company focus on B2B customers just as much as B2C? Shopify reports that B2B buyers cart size is almost triple the value of B2C — from $147 per order to $491.
- Why does omnichannel matter in B2B? According to BigCommerce, 74% of B2B buyers report researching at least half of their work purchases online. That means that they are buying from direct sales, online, and potentially in-store.
So your Acme Corporation team does a design sprint and creates a super cool B2B program (Acme4Business) for your B2B prospects that includes: volume-based pricing, trade credit for later payments (aka Net Terms), B2B specific-invoicing, and rebates — but how do you implement it on your eCommerce site?
Journey Stage: Awareness in Shopping Experience
Once you move past a banner on your eCommerce site or a special page describing your Acme4Business programs, now it is time to get more sophisticated in identifying B2B purchasers that are already buying from you. Tool your shopping experience to look for these flags, to trigger a B2B signup:
- Flag 1: Quantity Flag — Depending on the normal amount of that on B2C user would purchase, create a flag that will trigger when it appears they are buying an amount that would be for a group.
- Flag 2: IP Address Flag — If multiple users are buying from the same IP address, that is a smoking gun that is a company (create a flag).
- Call to Action in Shopping Experience: Experiment with different in-line messages, dialogues, and follow up nudge emails to optimize the best messaging for conversions.
Journey Stage: Awareness in Checkout Experience
- Flag 3 — Amex Flag: If a B2C user has a large cart size or is buying a quantity larger than one person would need, when the user pulls out an Amex for the purchase, that is another smoking gun that it is a potential B2B lead. If on the B2C site and using an Amex, market the B2B program.
- Call to Action in the Cart: Following patterns used in B2C with marketing reward carts (see Amazon Prime Card example), communicate the value of the Acme for Business program within the context of the purchase.
Unlike B2C, in B2B you can communicate more than pricing value. Experiment with different ways to communicate with a value-based message in the cart and follow up nudge emails.
B2B Examples:
- Cart CTA 1 — Pricing Value: On the product totals page, show the value of volume-based discounting or volume-based rebates.
- Cart CTA 2 — Payment Value: On the payment page, show the value of a Net 30 or Net 60 trade credit payment term. Note: default them to the terms payment option.
- Cart CTA 3 — Efficiency Value: On the shipping page, show the value of getting invoices sent directly to your accounts payable department.
Funnel Stage: Signup and Onboarding for B2B Experience
When working with B2B user, they will most likely be buying omnichannel, that means that you will need to create a bridge between traditional direct sales methods and online conversions. In order to ensure that it works for your customer — and your internal teams, here are helpful steps to consider:
- Step 1: On the signup form, collect the most critical information first to ensure that you can maximize your qualify the lead. Email, name, company, address, will be the minimum to create a B2B account online, create a lead in the CRM (e.g. Salesforce), and auto-populate information on the size of the prize.
- Step 2a: Create the user’s online B2B account, as well as create a lead in Salesforce for an account manager to reach out to them about volume pricing, subscriptions, rebates, and invoicing on terms.
- Step 2b: Use company info APIs like ZoomInfo or InsideView to populate your CRM/Salesforce records with the size of the company, annual review, number of employees, and locations to auto-prioritize which accounts get an in-person reach out vs. email automation.
- Step 2c: Use company hierarchy APIs, like DiscoverOrg.com, to understand where the user places in the org, what the path to selling up the chain would be, and if there are other departments that could be B2B buyers on the same account.
- Step 3: Customers purchasing on terms and getting invoiced is table-stakes for a B2B program. In order to get the user’s underwriting information for your terms financing offering (Acme4Business), reduce the friction for getting the information your in-house AR team, or credit-as-a-service partner, needs to approve by prepopulating your signup forms on your eCommerce and email campaigns.
Pro-Tip: As you are assigning each new account a B2B account manager restructure sales incentive agreements to ensure that sales team members are incentivized no matter if the purchase is direct sales or online.
Journey Stage: B2B First Purchase to Invoice
- Checkout Item 1: Do the Math —with the current credit line and cart total, reduce the cognitive load for the user by doing the math and then reframing their remaining amount in a positive way to encourage more purchasing.
- Checkout Item 2: Streamline Purchase Order Numbers — Allow for PO numbers to be entered in the checkout and to be connected with the printed invoice to help the buyer’s AP department reconcile the order with the approval.
- Checkout Item 3: Streamline AP Specific Notes — Allow for a note to be entered in the checkout and to be connected with the printed invoice to make the invoice that is generated flexible to any onerous or odd AP requirements (e.g. corporations that need a department number or government CAGE code).
- Checkout Item 4: Connect PO Documents to the Invoice — Allow for a PO document to be uploaded in the checkout and to be connected with the printed invoice (via an S3 link) to help the buyer’s AP department reconcile the order with the internally generated document approval.
- Checkout Item 5: Bill AP Direct — Allow for the user to set up their invoices to sent directly to their AP department to reduce a step for them.
Journey Stage: Creating B2B Repeat Purchasing
To come full circle from the beginning, the reason why B2B account the effort is worth the squeeze is that they have a high likelihood of being repeat purchasers. Here are ways to think about the experience after their first purchase:
- Checkout Item 6: Credit Limit Resolution Paths — When a user is buying and buying, you will want to ensure that if their AP department is slow to pay the invoices, or they are up against their trade credit limit, you will need to provide a path to resolution in checkout.
- Checkout Item 7: Rebate Bumps — When a user is close to a rebate in their cart, give them the opportunity to add more and hit their payout or realize the rebate in the same purchase.
- Checkout Item 8: Nudges Tied to Replenishment, Replacement Parts, or Depreciation — For goods that will need replacement parts or will run out of stock, allow the user to schedule an automatic purchase (or at least a notification) when you are forecasting for that event to happen. Depending on the type of good, you may even follow up after three years when it has depreciated on the accounting books.
- Checkout Item 9: Added Complementary Services — either offering your service (or a partner) to make using the good easier (e.g. install, training, etc.) is a way to further establish a customer relationship and humanize the purchasing experience.
- Checkout Item 10: Communicate the Value Always — along the purchasing process, remind the customer of the lifetime value (not what they have spent) that they have received from your company. These items can be dollar amounts (e.g. savings YTD), service-based (e.g. number of issues resolved under 5 minutes), or value-based on the product (total efficiency-found by purchasing our product).
- Shopping Experience with a REAL Relationship: Having a profile picture with an Intercom plug-in feels fake, but a real B2B sales manager that thanks you after your first purchase, and is there the next time you visit the eCommerce site, is powerful.
Kirby Montgomery is a post-it note advocate, a practitioner of data & design user-centric problem solving, and an extreme prototyper. As the current Director of Product for MSTS, he leads teams to build software platforms that remove the drama of B2B invoicing and collections. In addition, Kirby is a co-founder of TheraWe Connect where he is on a mission to help parents of children with disabilities navigate the world of pediatric therapy.
If you want to chat about any of the ideas presented here, please feel free to reach out via LinkedIn or gkmontgomery@msts.com.
