So what is the key to B2B eCommerce success? Is it Integration with your back end systems, mobile enablement, customer experience, social media?

While those are important. The key to success really lies in understanding this one statement from Justin King, a B2B eCommerce expert and thought leader for over 20 years. And I really love this. To quote Justin he says: “B2B customers come to your web site because they have to. It is their job. And in people’s jobs more often than anywhere else, they look for the least path of resistance”.

So what Justin is really saying here is that your site needs to be about making your customer’s job easier. And if you can make their job easier, they are going to come back and they’ll have more loyalty to your brand. So how can you make your customer’s job easier?

Well, there are many ways you can do that, but the simplest place to start is looking at your customer’s job roles and how you can make them more efficient. For many B2B companies, this means providing a full set of account management capabilities to empower your business buyers to accomplish keys tasks at their convenience.

For example, they want to be able to log in and easily find what they are looking for. So how about making sure they see their price list and a custom catalog structure with merchandised products tailored to their buying needs.

You could give your customers the ability to set up multiple buyers in varying organisational structures. Allowing your customer to easily replicate their business structure with fast drag-and-drop tools!

Then once buyers are added to an account, the company administrator could assign specific roles and permissions to each one (like whether or not they can submit quotes and orders, etc.)

Or you could help your buyers easily track open orders and quotes and see their full order history across all buyers in the organization, giving them greater control and visibility into their spending patterns.

These are just some examples of how you can make your customer’s job easier and deliver that self-service convenience. In the end, it’s not about what we want or what we think is important, it’s about giving your customers the tools that make them more efficient, to build that loyalty and keep them coming back.