2017 Sample Report B2B WebDesign
B2BECNEWS JUNE 2017 EXECUTIVE REPORT
B2B Website Design The Complexity of Simple Just as they try to sell products designed to meet their customers’ needs, manufacturers and distributors are finding ways to design simplicity into helpful, user-friendly websites backed by complex systems for complicated online purchases. Sponsored by: Oracle NetSuite
CONTENTS COVER FEATURE Winning designs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Tech Data and PacknWood cater to customers’ needs
PROFILES How Grainger will ride web design to more online sales . . . 10 A golf supplies manufacturer scores sales with its new website . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Personalization pushes web sales higher for Zoro.com . . . . 15 What buyers want from manufacturers’ websites . . . . . . . . . 18
KEY DATA Taking action to improve customers’ buying experience . . . . 4 Using marketing data for content personalization is effective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Business buyers often prefer manufacturers’ sites . . . . . . . . . 19
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JUNE 2017 EDITORIAL Editor in Chief: Don Davis [email protected] Editor: Paul Demery [email protected] Senior Editor: Bill Briggs [email protected] Art Director: Jason Smith ADVERTISING B2BecNews Advertising Manager: Oliver Love [email protected] 312-572-6251 EXECUTIVE TEAM Publisher: Jack Love [email protected] CEO/President: Molly Love Rogers [email protected] Executive Editor: Kurt T. Peters [email protected] Vice President, Sales & Product Development: Tom Duggan [email protected] | 312-572-6250 Vice President of Research: Mark Brohan [email protected] Director of Marketing: Erin Dowd [email protected] Web Production Editor: Farnia Ghavami [email protected]
B2BeCommerceWorld.com Vertical Web Media Publisher of B2BecNews, B2BeCommerceWorld.com and Internet Retailer June 2017 edition B2BecNews, a twice-weekly newsletter with several executive reports each year, is published by Vertical Web Media LLC, 125 S. Wacker Drive, Suite 1900, Chicago, IL 60606 For advertising information, call 312-572-6251.
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WINNING DESIGNS Tech Data and PacknWood cater to customers’ needs BY PAUL DEMERY
As one would expect, Tech Data Corp., a world wide distributor of information technology products and systems, pulls out all the stops in its multibillion-dollar operation to source, sell and service the products its customers need, from relatively simple printers to complex computer networking hardware and software systems. It takes the same approach in designing and developing its e-commerce site, Shop.TechData.com. Customers of all types and sizes can not only shop among thousands of products and services on the site, but also personalize their own online interface in a way that suits their purchasing needs. “Our top priority is the quality and consistency of each online interaction, and enabling customers to personalize their e-commerce experience through an array of online tools,” says Ryan McKenzie, manager of e-business. “Customers are able to create and manage a suite of proactive notifications, access multiple product configurator tools, view and share rich product content, and manage different personas. Shop.TechData.com is completely customizable and caters to each user’s preferences and role.” Indeed, the company considers good website design its responsibility, an approach that has earned it recognition among design experts. At a time when distributors, manufacturers and wholesalers are facing increasing pressure from well-heeled
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Taking action to improve customers’ buying experience (Percentage of companies implementing actions in 2017) Improving online customer experience Transforming company culture to be more customer-centric Adding or improving customer experience measurement Adding or improving social media customer experiences Adding or improving mobile customer experiences Improving store/branch customer experiences Improving cross-channel customer experiences Improving customer interaction with call center agents Developing a dedicated customer experience advisory group Improving customer self-service via phone Adopting customer experience design practices
45% 32% 30% 29% 29% 26% 26% 20% 19% 15% 14%
Source: Forrester Research Inc., “Your Digital Experience Technology Strategy Starts with a Customer Journey Map.”
competition—most notably Amazon Business, the B2B arm of Amazon.com Inc.—providing a well-designed website is becoming table stakes for companies that want to serve their market well and maintain growth. “It’s our responsibility to deliver a consistent use experience that caters to each user’s intention, whether it’s building a quote, searching for order-tracking information, a request for special pricing, locating an invoice, calculating freight costs, or requesting a re-send,” McKenzie says. Tech Data shared an Internet Retailer Excellence Award this year for B2B Website Design of the Year, winning in the large-company category, while tableware and food container manufacturer PacknWood won in the small-company category. Tech Data also won the IR Excellence Award for B2B E-Commerce Player of the Year, which recognized its overall performance as a company that provides an extraordinary online customer experience. Andy Hoar, vice president and principal B2B e-commerce analyst at Forrester Research Inc., who was one of the judges of the B2B awards, noted that Tech Data’s e-commerce site
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stood out as a large site with many complex products that features good imaging, is easy to navigate, and displays public pricing as well as the custom pricing that contract customers see when they log in.
Contract customers of Tech Data can log into Shop.TechData.com to view a dashboard that lets them track their special pricing agreements and other information.
The Tech Data e-commerce site includes a dashboard customized to show data for each customer who logs in, such as the number of days left in a special pricing contract, and the amount of time left before particular product orders are routinely renewed. The dashboard also displays for each contract information on pertinent product details, pricing and the suppliers. Other features that make Tech Data stand out from many other online sellers are the details it shows online about technology services agreements, enabling customers to easily purchase service plans along with a product. Tech Data has performance metrics to show the results of a welldesigned site: It ended its most recent fiscal year on Jan. 31, 2017, with more than half of its $26 billion in sales conducted online. In addition, it transacts online more than 70% of its orders. And among small and mid-sized businesses—a market it has addressed recently with such new online features as exclusive web-only pricing, customer service live chat sessions, and the display of reduced shipping costs based on customer locations— Tech Data has increased its web revenue by 26%.
‘It’s our responsibility to deliver a consistent use experience that caters to each user’s intention.’ —Ryan McKenzie, manager of e-business, Tech Data Corp.
MORE THAN ECO-FRIENDLY For PacknWood, a strong web design has helped to make the difference in its ability to sell its lines of “eco-friendly” products like bowls and plates made of bamboo. It features such items in
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Above: The Baking Solutions section of PacknWood presents a mix of images and content to romance and educate the buyer.
decorative images on its business-to-business e-commerce site, PacknWood.com. Online sales increased 30% over the past year, but only after the manufacturer dealt with a web design challenge posed by its products, says Ryan Spooner, manager of marketing and web development.
Left: Photos of products in use serve to draw customers’ attention and introduce them to new product categories.
On the one hand, many of PacknWood’s products—including serving containers and soup bowls made of bamboo, sugarcane or palm leaf—are easy to present in attractive displays embellished with fresh fruit and other foods, Spooner says. But to let buyers in on the characteristics that make its products eco-friendly—such as being produced from quickly growing plants and compostable when discarded—PacknWood had to learn to design its site in a way that blends educational material with attractive images, he adds.
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“What makes it easy for us is that our products are unique,” Spooner says. “But it’s a double-edged sword—what make it easy also makes it difficult. We have to educate customers as to why bamboo is good, and how they should use our products.” PacknWood.com’s customers are buyers from distributors and food-service chains. So a product display page of plates made of sugarcane— embellished with several still and spinning images of plates with delicacies like bright red strawberries and tomatoes—also features extensive and yet easy-to-view product details. The details reveal, for instance, that the plates are biodegradable, compostable, and approved for heating in a microwave oven. In addition, product pages display U.S. maps showing estimated shipping times for basic ground and expedited shipping to each of the 50 states; a shipping calculator shows rates for standard ground and expedited deliveries based on item quantity and ZIP code. Spooner and one other in-house web design employee have worked on the site’s design over the past year and a half. PacknWood.com runs on e-commerce software from WebJaguar, which provides ongoing support for such projects as adding 360-degree images to product pages. The WebJaguar software is deployed under a software-as-a-service model, enabling PacknWood to access and manage the software through a web browser.
‘We have to educate customers as to why bamboo is good, and how they should use our products.’ —Ryan Spooner, manager of marketing and web development, PacknWood
PacknWood, based in New York, is the U.S. division of familyowned Firstpack, which is headquartered in Paris. The company doesn’t release financial figures, but Spooner says PacknWood has scored several positive metrics over the past year as the new design has helped its exposure in Internet search and social media, while also increasing customer activity. The number of unique visitors to the site is up 83%, the number of registered users, up 40%. The number of orders placed on the site are up 34%, resulting in a 30% increase in online sales, Spooner says. With those kind of metrics, PacknWood, like Tech Data, shows the benefits of a good web design.
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SPONSORED SPOTLIGHT
Success of B2B e-commerce relies on excellent customer experiences
W
ebsite design has always been critical in providing an excellent customer experience to consumers shopping online. And due to their experiences as consumers, business buyers expect that same online experience. “The only thing differentiating B2B businesses today is the customer experience,” says Nair Hid Ahmed, senior user experience designer at Oracle NetSuite. “If you offer an excellent customer experience, it will drive awareness and conversion rates, but most importantly, it will deliver highly satisfied customers who buy more and improve your brand’s reputation.” Hid Ahmed explains, “As a business, you’re expected to be trustworthy, smart, flexible and reliable in all of your channels. You may think that your customers trust you because you’ve been in business for 50 years, or because your company has an excellent reputation, but e-commerce is a whole new world.” The first time customers arrive at a company’s digital doorstep, they evaluate that brand on screen, Hid Ahmed says. The company might have a huge distribution organization, but if the customer sees a static, outdated website, he will lose trust in that brand. First impressions are based on the design of the site, Hid Ahmed says. “In that first glance, visitors judge the credibility of a site only on the design elements,” she says. “At this point, they haven’t yet read any content, compared prices or seen your competitive shipping services. Unconsciously they form a gut feeling about your brand; then, if they decide to stay on your site, they’ll look for ways to justify that feeling.” Design is often overlooked and undervalued in B2B environments, Hid Ahmed adds. But like other markets, B2B companies are competing based on customer experience. “B2B websites need to support very complex content and functionality that can give any good designer challenges,” she says. “But it’s not just about functionality that will optimize and streamline the buying experience, it’s also important to have updated and consistent data.” Outdated, static information on an e-commerce site will only lead to frustration and distrust toward your online channel and brand. But Hid Ahmed says a unified commerce platform provides a single source of inventory, order and customer data which can be used to enable better customer experiences.
For example, working on a siloed, legacy technology platform, Regina Andrew Design recently realized that to provide a best-in-class online customer experience, it needed more than just a new e-commerce system. The home décor designer and manufacturer partnered with Oracle NetSuite to implement its unified cloud commerce platform, which includes e-commerce, order and inventory management, warehouse management, CRM and ERP. “The transition to the unified cloud commerce platform enabled Regina Andrew Design to consolidate systems, streamline operations and optimize online purchasing for its B2B buyers,” says James Bonomo, Regina Andrew’s chief operating officer. “The site provides a B2C like experience, but provides the needed functionality to support its B2B buyers.” With extensive product information and detailed product images, Regina Andrew’s designers can disable pricing and use the website product pages to create tear sheets to present to clients. Designers are also able to create project lists for each project and purchase as needed. Plus, with the site now providing real-time current and future inventory availability, planning projects has never been easier, Bonomo says. “New self-service functionality on the website has improved the customer experience,” he says. “Once buyers log into the website, they can see their account pricing for products, get real-time inventory availability, and place orders.” Account management has also been streamlined. Buyers can now view their account balances, apply credits and make payments to outstanding invoices. “Web stores are a company’s doorstep,” Hid Ahmed says. “First impressions matter. Therefore, you should be dedicating time and effort to designing the digital impact you wish to have and the type of relationship you want to build with your customers.”
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HOW GRAINGER WILL RIDE WEB DESIGN TO MORE ONLINE SALES BY PAUL DEMERY Grainger executives say they’re meeting demand for online orders with continuously upgraded websites complemented by in-person service. W.W. Grainger Inc., a distributor of business and industrial products, is on track to do more than three-quarters of its total sales through e-commerce, CEO D.G. Macpherson says. “I’d be surprised if five years from now our sales are not 80% e-commerce,” he said at the company’s annual user conference in March 2017. He added that e-commerce has become a purchase point and an acquisition vehicle for “every type of customer.” Indeed, Macpherson pointed to his company’s expertise in e-commerce and in providing customer service to large customers with complex needs as two of the key areas that will help Grainger drive stronger growth and build market share during challenging economic times. Grainger’s total sales dipped 0.3% in the fourth quarter, to $2.47 billion, and declined 1.6% to $10.14 billion for the year ended Dec. 31, 2016. By contrast, e-commerce sales grew 16.4% year over year in 2016 to $4.76 billion, bringing e-commerce to 47% of total sales, and Macpherson said Grainger is working hard to maintain that momentum. Macpherson attributed the poor overall sales performance to a drop in industrial demand for its products, notably in the oil industry. He said Grainger has been able to gain market share, “but it’s harder to do.” Going forward, the distributor will compete harder with ongoing improvements to its e-commerce sites and more competitive pricing, he said. “Digital will be a big part of this,” he said. When Grainger makes the “price right and the digital solution right” for customers, “they want to use Grainger.” While expecting e-commerce to account for 80% of sales within five years,
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Macpherson noted that e-commerce already accounts for more than 60% when including sales through its internet-connected KeepStock vending machines placed at customer locations. Geoff Robertson, vice president of global digital business and innovation, demonstrated at Grainger’s conference some of the improvements the company has made to its flagship e-commerce site, Grainger.com, in its effort to make shopping easier and faster for customers. For example, rather than just figuring the best keywords to search for particular products among the 1.9 million available on Grainger.com, Grainger has been upgrading its search-and-navigation technology to let buyers first choose among their most important criteria, Robertson said. For example, customers looking to purchase a threadlocker— a material used to coat and protect metal threads in machinery— typically must choose among such criteria as the material’s bonding strength, the temperature of the machine that will use the threadlocker, the threadlocker material type (gel, liquid or solid), the time it takes to harden after applying it to machinery, and the type and size of container the threadlocker comes in. In the past, customers would search by such general criteria as brand or price, then check each product description for the other criteria.
‘I’d be surprised if five years from now our sales are not 80% e-commerce.’ —D.G. Macpherson, CEO, W.W. Grainger Inc.
Now when buyers enter “threadlockers” in the Grainger.com search window, they arrive at a Threadlocker Buying Guide that lets them choose strength level and other specific criteria, which instantly produces a list of products each featuring the chosen attributes. A new shopping feature lets buyers on factory floors, or other locations without ready access to a computer, use a Grainger mobile app in their cell phone to capture the image of a printed Grainger catalog page that shows listings of products without prices. They can then instantly view an image-rich version of the page with the buyer’s contract pricing on their phone and place an electronic order. Another new feature personalizes content that contract buyers view when they land on a Grainger.com page by punching out from their e-procurement software. Under a prior system, such
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buyers would have to search and navigate to find the products they typically buy; the new personalized system recognizes the registered buyer and displays content related to the products and categories they typically purchase. Grainger has also streamlined the checkout process, reducing it from eight pages to two. The first page lets buyers fill out several data windows on such things as ship-to addresses, delivery methods and payment information without leaving the page, then use the second page to confirm all their information and click to complete the purchase. Robertson said Grainger has launched these improvements over the past several months. He said he was unable to comment on specific results in customer activity or sales, but noted that Grainger has seen “significant” improvements in the number of products that customers have added to carts after searching for them, and the number of carted products for which customers have completed purchases.
A two-page checkout process and other website improvements have yielded an increase in completed orders for Grainger.
Elizabeth Casatelli, a product marketing manager for Loctite, a supplier to Grainger of threadlockers exhibiting at the Grainger Show, said the new threadlockers buying guide on Grainger.com is an important way to help industrial buyers quickly find and buy what they need, especially when they don’t have time to order through a sales rep. She said she couldn’t comment on any noticeable results yet in sales activity, or whether other distributors of Loctite products were also offering similar online buying tools. Grainger has so far provided new search and navigation tools for “close to 50%” of Grainger’s top-selling products, Robertson said. Grainger, which won the 2016 Internet Retailer Excellence Award for B2B E-Commerce Player of the Year, will be a company to watch as its web design continues to evolve.
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A GOLF SUPPLIES MANUFACTURER SCORES SALES WITH ITS NEW WEBSITE Wittek Golf, a manufacturer and distributor of products for golf courses and driving ranges, turns to e-commerce to reach a new generation of buyers. BY BILL BRIGGS
Wittek Golf is doing its part to move sales of golf course and driving range equipment from printed catalogs to the web. “Our industry is oldfashioned. Golf course managers call and say they want to buy what they’ve bought for the past 20 years,” says Alex Novikov, Wittek’s I.T. manager. Wittek manufactures and distributes products such as ballcleaning and vending machines, flags, benches and ball-picking equipment. The company sells directly to golf courses as well as through distributors, says Rajeev Sharma, director of marketing. It only drove into e-commerce in 2016, but sees the online channel as important to growth, Sharma says. Elk Grove, Ill.-based Wittek has been in the golf supply business since 1946. After it was acquired in 2015 by driving range equipment manufacturer P&W Golf Supply Co., Wittek launched a website that listed equipment and supplies for miniature golf courses. But businesses couldn’t place orders on the new site, Novikov says. The sales process was labor-intensive, requiring company sales reps to manually enter emailed orders. Although Wittek has a long history of selling through a catalog, sales reps and Professional Golf Association trade shows, company managers knew that e-commerce was an untapped sales
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channel. In the past sales were dominated by faxes and phone calls, Sharma says, “but we’re trying to change the brand image and make it look more modern, with automation and online ordering. Most golf course pros are old-fashioned, but as young people come in, the business is changing and we are trying to make it easier to order.” Since September 2016 customers have been able to buy online at Wittek.com, which was built on the NetSuite SuiteCommerce Advanced e-commerce platform from the Oracle NetSuite Global Business Unit of software giant Oracle Corp. Wittek plans to arm its 35-person sales force with mobile devices so they can tap into the e-commerce platform to place orders and check order status. Sharma declines to disclose the company’s revenue but says 2016 web sales accounted for only 2-3% of revenue. The aim is to increase the share from e-commerce to 15-20%. “The good part is if revenue increases, profit increases because there aren’t the extra expenses for orders that come in by phone,” Sharma says. “Plus, we tend to give more discounts on phone orders.” Since the new site went live Wittek has seen some traffic and conversion increases, Sharma says, without getting into specific numbers. The new e-commerce platform enables him to make product changes himself, without input from a programmer. Wittek has about 2,300 SKUs on its website and is adding more.
‘We’re trying to change the brand image and make it look more modern, with automation and online ordering. Most golf course pros are old-fashioned, but as young people come in, the business is changing and we are trying to make it easier to order,’ says Rajeev Sharma, director of marketing, Wittek Golf.
Wittek declined to disclose the cost of the cloud-based e-commerce technology, but Novikov, who is the company NetSuite administrator, notes it meshes effectively with the company’s enterprise resource planning application, also from NetSuite. The new website helps promote the Wittek brand, Sharma says. “We are also a manufacturer and we make more than half of our product,” he says. “People are aware of our brand and that gives us an edge. But we have to keep ahead to keep the edge.”
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PERSONALIZATION PUSHES WEB SALES HIGHER FOR ZORO.COM MRO distributor Zoro gears web content to whether the site visitor is new, ready to buy or a returning customer. BY DON DAVIS
Zoro.com segments site visitors into three broad categories and adjusts what they see accordingly. The personalization strategy has increased online sales by 8-10% in a year, e-commerce director Kyle Hilbrenner told attendees in a presentation at the 2017 Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition in Chicago in June. More than 80% of buyers arriving from Google land on a product detail page, and Zoro, a unit of W.W. Grainger Inc. that targets small businesses, makes those pages the focus of its personalization tactics for this segment. To provide the most relevant offers, Hilbrenner said, Zoro feeds as much information as possible into the personalization technology it uses from Kibo, for example the content of the Google ad the individual clicked on or what search terms the visitor may have used on the site. The distributor of industrial MRO products—maintenance, repair and operations—also offers complementary products, such as a level to go with the tape measure the person is looking at. At the same time, it may not offer a new visitor as attractive a discount on the product page as it would a returning customer, as those who have purchased previously typically are worth more in terms of lifetime value, Hilbrenner said. When someone adds items to a shopping cart and arrives at the checkout page, Zoro moves him into the “ready buyer” category and offers related products on the checkout page. Hilbrenner said this has increased sales for Zoro.com, but that it’s important not to
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B2B Website Design The Complexity Behind Simple
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Using marketing data for content personalization is effective (Most effective uses of marketing data according to U.S. B2B marketers)
62%
51%
43%
42%
Campaign targeting
Content personalization
Sales attributed to marketing
Customer journey analytics
32%
31%
22%
Predictive analysis
Account-based marketing
Market research
confuse a customer ready to buy with lower-priced items or force him to leave the checkout page to purchase a related product.
Source: Openprise, “The State of B2B Marketing Data Management: 2016 Benchmark Research Report, conducted by Ascend2, June 14, 2016.
“You don’t want to give the shopper pause,” he said. “Make it possible to buy in one click and don’t take them away from the checkout page.” Zoro has the most information about returning customers and re-orders the site navigation for those buyers to feature categories that the customer has previously purchased from or browsed. “We may move down office supplies, if he hasn’t purchased or looked at those items,” he said. He says this strategy has allowed Zoro, which has a catalog of 1.5 million items, to show visitors more of the products likely to be of interest to them. Because these returning customers often arrive via the home page, Zoro makes it easy for them to re-order items from that page or to buy items they have recently viewed. A year after deploying the personalization system from Kibo— which also provides order management, e-commerce and
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omnichannel technology for both retailers and business-tobusiness sellers—Zoro has seen 15-20% of site visitors engage with product recommendations, more than Hilbrenner expected, he said. Those who do interact with recommendations spend four times more time on Zoro.com than other visitors and view three times as many pages, he said. Overall, the conversion rate on the site has gone up 1-2% since Zoro implemented the personalization system, contributing to the 8-10% increase in site revenue, Hilbrenner said. He declined to disclose Zoro.com’s annual sales. Grainger, No. 35 in the 2017 B2B E-Commerce 300, reported online sales for all its e-commerce sites increased 16.4% to $4.76 billion in 2016 from $4.09 billion in 2015, as e-commerce accounted for 47% of 2016 sales, up from 41%. In the first quarter of 2017, Grainger said the web accounted for over half of revenue.
‘Make it possible to buy in one click and don’t take them away from the checkout page,’ says Kyle Hilbrenner, director of e-commerce searchandising, Zoro.com
Speaking with Hilbrenner in the B2B e-commerce workshop session at IRCE, Danielle Roberts, product manager for personalization and e-commerce at Kibo, advised attendees to avoid common personalization pitfalls. They include offering recommendations that are outdated, such as products that are out of stock, or suggesting a site visitor buy something he just purchased. She also said recommendations in email should be updated when the recipient opens the email, which allows the seller to update the items promoted based on inventory availability as well as on any website behavior by the recipient in the interim since the email was sent.
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B2B BUYERS WANT MORE FROM BRAND MANUFACTURERS Buyers want to research products on brands’ websites, and some will pay more to buy directly from those sites, Forrester Research says. BY BILL BRIGGS
New car shoppers all have different ideas when it comes to optional equipment and functions, and car makers have learned to offer many combinations. Today’s business-to-business buyers want more options, as well, led by buying directly from brand manufacturers, according to a recent report released by Forrester Research Inc. The report, “A Brand New Day in B2B Commerce,” asserts that buyers want to purchase outside traditional channels, and brands therefore need to rethink their sales strategies. “Out of respect for channel partners, B2B brands often redirect customers to partner sites—but in the process inadvertently frustrate and disappoint these originally eager customers as well as hurt their bottom line,” Forrester says in the report, which was written by Andy Hoar, vice president and principal analyst for B2B e-commerce, along with other Forrester analysts. B2B e-commerce shoppers look for detailed information about the products they need to procure wherever they can find it, Hoar writes. The report is based on responses from 225 B2B company buyers to the Q1 2017 Global B2B Buy-Side Online survey conducted jointly by Forrester and B2BecNews from December 2016 to February 2017. Buyers now expect B2B brand sites to be “the authoritative source of product information across the broader ecosystem of B2B buying,” the report says. The survey shows 54% of buyers
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Business buyers often prefer manufacturers’ sites (Percentage of buyers)
54% Business buyers who say brand manufacturers’ websites have the best information about their products
43% Business buyers prefer to buy directly from the company that manufactures a product versus a distributor
say a manufacturer has the best information about its product on its own website.
20% Business buyers willing to pay more to buy directly from a manufacturer
Source: Forrester Research Inc. report, “A Brand New Day in B2B Commerce,” based on Forrester/Internet Retailer Q1 2017 Global B2B Buy-Side Online Survey.
Those buyers also want to buy directly online from brands and some will pay for the privilege, Hoar writes. 43% of buyers prefer to buy a product directly from the brand that manufactures the product, rather than the distributor that sells it, and 20% of them are willing to pay slightly more for the opportunity to do so. Rather than placing themselves at the center of the sales process, manufacturers traditionally have deferred to distributors and wholesalers to do the selling, a mindset that needs an update, Hoar writes. “Historically, brands and the channel have enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship that has consistently grown the pie for both parties. But changing B2B buyer behavior is now forcing digital business pros at B2B brands to rethink their traditional channel-centric selling strategies.”
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B2B Website Design The Complexity of Simple Just as they try to sell products designed to meet their customers’ needs, manufacturers and distributors are finding ways to design simplicity into helpful, user-friendly websites backed by complex systems for complicated online purchases. Sponsored by: Oracle NetSuite
CONTENTS COVER FEATURE Winning designs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Tech Data and PacknWood cater to customers’ needs
PROFILES How Grainger will ride web design to more online sales . . . 10 A golf supplies manufacturer scores sales with its new website . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Personalization pushes web sales higher for Zoro.com . . . . 15 What buyers want from manufacturers’ websites . . . . . . . . . 18
KEY DATA Taking action to improve customers’ buying experience . . . . 4 Using marketing data for content personalization is effective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Business buyers often prefer manufacturers’ sites . . . . . . . . . 19
strategic intelligence for business-to-business professionals
JUNE 2017 EDITORIAL Editor in Chief: Don Davis [email protected] Editor: Paul Demery [email protected] Senior Editor: Bill Briggs [email protected] Art Director: Jason Smith ADVERTISING B2BecNews Advertising Manager: Oliver Love [email protected] 312-572-6251 EXECUTIVE TEAM Publisher: Jack Love [email protected] CEO/President: Molly Love Rogers [email protected] Executive Editor: Kurt T. Peters [email protected] Vice President, Sales & Product Development: Tom Duggan [email protected] | 312-572-6250 Vice President of Research: Mark Brohan [email protected] Director of Marketing: Erin Dowd [email protected] Web Production Editor: Farnia Ghavami [email protected]
B2BeCommerceWorld.com Vertical Web Media Publisher of B2BecNews, B2BeCommerceWorld.com and Internet Retailer June 2017 edition B2BecNews, a twice-weekly newsletter with several executive reports each year, is published by Vertical Web Media LLC, 125 S. Wacker Drive, Suite 1900, Chicago, IL 60606 For advertising information, call 312-572-6251.
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WINNING DESIGNS Tech Data and PacknWood cater to customers’ needs BY PAUL DEMERY
As one would expect, Tech Data Corp., a world wide distributor of information technology products and systems, pulls out all the stops in its multibillion-dollar operation to source, sell and service the products its customers need, from relatively simple printers to complex computer networking hardware and software systems. It takes the same approach in designing and developing its e-commerce site, Shop.TechData.com. Customers of all types and sizes can not only shop among thousands of products and services on the site, but also personalize their own online interface in a way that suits their purchasing needs. “Our top priority is the quality and consistency of each online interaction, and enabling customers to personalize their e-commerce experience through an array of online tools,” says Ryan McKenzie, manager of e-business. “Customers are able to create and manage a suite of proactive notifications, access multiple product configurator tools, view and share rich product content, and manage different personas. Shop.TechData.com is completely customizable and caters to each user’s preferences and role.” Indeed, the company considers good website design its responsibility, an approach that has earned it recognition among design experts. At a time when distributors, manufacturers and wholesalers are facing increasing pressure from well-heeled
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Taking action to improve customers’ buying experience (Percentage of companies implementing actions in 2017) Improving online customer experience Transforming company culture to be more customer-centric Adding or improving customer experience measurement Adding or improving social media customer experiences Adding or improving mobile customer experiences Improving store/branch customer experiences Improving cross-channel customer experiences Improving customer interaction with call center agents Developing a dedicated customer experience advisory group Improving customer self-service via phone Adopting customer experience design practices
45% 32% 30% 29% 29% 26% 26% 20% 19% 15% 14%
Source: Forrester Research Inc., “Your Digital Experience Technology Strategy Starts with a Customer Journey Map.”
competition—most notably Amazon Business, the B2B arm of Amazon.com Inc.—providing a well-designed website is becoming table stakes for companies that want to serve their market well and maintain growth. “It’s our responsibility to deliver a consistent use experience that caters to each user’s intention, whether it’s building a quote, searching for order-tracking information, a request for special pricing, locating an invoice, calculating freight costs, or requesting a re-send,” McKenzie says. Tech Data shared an Internet Retailer Excellence Award this year for B2B Website Design of the Year, winning in the large-company category, while tableware and food container manufacturer PacknWood won in the small-company category. Tech Data also won the IR Excellence Award for B2B E-Commerce Player of the Year, which recognized its overall performance as a company that provides an extraordinary online customer experience. Andy Hoar, vice president and principal B2B e-commerce analyst at Forrester Research Inc., who was one of the judges of the B2B awards, noted that Tech Data’s e-commerce site
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stood out as a large site with many complex products that features good imaging, is easy to navigate, and displays public pricing as well as the custom pricing that contract customers see when they log in.
Contract customers of Tech Data can log into Shop.TechData.com to view a dashboard that lets them track their special pricing agreements and other information.
The Tech Data e-commerce site includes a dashboard customized to show data for each customer who logs in, such as the number of days left in a special pricing contract, and the amount of time left before particular product orders are routinely renewed. The dashboard also displays for each contract information on pertinent product details, pricing and the suppliers. Other features that make Tech Data stand out from many other online sellers are the details it shows online about technology services agreements, enabling customers to easily purchase service plans along with a product. Tech Data has performance metrics to show the results of a welldesigned site: It ended its most recent fiscal year on Jan. 31, 2017, with more than half of its $26 billion in sales conducted online. In addition, it transacts online more than 70% of its orders. And among small and mid-sized businesses—a market it has addressed recently with such new online features as exclusive web-only pricing, customer service live chat sessions, and the display of reduced shipping costs based on customer locations— Tech Data has increased its web revenue by 26%.
‘It’s our responsibility to deliver a consistent use experience that caters to each user’s intention.’ —Ryan McKenzie, manager of e-business, Tech Data Corp.
MORE THAN ECO-FRIENDLY For PacknWood, a strong web design has helped to make the difference in its ability to sell its lines of “eco-friendly” products like bowls and plates made of bamboo. It features such items in
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Above: The Baking Solutions section of PacknWood presents a mix of images and content to romance and educate the buyer.
decorative images on its business-to-business e-commerce site, PacknWood.com. Online sales increased 30% over the past year, but only after the manufacturer dealt with a web design challenge posed by its products, says Ryan Spooner, manager of marketing and web development.
Left: Photos of products in use serve to draw customers’ attention and introduce them to new product categories.
On the one hand, many of PacknWood’s products—including serving containers and soup bowls made of bamboo, sugarcane or palm leaf—are easy to present in attractive displays embellished with fresh fruit and other foods, Spooner says. But to let buyers in on the characteristics that make its products eco-friendly—such as being produced from quickly growing plants and compostable when discarded—PacknWood had to learn to design its site in a way that blends educational material with attractive images, he adds.
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“What makes it easy for us is that our products are unique,” Spooner says. “But it’s a double-edged sword—what make it easy also makes it difficult. We have to educate customers as to why bamboo is good, and how they should use our products.” PacknWood.com’s customers are buyers from distributors and food-service chains. So a product display page of plates made of sugarcane— embellished with several still and spinning images of plates with delicacies like bright red strawberries and tomatoes—also features extensive and yet easy-to-view product details. The details reveal, for instance, that the plates are biodegradable, compostable, and approved for heating in a microwave oven. In addition, product pages display U.S. maps showing estimated shipping times for basic ground and expedited shipping to each of the 50 states; a shipping calculator shows rates for standard ground and expedited deliveries based on item quantity and ZIP code. Spooner and one other in-house web design employee have worked on the site’s design over the past year and a half. PacknWood.com runs on e-commerce software from WebJaguar, which provides ongoing support for such projects as adding 360-degree images to product pages. The WebJaguar software is deployed under a software-as-a-service model, enabling PacknWood to access and manage the software through a web browser.
‘We have to educate customers as to why bamboo is good, and how they should use our products.’ —Ryan Spooner, manager of marketing and web development, PacknWood
PacknWood, based in New York, is the U.S. division of familyowned Firstpack, which is headquartered in Paris. The company doesn’t release financial figures, but Spooner says PacknWood has scored several positive metrics over the past year as the new design has helped its exposure in Internet search and social media, while also increasing customer activity. The number of unique visitors to the site is up 83%, the number of registered users, up 40%. The number of orders placed on the site are up 34%, resulting in a 30% increase in online sales, Spooner says. With those kind of metrics, PacknWood, like Tech Data, shows the benefits of a good web design.
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SPONSORED SPOTLIGHT
Success of B2B e-commerce relies on excellent customer experiences
W
ebsite design has always been critical in providing an excellent customer experience to consumers shopping online. And due to their experiences as consumers, business buyers expect that same online experience. “The only thing differentiating B2B businesses today is the customer experience,” says Nair Hid Ahmed, senior user experience designer at Oracle NetSuite. “If you offer an excellent customer experience, it will drive awareness and conversion rates, but most importantly, it will deliver highly satisfied customers who buy more and improve your brand’s reputation.” Hid Ahmed explains, “As a business, you’re expected to be trustworthy, smart, flexible and reliable in all of your channels. You may think that your customers trust you because you’ve been in business for 50 years, or because your company has an excellent reputation, but e-commerce is a whole new world.” The first time customers arrive at a company’s digital doorstep, they evaluate that brand on screen, Hid Ahmed says. The company might have a huge distribution organization, but if the customer sees a static, outdated website, he will lose trust in that brand. First impressions are based on the design of the site, Hid Ahmed says. “In that first glance, visitors judge the credibility of a site only on the design elements,” she says. “At this point, they haven’t yet read any content, compared prices or seen your competitive shipping services. Unconsciously they form a gut feeling about your brand; then, if they decide to stay on your site, they’ll look for ways to justify that feeling.” Design is often overlooked and undervalued in B2B environments, Hid Ahmed adds. But like other markets, B2B companies are competing based on customer experience. “B2B websites need to support very complex content and functionality that can give any good designer challenges,” she says. “But it’s not just about functionality that will optimize and streamline the buying experience, it’s also important to have updated and consistent data.” Outdated, static information on an e-commerce site will only lead to frustration and distrust toward your online channel and brand. But Hid Ahmed says a unified commerce platform provides a single source of inventory, order and customer data which can be used to enable better customer experiences.
For example, working on a siloed, legacy technology platform, Regina Andrew Design recently realized that to provide a best-in-class online customer experience, it needed more than just a new e-commerce system. The home décor designer and manufacturer partnered with Oracle NetSuite to implement its unified cloud commerce platform, which includes e-commerce, order and inventory management, warehouse management, CRM and ERP. “The transition to the unified cloud commerce platform enabled Regina Andrew Design to consolidate systems, streamline operations and optimize online purchasing for its B2B buyers,” says James Bonomo, Regina Andrew’s chief operating officer. “The site provides a B2C like experience, but provides the needed functionality to support its B2B buyers.” With extensive product information and detailed product images, Regina Andrew’s designers can disable pricing and use the website product pages to create tear sheets to present to clients. Designers are also able to create project lists for each project and purchase as needed. Plus, with the site now providing real-time current and future inventory availability, planning projects has never been easier, Bonomo says. “New self-service functionality on the website has improved the customer experience,” he says. “Once buyers log into the website, they can see their account pricing for products, get real-time inventory availability, and place orders.” Account management has also been streamlined. Buyers can now view their account balances, apply credits and make payments to outstanding invoices. “Web stores are a company’s doorstep,” Hid Ahmed says. “First impressions matter. Therefore, you should be dedicating time and effort to designing the digital impact you wish to have and the type of relationship you want to build with your customers.”
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HOW GRAINGER WILL RIDE WEB DESIGN TO MORE ONLINE SALES BY PAUL DEMERY Grainger executives say they’re meeting demand for online orders with continuously upgraded websites complemented by in-person service. W.W. Grainger Inc., a distributor of business and industrial products, is on track to do more than three-quarters of its total sales through e-commerce, CEO D.G. Macpherson says. “I’d be surprised if five years from now our sales are not 80% e-commerce,” he said at the company’s annual user conference in March 2017. He added that e-commerce has become a purchase point and an acquisition vehicle for “every type of customer.” Indeed, Macpherson pointed to his company’s expertise in e-commerce and in providing customer service to large customers with complex needs as two of the key areas that will help Grainger drive stronger growth and build market share during challenging economic times. Grainger’s total sales dipped 0.3% in the fourth quarter, to $2.47 billion, and declined 1.6% to $10.14 billion for the year ended Dec. 31, 2016. By contrast, e-commerce sales grew 16.4% year over year in 2016 to $4.76 billion, bringing e-commerce to 47% of total sales, and Macpherson said Grainger is working hard to maintain that momentum. Macpherson attributed the poor overall sales performance to a drop in industrial demand for its products, notably in the oil industry. He said Grainger has been able to gain market share, “but it’s harder to do.” Going forward, the distributor will compete harder with ongoing improvements to its e-commerce sites and more competitive pricing, he said. “Digital will be a big part of this,” he said. When Grainger makes the “price right and the digital solution right” for customers, “they want to use Grainger.” While expecting e-commerce to account for 80% of sales within five years,
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Macpherson noted that e-commerce already accounts for more than 60% when including sales through its internet-connected KeepStock vending machines placed at customer locations. Geoff Robertson, vice president of global digital business and innovation, demonstrated at Grainger’s conference some of the improvements the company has made to its flagship e-commerce site, Grainger.com, in its effort to make shopping easier and faster for customers. For example, rather than just figuring the best keywords to search for particular products among the 1.9 million available on Grainger.com, Grainger has been upgrading its search-and-navigation technology to let buyers first choose among their most important criteria, Robertson said. For example, customers looking to purchase a threadlocker— a material used to coat and protect metal threads in machinery— typically must choose among such criteria as the material’s bonding strength, the temperature of the machine that will use the threadlocker, the threadlocker material type (gel, liquid or solid), the time it takes to harden after applying it to machinery, and the type and size of container the threadlocker comes in. In the past, customers would search by such general criteria as brand or price, then check each product description for the other criteria.
‘I’d be surprised if five years from now our sales are not 80% e-commerce.’ —D.G. Macpherson, CEO, W.W. Grainger Inc.
Now when buyers enter “threadlockers” in the Grainger.com search window, they arrive at a Threadlocker Buying Guide that lets them choose strength level and other specific criteria, which instantly produces a list of products each featuring the chosen attributes. A new shopping feature lets buyers on factory floors, or other locations without ready access to a computer, use a Grainger mobile app in their cell phone to capture the image of a printed Grainger catalog page that shows listings of products without prices. They can then instantly view an image-rich version of the page with the buyer’s contract pricing on their phone and place an electronic order. Another new feature personalizes content that contract buyers view when they land on a Grainger.com page by punching out from their e-procurement software. Under a prior system, such
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buyers would have to search and navigate to find the products they typically buy; the new personalized system recognizes the registered buyer and displays content related to the products and categories they typically purchase. Grainger has also streamlined the checkout process, reducing it from eight pages to two. The first page lets buyers fill out several data windows on such things as ship-to addresses, delivery methods and payment information without leaving the page, then use the second page to confirm all their information and click to complete the purchase. Robertson said Grainger has launched these improvements over the past several months. He said he was unable to comment on specific results in customer activity or sales, but noted that Grainger has seen “significant” improvements in the number of products that customers have added to carts after searching for them, and the number of carted products for which customers have completed purchases.
A two-page checkout process and other website improvements have yielded an increase in completed orders for Grainger.
Elizabeth Casatelli, a product marketing manager for Loctite, a supplier to Grainger of threadlockers exhibiting at the Grainger Show, said the new threadlockers buying guide on Grainger.com is an important way to help industrial buyers quickly find and buy what they need, especially when they don’t have time to order through a sales rep. She said she couldn’t comment on any noticeable results yet in sales activity, or whether other distributors of Loctite products were also offering similar online buying tools. Grainger has so far provided new search and navigation tools for “close to 50%” of Grainger’s top-selling products, Robertson said. Grainger, which won the 2016 Internet Retailer Excellence Award for B2B E-Commerce Player of the Year, will be a company to watch as its web design continues to evolve.
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A GOLF SUPPLIES MANUFACTURER SCORES SALES WITH ITS NEW WEBSITE Wittek Golf, a manufacturer and distributor of products for golf courses and driving ranges, turns to e-commerce to reach a new generation of buyers. BY BILL BRIGGS
Wittek Golf is doing its part to move sales of golf course and driving range equipment from printed catalogs to the web. “Our industry is oldfashioned. Golf course managers call and say they want to buy what they’ve bought for the past 20 years,” says Alex Novikov, Wittek’s I.T. manager. Wittek manufactures and distributes products such as ballcleaning and vending machines, flags, benches and ball-picking equipment. The company sells directly to golf courses as well as through distributors, says Rajeev Sharma, director of marketing. It only drove into e-commerce in 2016, but sees the online channel as important to growth, Sharma says. Elk Grove, Ill.-based Wittek has been in the golf supply business since 1946. After it was acquired in 2015 by driving range equipment manufacturer P&W Golf Supply Co., Wittek launched a website that listed equipment and supplies for miniature golf courses. But businesses couldn’t place orders on the new site, Novikov says. The sales process was labor-intensive, requiring company sales reps to manually enter emailed orders. Although Wittek has a long history of selling through a catalog, sales reps and Professional Golf Association trade shows, company managers knew that e-commerce was an untapped sales
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channel. In the past sales were dominated by faxes and phone calls, Sharma says, “but we’re trying to change the brand image and make it look more modern, with automation and online ordering. Most golf course pros are old-fashioned, but as young people come in, the business is changing and we are trying to make it easier to order.” Since September 2016 customers have been able to buy online at Wittek.com, which was built on the NetSuite SuiteCommerce Advanced e-commerce platform from the Oracle NetSuite Global Business Unit of software giant Oracle Corp. Wittek plans to arm its 35-person sales force with mobile devices so they can tap into the e-commerce platform to place orders and check order status. Sharma declines to disclose the company’s revenue but says 2016 web sales accounted for only 2-3% of revenue. The aim is to increase the share from e-commerce to 15-20%. “The good part is if revenue increases, profit increases because there aren’t the extra expenses for orders that come in by phone,” Sharma says. “Plus, we tend to give more discounts on phone orders.” Since the new site went live Wittek has seen some traffic and conversion increases, Sharma says, without getting into specific numbers. The new e-commerce platform enables him to make product changes himself, without input from a programmer. Wittek has about 2,300 SKUs on its website and is adding more.
‘We’re trying to change the brand image and make it look more modern, with automation and online ordering. Most golf course pros are old-fashioned, but as young people come in, the business is changing and we are trying to make it easier to order,’ says Rajeev Sharma, director of marketing, Wittek Golf.
Wittek declined to disclose the cost of the cloud-based e-commerce technology, but Novikov, who is the company NetSuite administrator, notes it meshes effectively with the company’s enterprise resource planning application, also from NetSuite. The new website helps promote the Wittek brand, Sharma says. “We are also a manufacturer and we make more than half of our product,” he says. “People are aware of our brand and that gives us an edge. But we have to keep ahead to keep the edge.”
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PERSONALIZATION PUSHES WEB SALES HIGHER FOR ZORO.COM MRO distributor Zoro gears web content to whether the site visitor is new, ready to buy or a returning customer. BY DON DAVIS
Zoro.com segments site visitors into three broad categories and adjusts what they see accordingly. The personalization strategy has increased online sales by 8-10% in a year, e-commerce director Kyle Hilbrenner told attendees in a presentation at the 2017 Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition in Chicago in June. More than 80% of buyers arriving from Google land on a product detail page, and Zoro, a unit of W.W. Grainger Inc. that targets small businesses, makes those pages the focus of its personalization tactics for this segment. To provide the most relevant offers, Hilbrenner said, Zoro feeds as much information as possible into the personalization technology it uses from Kibo, for example the content of the Google ad the individual clicked on or what search terms the visitor may have used on the site. The distributor of industrial MRO products—maintenance, repair and operations—also offers complementary products, such as a level to go with the tape measure the person is looking at. At the same time, it may not offer a new visitor as attractive a discount on the product page as it would a returning customer, as those who have purchased previously typically are worth more in terms of lifetime value, Hilbrenner said. When someone adds items to a shopping cart and arrives at the checkout page, Zoro moves him into the “ready buyer” category and offers related products on the checkout page. Hilbrenner said this has increased sales for Zoro.com, but that it’s important not to
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B2B Website Design The Complexity Behind Simple
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Using marketing data for content personalization is effective (Most effective uses of marketing data according to U.S. B2B marketers)
62%
51%
43%
42%
Campaign targeting
Content personalization
Sales attributed to marketing
Customer journey analytics
32%
31%
22%
Predictive analysis
Account-based marketing
Market research
confuse a customer ready to buy with lower-priced items or force him to leave the checkout page to purchase a related product.
Source: Openprise, “The State of B2B Marketing Data Management: 2016 Benchmark Research Report, conducted by Ascend2, June 14, 2016.
“You don’t want to give the shopper pause,” he said. “Make it possible to buy in one click and don’t take them away from the checkout page.” Zoro has the most information about returning customers and re-orders the site navigation for those buyers to feature categories that the customer has previously purchased from or browsed. “We may move down office supplies, if he hasn’t purchased or looked at those items,” he said. He says this strategy has allowed Zoro, which has a catalog of 1.5 million items, to show visitors more of the products likely to be of interest to them. Because these returning customers often arrive via the home page, Zoro makes it easy for them to re-order items from that page or to buy items they have recently viewed. A year after deploying the personalization system from Kibo— which also provides order management, e-commerce and
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omnichannel technology for both retailers and business-tobusiness sellers—Zoro has seen 15-20% of site visitors engage with product recommendations, more than Hilbrenner expected, he said. Those who do interact with recommendations spend four times more time on Zoro.com than other visitors and view three times as many pages, he said. Overall, the conversion rate on the site has gone up 1-2% since Zoro implemented the personalization system, contributing to the 8-10% increase in site revenue, Hilbrenner said. He declined to disclose Zoro.com’s annual sales. Grainger, No. 35 in the 2017 B2B E-Commerce 300, reported online sales for all its e-commerce sites increased 16.4% to $4.76 billion in 2016 from $4.09 billion in 2015, as e-commerce accounted for 47% of 2016 sales, up from 41%. In the first quarter of 2017, Grainger said the web accounted for over half of revenue.
‘Make it possible to buy in one click and don’t take them away from the checkout page,’ says Kyle Hilbrenner, director of e-commerce searchandising, Zoro.com
Speaking with Hilbrenner in the B2B e-commerce workshop session at IRCE, Danielle Roberts, product manager for personalization and e-commerce at Kibo, advised attendees to avoid common personalization pitfalls. They include offering recommendations that are outdated, such as products that are out of stock, or suggesting a site visitor buy something he just purchased. She also said recommendations in email should be updated when the recipient opens the email, which allows the seller to update the items promoted based on inventory availability as well as on any website behavior by the recipient in the interim since the email was sent.
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B2B BUYERS WANT MORE FROM BRAND MANUFACTURERS Buyers want to research products on brands’ websites, and some will pay more to buy directly from those sites, Forrester Research says. BY BILL BRIGGS
New car shoppers all have different ideas when it comes to optional equipment and functions, and car makers have learned to offer many combinations. Today’s business-to-business buyers want more options, as well, led by buying directly from brand manufacturers, according to a recent report released by Forrester Research Inc. The report, “A Brand New Day in B2B Commerce,” asserts that buyers want to purchase outside traditional channels, and brands therefore need to rethink their sales strategies. “Out of respect for channel partners, B2B brands often redirect customers to partner sites—but in the process inadvertently frustrate and disappoint these originally eager customers as well as hurt their bottom line,” Forrester says in the report, which was written by Andy Hoar, vice president and principal analyst for B2B e-commerce, along with other Forrester analysts. B2B e-commerce shoppers look for detailed information about the products they need to procure wherever they can find it, Hoar writes. The report is based on responses from 225 B2B company buyers to the Q1 2017 Global B2B Buy-Side Online survey conducted jointly by Forrester and B2BecNews from December 2016 to February 2017. Buyers now expect B2B brand sites to be “the authoritative source of product information across the broader ecosystem of B2B buying,” the report says. The survey shows 54% of buyers
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Business buyers often prefer manufacturers’ sites (Percentage of buyers)
54% Business buyers who say brand manufacturers’ websites have the best information about their products
43% Business buyers prefer to buy directly from the company that manufactures a product versus a distributor
say a manufacturer has the best information about its product on its own website.
20% Business buyers willing to pay more to buy directly from a manufacturer
Source: Forrester Research Inc. report, “A Brand New Day in B2B Commerce,” based on Forrester/Internet Retailer Q1 2017 Global B2B Buy-Side Online Survey.
Those buyers also want to buy directly online from brands and some will pay for the privilege, Hoar writes. 43% of buyers prefer to buy a product directly from the brand that manufactures the product, rather than the distributor that sells it, and 20% of them are willing to pay slightly more for the opportunity to do so. Rather than placing themselves at the center of the sales process, manufacturers traditionally have deferred to distributors and wholesalers to do the selling, a mindset that needs an update, Hoar writes. “Historically, brands and the channel have enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship that has consistently grown the pie for both parties. But changing B2B buyer behavior is now forcing digital business pros at B2B brands to rethink their traditional channel-centric selling strategies.”
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