Why Your B2B Company Should Consider Working with an Agency on Your E-Commerce Experience

The world of e-commerce isn't just for direct-to-consumer businesses anymore. We're seeing a clear trend where the e-commerce experience is permeating the B2B world. Companies are coming to us raising a need for a store or simply saying they want to create a certain type of experience that, for us, raises a red flag – an e-commerce need.

What is e-commerce? Does my business need it?

So, what are the flags that signal a B2B e-commerce need? The first one often is the desire for customers, whether they are other businesses or the general public, to be able to select multiple things and go through a checkout experience. This isn't just about charging money; it's the ability to cart things together so that shipping and perhaps billing information is provided just one time. Unlike "buy now" buttons that require repeating information for each purchase, the cart functionality defines an e-commerce need.

But it's not solely about purchase transactions. E-commerce can also be the way you interact with items on a website, enabling you to select multiple things to build something like a quote, a playbook, or even just to request free samples. If a company wants to let customers order free paint chips or fabric samples to be shipped, that's an e-commerce need. 

Similarly, if customers need to download multiple non-physical items that are large enough that they'd want to manage them together, that's another sign. Another flag is the volume of information or variations a company wants to present for products, like different colors of the same fabric or various sizes of industrial fittings.

Once these needs are identified, the next question is: who do you need on your team to make something like this work? And this is where the complexity — and the value of an agency — comes in.

Why partner with an agency to build your e-commerce experience?

Building a good e-commerce experience always comes back to the data. If you don't start with a good look at your data, you'll run into trouble later. You absolutely need someone who has familiarity with your product data – understanding part numbers, schemes, variations, and model numbers with codes. This person helps organize that data for the e-commerce experience.

At Trekk, we see this as a partnership. We've done this enough to know what questions to ask. We can provide a framework, like a spreadsheet, to help clients organize product names, model numbers, and prices if they don't have a product list ready. Then we engage with them, asking questions about the data we see to help develop that product database. You still need someone on the client side who knows the data really well and is willing to answer questions or solve problems when managing data in a new place. This person needs to have enough product knowledge to provide the necessary answers or find them from the right person internally.

Beyond the data expert, building a robust e-commerce experience requires several key roles:

• Content Marketer/Developer: Essential for search engine optimization (SEO) so products can be found when people are searching. They also handle the post-sale experience, including automated emails and abandoned cart flows.
• Creative Team: Crucial for normalizing product imagery so everything looks consistent on the site. They can also add value with things like 3D or 360-degree product views.
• Technical Expertise: Needed to set up personalized experiences using variable data from a CRM, such as cross-sell or upsell recommendations in emails.

Essentially, an e-commerce site is a highly specialized website. It marries standard website requirements like SEO, accessibility, design, and user experience with the unique demands of showcasing and selling products. This is where the value of a strategic marketing partner like an agency becomes clear. An agency thinks strategically about the full thread of the customer's journey in making a purchase or transaction. This perspective is incredibly valuable and something you might not consider initially if you just think about building a "store.”

Selecting an e-commerce platform and optimizing it

From a technology standpoint, one of my biggest learnings is that the platform makes a big difference. As I've heard said, you should build your treehouse in the tallest trees. Choose a platform that is a leader in the e-commerce front and supports your needs. Don't shortchange the platform, or you risk significant development effort being wasted because the platform can't handle what you need. The right platform impacts both the initial launch effort and the ongoing work for your team. Integrating the e-commerce store with your CRM and CMS (like HubSpot, which we use) is also incredibly powerful for managing abandoned carts, analyzing orders, sending follow-up emails, and even identifying high-value leads for your sales team.

Once the site is live, the work isn't done. It's critical to watch what's happening on the back end. There's so much to learn from data about abandoned carts, popular products, and products frequently bought together. This data can reveal unexpected customer behaviors or product applications you didn't know existed, which can inform your product positioning. An agency can also help with competitive analysis to understand, for instance, why products might be abandoned in carts (like pricing differences).

Conclusion: e-commerce isn’t all or nothing

Deploying e-commerce doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing endeavor. You don't need to be ready to sell all your products online to get started. We recently worked with a client in an industrial space whose main business is custom solutions. However, they also offer standard off-the-shelf products and spare parts that customers previously had to order by phone. By putting just these standard items on an e-commerce site (using Shopify for an easy entry point), we made it much easier for customers to get needed parts quickly. This also opened a whole new avenue for SEO and acquiring new customers who were simply searching for specific parts. It freed up the client's team to focus on their core custom engineering work.

In short, working with an agency provides the technical expertise, strategic marketing insight, creative support, and data management capabilities needed to successfully launch and manage a B2B e-commerce experience that can drive sales, improve customer satisfaction, and free up your internal team.