How we translate B2C e-commerce experience to B2B success

Everyone is familiar with online shopping these days. I would even dare to say with complete certainty that everyone has made a purchase online at this point. Online shopping has especially taken off during the pandemic, because the advantages of E-commerce became crystal clear in times where you were restricted in your movement.

Is B2C success the blueprint for B2B success?

With partial thanks to the developments over these last two years, online shopping reached a certain level of maturity. Physical stores have had to deal with serious competition from the online marketplace. If you want to continue to matter as a business, you have to get with the program. At this point, every medium to large retail enterprise has a complementary online shop. A logical continuation is to bring the success of online shopping to the business-to-business (B2B) market. But the question remains; are you able to just copy the successes of the consumer market to the business market?

From humble beginnings to a big future

After attending many events, I can say with certainty that we still have a long way to go. B2B E-commerce is still in its early stages of development. When sharing knowledge and new innovations within my field, I noticed very few specific business applications. At the end of these events or sessions, I would always ask if they have any solutions for the challenges that we have in the railway sector. For example, how do you handle advanced MRP (Material Requirement Planning) and purchasing systems with built-in approval processes? Surely the ERP landscape of the customer could not be ignored in this modern method of conducting commerce? And how do you accommodate your long-standing, intimate relationship with your customer in a non-personal and cold online environment? What is the added value of “Big Data’ when you only have a small number of customers who are responsible for most of your business, as is typical for the B2B market? 

The dawn of a B2B digital revolution

I was invited to speak at the Emerce B2B digital event in Maarssen, the Netherlands. A good place to speak about the challenges we are experiencing in the railway sector and what kind of solutions we are working on. To my great surprise and relief, I wasn’t the only one. We are at the dawn of a digital revolution for B2B e-commerce. And my conclusion is that it’s an entirely different business concept than B2C e-commerce. The goals are larger, more ambitious – and in my opinion, far more interesting.

Where B2C e-commerce tends to end with the online retail of products and services, B2B e-commerce takes it to the next step. The creation of value, the maintenance of your cherished relationship with your customer and the improvement of your (digital) connections, are all areas that B2B e-commerce focuses on. And we haven’t even brought up the opportunities in content-driven marketing and process efficiency yet. 

The right direction

Is there any overlap between B2C and B2B E-commerce? There certainly is. We can learn a lot from the innovations we’re seeing in that sector. But it’s time for B2B E-commerce to set out a new direction for itself for the future. A future I hope you also want to be a part of.