7 Best B2B eCommerce Platforms in 2022: Essential B2B eCommerce Features and Best B2B Sites

Let’s start by taking a closer look at what B2B ecommerce actually is. In its broadest sense, B2B ecommerce, or business-to-business electronic commerce, is the process of marketing and selling products or services online between two companies via an online business portal, which is used to improve the efficiency of a company’s sales efforts.

Although there are similarities between B2B and B2C, selling to consumers and businesses are quite different, owing to the different purchasing needs and shopping behavior of business buyers and consumers. For example, while individuals might buy impulsively, business buyers act rationally. They plan for purchases and execute a budget that is often incomparably larger than the resources available to individual consumers. Moreover, unlike consumer shopping, where individuals are solely responsible for their own purchasing decisions, B2B purchasing is extremely complex — every business transaction hides multiple decision-makers under its hood.

A B2B ecommerce platform is what makes B2B ecommerce possible. To put it simply, a B2B ecommerce platform is the technology that allows B2B businesses to conduct business online, showcase their products and services, accept orders, and process payments. While one part of the platform is freely and readily available to visitors, another part of it is only accessible by registered customers with login credentials.

In the upcoming sections, we’ll look at the essential features of B2B ecommerce platforms in more detail.

Before we move on to the next section, let’s take a look at a few examples of successful B2B ecommerce ventures for inspiration.

A shopping cart is an integral part of any ecommerce system; it’s where your customers put their products before checking out and paying. A shopping cart must be simple and flexible. It has to give customers the option to add or remove products, change quantities, save products for a later purchase or to a wish list, and request a quotation under specific circumstances (which we’ll cover in detail later). Some ecommerce platforms have an abandoned cart module that serves to remind and notify customers about abandoned products in their shopping cart, which they can retrieve to complete their purchase. To significantly reduce the cart abandonment rate, it’s best to fit the required information within a single checkout page, rather than sprawled across several pages.

An order management module is an extremely important feature of any ecommerce platform as it allows quick access to the required information regarding order status updates, such as buyer cancellations, refunds, order verification, fulfillment notifications, and so on. The order management panel gives you complete control over the order management process, including searching and filtering to easily find necessary orders, creating and managing customer order updates, and exporting info to other systems or in different file formats.

To ensure buyers have enough supplemental information regarding your products, provide as much detail as possible about what you’re offering, including product descriptions, warranty, technical specifications, high-quality images, and video. The information you provide serves several purposes: first and foremost, it educates your users and allows them to arrive at a purchasing decision faster; and secondly, it helps search engines discover your website and improves your search rankings. To be able to provide such information, your ecommerce platform needs to have a robust Content Management System that allows you to have complete control over the platform’s content and layout.

Your ecommerce platform should help your marketing strategy by providing a variety of marketing and promotion tools. Discount coupons, special offers, freebies, limited offers, customer reviews, and private sales for registered or subscribed users are extremely useful tools when it comes to closing a sale, upselling, or cross-selling.

One of the many advantages of ecommerce solutions is the ability to keep track of important KPIs, gather valuable data, and analyze market conditions. Hence, a built-in customizable reporting engine is a must-have feature for any ecommerce platform.

Ideally, an ecommerce platform should have a customizable reporting engine that can track any metric, segment the results, and integrate with third-party reporting engines and data analytics tools

Your ecommerce solution should be designed to handle multiple integrations of any complexity and with different systems, such as:

• ERP Systems, CRM, CMS, PIM, SAP
• AI recommendation systems
• Configure Price & Quote (CPQ) solutions
• Search engines (Elastic, Azure Search)
• Google ecommerce analytics
• Payment processing systems and payment gateways
• Shipping, fulfillment, and logistic providers
• Tax automation systems
• Logic Apps

Your ecommerce solution needs to be safeguarded against cybersecurity threats and data theft. To ensure your digital assets are appropriately protected, you’ll need to observe at least the following recommendations:

• Use reliable security software and hardware.
• Regularly review access controls and permissions.
• Obtain necessary certifications.
• Keep up with security challenges.

eCommerce infrastructure refers to all the hardware, software, network, and services required to run an ecommerce business. Having the right infrastructure ensures your ecommerce platform can scale as your business grows. Your website must be equipped to accommodate large spikes in traffic and customer demand. To ensure your platform can handle scalability issues, opt for a cloud-based infrastructure with feature-based augmentations. Finally, have your efficient customer service team back it all up with extensive passive-load testing and optimizations.

Mobile responsiveness refers to a website’s ability to be functional and aesthetically pleasing on different mobile devices. It’s extremely important that your platform can handle mobile device compatibility and function perfectly well regardless of the device. After all, as of April 2021, nearly 57% of all web traffic originates from mobile devices.

There are different ways and steps to ensure your ecommerce website is device compatible. For instance:

• Implement responsive design (and keep testing to ensure compatibility across multiple browser-device-OS combinations)
• Simplify design and navigation
• Optimize speed load
• Keep the search option front and center
• Ensure cross-browser and cross-device compatibility (and keep testing on multiple browser-device-OS combinations).

In this section, we’ll take a deeper look at B2B-specific ecommerce platform functionality, as it can significantly differ from B2C.

Business customers have different degrees of accountability; therefore, it’s important to ensure users have access to the information and actions that directly correspond to their job functions. A B2B ecommerce platform typically has an administrative account that can grant access to users depending on the job function, and restrict information access to unauthorized users. This way, a purchasing manager gets to work with orders and RFQs and an account manager with invoices and taxes.

B2B catalog management, personalized for customers and account-restricted for sellers, is among the most critical features of a robust B2B ecommerce solution. With personalized catalog management, you can show different catalogs and prices to different companies and tailor your recommendations and promotional campaigns on an account basis.

B2B order management significantly differs from order management in B2C. For one thing, B2C customers rarely order in bulk quantities or on behalf of other people. A B2B ecommerce platform, therefore, should address B2B-specific scenarios and provide the appropriate tools for sales/purchasing managers to assemble their orders quickly and efficiently.

A robust B2B ecommerce platform needs to have the following order management capabilities:

• B2B inventory management 
• EDI/punchout and dropship
• Warranty support and RMAs 
• Quick reorder functionality
• Bulk functions
• Payment method control (including credit/debit cards, ACH, etc.) and purchase order management  
• Quotes & Request for Quotations (RFQ)

Pricing in B2B ecommerce is very complex because prices can depend on multiple factors, such as purchasing volume, quantities, discounts, purchasing frequency, and so on. B2B pricing can have a number of price points, tiers, and currencies, which only adds to its complexity. Your ecommerce platform needs to be able to account for such particulars and replicate contractually agreed-upon prices electronically.

B2B ecommerce pricing management should be able to accomplish the following:

• Enable customer-specific pricing for B2B and B2C
• Integrate multiple price lists with ERP and price engines
• Include B2B account-based pricing
• Feature contract-based catalogs

One crucial feature you should look for in a B2B ecommerce platform is the ability to create custom workflows for both seller and buyer-related processes. Everything from onboarding new sellers or buyers to receiving requests for a quotation should be customizable and easy to modify.

In order to provide a high-level user experience, a B2B ecommerce platform needs to satisfy user demand and expectations by showing personalized, relevant content. In B2B, personalization doesn’t end with showing contractually agreed-upon prices and catalogs for individual accounts. It also incorporates dynamic content and customized recommendations like bundling products or substituting parts.

Since many businesses operate multinational brands across different geographies (think currencies and tax regulations), it’s important that the B2B ecommerce platform is capable of supporting localization and has appropriate tooling to control multiple business units with varying business logic, e.g., different tax regulations, currency conversion, and so on.

While a typical ecommerce business is spoiled by choices in payment methods, few B2B companies are taking advantage of the multitude of opportunities ecommerce offers. Thankfully, there are a number of technology solutions that address the payment processing complexities in B2B and make the adoption of different payment methods quite simple. Your B2B ecommerce platform should connect to different payment processing companies and payment gateways to ensure you can take full advantage of different payment methods and offer your customers more choices when it comes to payment. Aside from purchase orders and credit/debit cards, some other payment options include: ACH, COD, BNPL, net 30/45/60, mobile wallets, and trade finance options.

Even before the pandemic, online sales were steadily increasing, but as we’ve clearly seen, the pandemic has certainly given ecommerce, and B2B ecommerce in particular, a much-needed boost, propelling B2B sales and transforming the B2B industry forever. Based on the latest estimations, B2B ecommerce sales are expected to reach nearly $1.77 trillion in 2022, a 12% increase from the previous year. As buyer expectations continue to evolve, we expect B2B companies to concentrate on crafting more personalized, B2C-like, mobile-friendly shopping experiences and take advantage of a pool of opportunities that online marketplaces offer. More sophisticated and technologically-oriented companies will experiment with cutting-edge technology, such as augmented and virtual reality, 3D mapping, and product builders, while others will concentrate on improving existing functionality and tinkering with social commerce. In short, it looks like the future of B2B is bright, so companies should look for and try not to miss these opportunities.

• Hosted, on-premises, or cloud: An on-premises solution is installed at the vendor’s data center, whereas a cloud-based platform is hosted and maintained by the cloud provider.
• Open-source or proprietary: While an open-source platform gives you access to code, it requires additional developer resources to build and maintain. A branded platform’s code is inaccessible, but such platforms have other advantages like quick time to market or 24/7 customer service.
• Essential B2B ecommerce features: Look for a platform that has all the essential B2B ecommerce features that are of particular importance to your business. Ensure the B2B functionality is flexible and can be modified to incorporate your unique business scenarios.
• Certifications and compliance regulations: Some platforms provide PCI compliance and other important security protocols out of the box, while others do not. Make sure you understand your protection level when it comes to information security.
• Costs: One of the most important aspects of every purchase is cost. Ensure your platform of choice fits within your budget.

According to recent estimates, the global B2B ecommerce market is estimated to bank a CAGR of 14.1%, reaching $18,771.4 billion dollars during the forecasted period for 2021-2027. While the B2B market is booming, the market of B2B solution providers appears stable and consolidated. A few solid market players continue to occupy strong positions without giving way to new entrants. The reason might be the amount of expertise that’s required in B2B, which can only be achieved with time and experience. The situation might change, however, as more web development companies mature and acquire the necessary experience.

In this section, we’ll look at the top market players in B2B ecommerce.

The following B2B ecommerce vendors all have top-notch platforms that offer essential B2B-specific ecommerce features.

Spryker is a B2B cloud-based PaaS ecommerce solution that’s specifically tailored to accelerate transactional B2B use cases. The platform provides all the necessary features out of the box, including corporate account management, approvals, personalized pricing and catalog management, CPQ, and dynamic order processing, among others.

Mirakl is a B2B ecommerce marketplace platform tailored to accommodate complex business scenarios and environments. Mirakl’s solution is cloud-based and API-powered, so scalable and extensible by default. Perhaps the most expensive solution on the list, Mirakl is a powerful platform specifically built for larger enterprises (manufacturers, wholesalers, and so on). Apart from essential B2B ecommerce features, with Mirakl, you’re getting multi-vendor order management and other marketplace-specific features, which can be further tailored to meet your particular business needs.

In this article, we’ve looked at the essential B2B ecommerce features you should look for when considering an ecommerce platform, have examined the 7 best platform vendors on the market in 2022, and taken a closer look at a few successful B2B companies that continue to inspire. As the ecommerce market is booming, the future for the B2B ecommerce industry looks incredibly bright and we are thrilled for the new opportunities and exciting news that 2022 will bring.