In 2022, McKinsey found nearly two-thirds of B2B buyers opted for remote human interactions and digital self-service for ordering and reordering. It’s likely a percentage that is growing each year. Every year, more B2B businesses shift their operations online to better meet these expectations.
Meeting these buyer expectations pays off: the same McKinsey report found that the B2B companies that provide the best omnichannel experience are improving their market share by at least 10% annually. The global B2B ecommerce market is expected to increase from $7.4 billion by 2022 to more than $36 billion by 2031. That gives B2B businesses billions of reasons to invest in delivering the best possible online experience for their buyers.
However, scaling and improving B2B ecommerce operations, especially those powered by custom or legacy solutions, can require significant overhead costs, lengthy development times, and the need for specialized IT resources. A key way for B2B businesses to modernize their buying experience without costly overhead is by partnering with the right SaaS B2B ecommerce platform. In this article, we’ll look at the challenges of legacy and custom platforms, the benefits of migrating to a SaaS ecommerce platform, and how to identify the right platform provider based on your business goals.
Traditional B2B ecommerce solutions and their challenges
Before the rise of SaaS, B2B businesses turned to one of three options for their commerce operations, from purchasing to order fulfillment and delivery. While each came with its own benefits, there were also serious drawbacks, especially as businesses scaled.
Manual, offline processes
A decade or so ago, nearly every business had at least an informational website, but many B2B businesses still relied primarily on manual processes to take and fulfill large orders. These processes often involved buyers calling, emailing, or faxing a business to place an order. Then sales representatives rekeyed orders into an enterprise resource planning system (ERP) like Oracle or SAP.
Today, many B2B businesses still process a majority or all of their orders through manual processes. In fact, according to McKinsey, up to one-third of B2B transactions are conducted manually. Without a centralized solution for their operations, businesses can end up with an ad hoc mix of systems, platforms and channels to manage and keep in sync.
This can quickly lead to a hodge-podge tech stack that sales reps must navigate to manually take orders. All of this manual data entry can lead to ordering errors, delayed processing, inaccurate invoicing, and bloated operational costs. Sales reps end up spending the bulk of their time on existing customers inputting orders and resolving issues—instead of reaching out to potential new customers and growing the business.
Legacy software systems
On the other hand you have legacy commerce platforms, which were likely adopted decades ago and haven't been revisited since. As these platforms rely on outdated technology, customers often find their interfaces clunky and difficult to navigate. This can have the unintended consequence of customers preferring manual ordering methods, even if they would actually prefer to self-service with the right buying experience.
Many solutions that were “top of the line” 15 years ago are now unintuitive to manage, challenging to update, and require costly developers with specialized knowledge to keep updated. Some of the oldest systems aren’t even cloud-based, raising the risk of outages due to equipment failures or human error.
Having to rely on that “one guy from IT” who knows the system for everything from troubleshooting to adding new features has a major impact on innovation and agility. And the consequences can be dire if those one or two people were to leave the organization. From slow development times to complicated workarounds, legacy systems make it very difficult—and costly—to respond to changing buyer expectations and business needs.
Custom-built platforms
Many businesses that have unique brand visions or complex operational requirements invested heavily in building their own ecommerce solutions from the ground up. Developers and engineers got full control of every part of the tech stack to build exactly what they wanted, however they wanted to. For larger B2B businesses, they also likely involved complex custom integrations with existing enterprise systems like ERP and CRM.
But it doesn’t take long for these solutions to become very costly and inefficient. Worse, they have a tendency to build up costly technical debt that can slow growth and divert resources from innovation. Even small changes, like updating a price list or adding new product lines, might take days or even weeks—as these systems require businesses to employ highly specialized staff or teams of developers.
To maintain these custom platforms, B2B businesses must invest significantly in security updates, maintenance, and technical support on an ongoing basis. In the highly competitive world of B2B, those resources would be far better spent on modernizing the buyer experience to retain existing customers and attract new ones.
The benefits of SaaS B2B ecommerce platforms
No matter what size your business is, the benefits of moving to a SaaS B2B ecommerce platform can be significant. Platforms like Shopify have become very robust in the past few years, allowing B2B businesses to offload significant amounts of technical work and refocus their resources on growing their customer base. Here are some of the key benefits of migrating to a SaaS B2B ecommerce platform:
Enhanced customer experience
In 2022, Gartner found that 83% of B2B buyers would prefer to self-service their own orders. B2B SaaS ecommerce platforms fulfill this need by allowing customers to self-serve their orders and accounts online, often from a modern, intuitive user interface. With access to order history, account information, bulk-buying workflows, and more, customers can self-serve more of the order process online, saving time on order-related tasks and reducing the need to contact customer service and sales teams for support.
The Somewhere Co., an Australian retailer of colorful home essentials, migrated from a less efficient platform to Shopify for their B2B operations. By doing so, they were able to reduce the average time it took to place a bulk order by 33%. Simplified back-end management allowed them to update and edit B2B product listings 91% faster. This made the entire B2B buying experience more accurate and efficient for their wholesale customers, driving a 13% year-over-year (YoY) increase in average B2B order value.
Lower total cost of ownership (TCO)
One of the biggest benefits of SaaS B2B ecommerce platforms is a significant reduction in costs, especially those related to development and engineering. SaaS eliminates the need for expensive hardware and software, effectively moving those costs to the platform providers. Providers like Shopify also employ their own engineers and IT teams to ensure a high uptime and fast performance, all in exchange for a predictable subscription pricing model. B2B businesses can also take advantage of the platform provider's newest releases to continuously improve their commerce experience, at little to no extra cost.
Faster time to market
A huge problem with custom builds and legacy software is the glacial pace of launching new features and capabilities. Carrier, a global provider of HVAC technology, built their B2B business on a custom platform prior to moving to Shopify. Previously, it took them 9 to 12 months to launch new ecommerce experiences for different markets and customer segments. After replatforming, they can now launch new features and capabilities in just 30 days with much less hassle and direct costs.
That type of agility is essential to stay competitive in today’s market. B2B SaaS ecommerce platforms come with numerous prebuilt functionalities and customizable templates, accelerating the development process. Businesses can use these to enter new markets faster, respond to evolving buyer expectations, capture new business, and generate revenue more rapidly.
Scalability and flexibility
The faster a B2B business scales, the more challenges a legacy or custom solution creates. Many custom builds become a patchwork of integrations, different codebases, and extensive customizations that become harder for IT teams to maintain, update, and scale.
Eventually, timelines get longer and costs get higher for developers to simply keep the platform maintained and upgraded—let alone incorporating new features or capabilities. Large surges in order volume could easily lead to crashes and outages, with catastrophic consequences for bottom lines.
B2B SaaS ecommerce platforms like Shopify solve the scalability problem with large global footprints of optimized, maintained infrastructure that is ready to scale as businesses grow. Businesses can take advantage of flexible integration options and customizable features to adapt to specific needs, without adding complexity to their ecommerce tech stack.
Improved efficiency and automation
Legacy or custom ecommerce solutions are notoriously inefficient. They often have outdated UI and complex (or multiple) back ends, making automation close to impossible. In contrast, today’s SaaS B2B ecommerce platforms allow you to centralize all of your operations and functions into a single back end. Once unified, you can streamline operations, automate workflows, and reduce manual tasks. It also allows you to fulfill orders faster and more accurately, providing a superior customer experience.
Laboratory supply company Filtrous struggled to provide a seamless customer experience on an ecommerce platform that wasn’t a good fit. The provider was slow to innovate, and the technology was fragile—the simplest changes caused their site to break. The ordering process was so clunky that customers just contacted customer service directly out of frustration.
By transitioning to Shopify, Filtrous was able to launch their wholesale storefront in just 63 days by taking advantage of numerous features and capabilities built just for B2B businesses. Shopify's B2B automation features also helped Filtrous save 10 hours per week for their customer service team and 2 hours per week for their sales team.
Key features to look for in a SaaS B2B ecommerce platform
When a B2B business decides to switch to a SaaS ecommerce platform, choosing the right one is crucial.Otherwise, you could end up replatforming again in a year or so, wasting valuable time and resources you could be using to innovate and grow.
Ideally, the right solution for your B2B business will align with your business goals and your budget. You also want to be sure that the platform provider fully supports B2B operations, not just DTC. Here is a quick rundown of the key features to look for:
- Robust B2B functionality: B2B buying requires a different set of features than DTC purchasing. Ask your provider if their platform is optimized for bulk orders, with features like quick order workflows, customer-specific pricing, tiered discounts, volume pricing, requests for quotes, and reorders.
- Personalized buyer experience: To keep up with evolving buyer expectations, the platform should allow you to quickly build and deploy a personalized buyer experience, including product recommendations, targeted promotions, and customized store content.
- Unified commerce: If your business needs to support both B2B and DTC operations, modern platforms allow you to consolidate operations into a single back end, ensuring consistency in branding, customer data, and order management. You should be capable of managing all of the different customer segments, sales channels, and regions you serve on a single platform.
- Seamless integrations: Simplifying your tech stack can take a lot of work off of development teams and reduce the risk of security issues and outages. Platforms like Shopify natively integrate with key business systems like ERP, CRM, PIM, and marketing automation platforms to ensure accurate, real-time data exchange to streamline processes.
- Self-service capabilities: Enabling self-service ordering gives today’s buyers what they want and saves businesses a lot of time and cost. The platform should support customer portals that allow buyers to manage their accounts, place orders, track shipments, view order history, and access invoices independently.
- Device optimization: Millennials make up more of the B2B buyers in the market today and are much more comfortable placing orders on a range of devices, including their phones and iPads. The platform should provide fully responsive theme designs and mobile-friendly interfaces for a consistent, optimized buying experience across devices.
- Security and compliance: To reduce your overall risk, the platform should have strong security measures in place, and be compliant with industry standards such as PCI DSS to protect sensitive data and transactions.
- Analytics and reporting: Being able to leverage centralized data to make strategic decisions can give your business a competitive edge. The platform should provide comprehensive dashboards and reporting tools to track key metrics, gain insights into customer behavior, and inform data-driven decisions.
- Vision and innovation: Not all SaaS ecommerce platforms in the market today are focused on the needs of B2B businesses. It’s important to ask the provider about their product roadmap and commitment to innovation, to ensure they will be the right partner in 5 to 10 years, not just today.
Choosing the right SaaS B2B ecommerce platform
Once you have determined the key features you need in a SaaS B2B ecommerce platform, it’s time to evaluate the providers themselves. There are several key players in the market, and our guide to the top 11 B2B SaaS ecommerce platforms compares the pros and cons of each. Here’s a quick rundown of how to approach vendor evaluation to make the best choice for your business.
Step 1: Assess your business needs and complexity
The first step is to assess the size and scale of your ecommerce operations, including your transaction volume, number of customers, and product catalogs. Make sure the provider is equipped to handle your current operation size, as well as your projected growth, to avoid any issues related to scalability.
Take the time to evaluate and review the complexity of your operations, including order fulfillment processes, inventory management, and customer relationship management. The platform should be able to handle your unique workflows without overcomplicating them. If you have any unique industry requirements, make sure the provider is ready to support them. Ask if and how they support other customers in your industry.
Step 2: Define your budget and pricing models
When evaluating the cost of a new platform provider, it helps to first fully evaluate the TCO of your current solution. Factor in the direct costs of hardware, software, developers, and engineers, as well as the opportunity cost of time spent in maintenance, bug fixing, and developing new features.
Then, ask the new provider about their pricing model, and take the time to uncover every potential applicable cost, such as fees for integrations, third-party providers, data storage, and more. By comparing the full TCO of one solution to another, you’ll get a more accurate and comprehensive view of both the upfront and ongoing costs.
Step 3: Evaluate integration capabilities
The larger your B2B business is, the more likely you have robust systems already in place supporting critical functions. Assess each platform's ability to integrate with each of your existing systems, such as ERP, CRM, and accounting software. Ask if the provider offers robust API capabilities and prebuilt connectors to simplify and streamline the exchange of data between your systems. If you need to migrate data from an existing solution, ask your provider about any tools available to support a smooth transition.
Step 4: Consider the provider’s customer support and third-party ecosystem
To get the most value from replatforming, partner with a provider that has an extensive ecosystem. This allows you to take advantage of best-in-breed third-party resources with lower cost and less technical hassle.
You also want to be sure the provider will offer the level of support and expertise your business requires. First determine the level of support you need, whether it is self-service documentation or dedicated account managers. Review the provider’s SLAs to get an idea of their response time to inquiries and incident resolution.
Step 5: Identify potential future needs and requirements
No business is ever the same one year to the next. Marketplaces and customer bases evolve and change quickly, and sometimes scaling can happen at a rapid pace. Map out what your business requirements are today, and also what they might be in the future.
Then, make sure the provider you choose can scale with your business to accommodate future growth and evolving business needs. Ideally, you want a provider with a strong track record of innovation and continuous improvement.
As you go through the process of vendor evaluation, make sure you include all the key stakeholders in your business early on to get a complete set of requirements. Having their buy-in early on will make for a smoother, faster implementation after a decision is made.
Conclusion
Over the last decade, ecommerce technology has come a long way. As buyer expectations evolve and markets remain competitive, B2B businesses have a lot to gain from everything a modern SaaS B2B ecommerce platform has to offer.
With a platform like Shopify, even the largest, most complex B2B business can modernize their operations with data centralization, workflow automation, and simplified storefront creation and feature development. With Shopify, you can deliver a more streamlined buying experience and enable robust self-service for more of your customers—and give today’s B2B buyers exactly what they want.
Don't let outdated B2B systems become a barrier to your future success. Find out how partnering with Shopify can help you streamline, automate, and transform your B2B business operations while reducing your security risks and saving on costs.
To get a first-hand look at the Shopify B2B experience, sign up for access to our demo store.
FAQ on SaaS B2B Ecommerce
What is SaaS B2B?
SaaS B2B is actually two acronyms: software as a service (SaaS) and business-to-business (B2B). In ecommerce, B2B SaaS platforms are cloud-based services that enable businesses to create storefronts and manage their online sales and operations. SaaS B2B ecommerce platforms provide features like product catalogs, order management, payment processing, and checkout, and integrate with B2B systems such as ERPs and CRMs. Being cloud-based, these platforms are often offered on a subscription basis, reducing costs and increasing agility.
What is SaaS in ecommerce?
SaaS stands for software as a service, and in ecommerce, it refers to a cloud-based platform accessible over the internet. These platforms offer tools and services to help businesses manage their online stores, including product listings, search functionality, inventory management, payment processing, and optimized checkout. SaaS ecommerce platforms, like Shopify, provide an alternative to on-premise software and hardware, offering a comprehensive suite of tools to build, customize, and manage online stores without requiring extensive technical expertise.
What is a B2B ecommerce platform?
A B2B ecommerce platform is a software solution that enables businesses to sell their products and services to other businesses online, often via wholesale and in bulk. B2B ecommerce platforms like Shopify offer features that go beyond typical DTC ecommerce platforms, such as customer-specific pricing, tiered discounts, volume pricing, quote management, order workflows, and account management. These platforms streamline the buying and selling process, making it more efficient for both buyers and sellers.
Is Amazon a B2B SaaS company?
No, Amazon is not a B2B SaaS company, although it offers some B2B services through Amazon Business. Amazon started as a direct-to-consumer bookseller and evolved to focus on ecommerce and cloud computing services through Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon Business facilitates B2B transactions but does not provide subscription-based software solutions. AWS, however, offers infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS), and supports SaaS offerings, but Amazon itself is not a direct SaaS provider.
