This week on the Friday 15 podcast, Andy & Brian discuss the reasons why it’s challenging for B2B eCommerce businesses to build a great user experience.  A few reasons they dig into:

– Because buyers need to make these purchases for work, the interface may matter less than in B2C.

– B2B businesses aren’t willing to make the investments necessary to create a great experience.

– The size of many B2B catalogs are orders of magnitude larger than the catalogs of B2C, which makes it much more difficult to build a great user experience.

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Brian Beck: Welcome to Friday 15 with Master B2B. My name is Brian Beck and I’m here with Andy Hoar, my partner in this crazy wild community of B2B e-commerce. They’re all crazy and wild, right Andy?

Andy Hoar: I don’t really think it’s crazy and wild when I think of B2B but we’ll go with it for now.

Brian: All right everyone, we got lots of cover today. But let’s start with some of our breaking news. Andy, you are in Chicago, well you’re always in Chicago but you were in Chicago downtown on Wednesday this week for a Master B2B executive roundtable with an incredible group. Who was there?

Andy: Yeah, near the top of the Willis Tower there. So we put our drone out and our drone took that amazing stock photo there. You know, it was an absolutely fantastic event. I mean we’re really getting a lot of traction with these and we had the elite of Chicago there. We had the Zoros, the Grangers, CDW was there. Univar, several multi-billion dollar companies and then
several kind of mid-size companies too. And I love putting those two groups together because they can learn from each other. And in terms of learning from each other we tried something a little bit different this time where we allowed sort of the folks to talk more interactively about their priorities for 2025. It’s not if we required it but we encouraged it, and my God was that amazing. I mean for 20, 30 minutes they were all sharing ideas, comparing notes, talking about their respective strategies for digital and I walked away as many people there did saying, wow, this is priceless. Getting these people in the same room – it was a great event and I’m looking forward to New York next week where hopefully the same magic will take place.

Brian: Yeah, we got a great group signed up for that round table as well. We’re doing a lot of these through the fall and it really helps us get our finger on the pulse of what the industry is talking about. These are VPs of e-commerce, chief digital officers, CMOs, directors of eCom, sitting down in a room talking about what’s important to them. So, yeah, we’re excited about New York and then we’ve got Atlanta and Dallas after that. It’s going to be a good series here. And you don’t know if you saw this breaking news – MDM’s forecast for the rest of 2024. Now they’re forecasting their business is going to be up later in the year followed by a much better 2025. I think it’s maybe some of the economy, some of the clarity there. Maybe that’s helping. And it’ll help once we get past the election, things like that. But we’ve seen stories in MDM about particularly large distributors. MDM covers a lot of the distribution market in industrial channels and others. And they’ve had some stories recently about companies that haven’t been kind of doing as well, even in e-commerce, with sales down and such. But this is encouraging – Andy, any reactions?

Andy: My take on this is – who knows? I’d love to be able to say, you know, we’re not economists, but we read a lot about what the economists are saying – and in one week, we’re in a recession. We just don’t know the next week. The recession’s coming. It’s going to be steep. The next week it’s, oh, we’re going to have a soft landing. I don’t think anybody really knows. But what’s interesting about this is people still have to make plans. And so MDM is talking to the distributors saying, where are you putting your money? So I tend to go with what these guys are saying a bit more than what even the economists are saying because these guys have to make bets. There’s the old joke with economists – you know, the one hand on the other hand, the economist can be on all sides of the same issue. And we’re entering budget season now where a lot of companies are planning their 2025 budgets. They do that typically in the fall. And so it’s going to be interesting.

Brian: So our topic we need to get to today is – Is great UI/UX (that’s user interface, user experience), design necessary in B2B e-commerce? Is it necessary or is good, good enough when you’re just rolling out a B2B e-commerce or other digital experience? And Andy, this is a great topic and one that’s close to my heart. You know, for many years I was as a VP of eCommerce. The UI on the consumer side, which is where I was living, was critical. And data proves out how important this is – the experience you give to your customer in the digital commerce, journey. We went to the authority on all things now, ChatGPT. We asked ChatGPT for a definition of great UI/UX design. And here is what ChatGPT said. Great UI/UX design in eCommerce is about creating a seamless, intuitive and engaging experience that effectively guides users through the shopping process, enhancing satisfaction while driving conversion. It balances aesthetics with functionality, ensuring design not only looks appealing, but it’s also easy to navigate and use. That’s the definition. Now, in my book, Andy, I talked a lot about eliminating friction in B2B, being a key measure of success for e-commerce by manufacturers distributors. So I think ChatGPT’s definition in some ways reflects that. But we’ve got this situation where companies that do this well on the consumer side and reap the benefits. Forrester said websites with well-designed user interfaces can increase conversion rates by as much as 200%. And I’ve experienced this. I’ve lived this on the consumer side. We improve our UX. We get higher conversion rates. But B2B, oh my gosh, 60% of B2B websites were found by a study this year to deliver a generally negative experience. Okay. So we’re not delivering a positive experience. It certainly means our UI/UX is not functioning very well. In fact, Amazon Web Services also found that e-commerce companies that are compromising on user experience and not meeting standards (meaning best practices) are missing out on 35% of their potential web sales. Okay. So we got companies B2B not meeting the standards. Clearly there’s a conversion rate benefit. The question is, is good, good enough? So Andy, I asked ChatGPT, to give me the best example. What’s the best example of user experience design in consumer? Well, that’s what showed up: The Apple store. They’re well known, apparently, as being one of the best. And I know this first-hand because we used to look at competitors, including companies like Apple for inspiration on user experience design. Apple is known as the best, right? So it’s a clean design. There’s a whole series of things they do well, get to your product quickly. They have product navigation configurations and really guiding the customer to what they need. You’re not an Apple customer, though, Andy, are you?

Andy: I’m an Android guy, but what’s interesting about this is I, you did a search with ChatGPT for the best site. And ChatGPT is actually owned by Microsoft, which is a rival of Apple in a way. And so I was wondering if ChatGPT is going to get fired by Microsoft. That was one comment. The other comment is, you seem to be talking to ChatGPT quite a bit. Are you asking chat GPT for a relationship? Fashion advice, health advice, I mean, I’m starting to get a little concerned that, you know, every time there’s a question, you go to ChatGPT. That said, you may just be ahead of the rest of us because it’s probably where it’s all going. So, back to this. Apple, inarguably, is a great website, but here’s the problem. Higher conversion rates for great UI/UX, so on and so forth. But do B2B companies have the resources, the time, and the budget to invest in it? And frankly, do they have the appetite for it? Because great UX design is like great athletics or great music. If you want to be great. To go from 99 to 99.99 is a order of magnitude leap. And so this is really the question, are you willing and able to invest that? And I don’t find many B2B companies are willing to do that. Because it’s a lot of time and data intensive. It’s resource intensive. So, yes, great is better than good, but it is a question about whether great is substantially better than good to make good just not good enough.

Brian: Well, it’s really about the effectiveness of the channel, period. Is it worth it? Do you want you need to invest the level of an Apple, or even companies not as big as Apple with the deep pockets, but do you need to emulate that kind of a user experience in B2B commerce? And, is it paying dividends?

Andy: And it’s worth noting too that B2B buyers are different from B2C buyers. We’re looking at the Apple site here. And I’m thinking, wow, it’s visual eye candy. It’s elegant. It’s beautiful. Most B2B buyers don’t care about that really. Now, that’s not an excuse for bad experience, but a lot of B2B buyers are very efficient. They’re hunter-like. They go enter the part number. They get out. Again, not an excuse for having a green screen with a blinking cursor that says, “Enter order here.” But seeing all this stuff, these great images, 360 reviews, videos, actually can be an impediment to an efficient buying experience. So, you’ve got those two things. B2B companies really have the time, money, and energy to invest in it. And two, B2C buyers on the other side, appreciate it. Those are the open questions.

Brian: So we asked our LinkedIn audience about this. And we got some interesting feedback. So Eric Nebbia, who’s the Senior Director of Digital at Fortune Brands, and also been in e-commerce for a long time, he said, “B2B buyers at work are similar to B2C shoppers at home and expect a similar experience.” However, there could be switching costs for B2B buyers to choose another website. So let’s think about that. He also said, “Also B2B buyers likely have direction on what to buy in a budget. So, better UX may not increase sales.” It’s his opinion that it’s kind of a pointless investment, getting to the level of great. Any reactions to that?

Andy: Well, I think you make a great point- well that Eric makes a great point about the switching costs. It’s not as easy as one click. It’s not like you go to Amazon and say, “Oh, that doesn’t work for me. I’ll go buy from Walmart.com or Target.com.” B2B has contract pricing. You have certain vendors where only these vendors can provide what you need. So there’s vendor lock-in in many cases. Now, again, these are non-excuses for companies producing subpar sites. But the dynamics are different. I think Eric pointed that out here.

Brian: I think, though, it’s interesting, even in that scenario, I’ve seen this big distributor, I’ll leave them nameless because I don’t want to embarrass anybody. But one of the largest distributors in the world had a very difficult user experience on their e-commerce site. It had to do with search and timing a result search. It would take minutes. There are millions of products and it would take minutes to get back product results. Minutes, that’s not good. That’s not great. It’s not good. It’s not even acceptable to get product results back that slowly. But customers would continue to order from that website because they had to. It was one of their number one complaints business-wide. I remember I worked with this company four or five years ago. This UX stuff, you have to get to at least a level of good. But that’s Eric’s point about switching costs. In some cases, people put up with miserable instances in B2B, right? This is the state of the art today – B2B ordering portals for a lot of companies, particularly manufacturers where they’re just like, “Hey, log in. Here’s your enter your order number, your part ID, and then we’ll order it for you.” There’s absolutely no baseline user experience from B2C here. Those of you who can see this visually, I’ve just got an example of a customer portal here. Again, the state of the art, but it doesn’t have to be this way. I think, Andy, your point about switching costs and things of that in nature,it’s really about acquisition, I think. I think you can use good or maybe even great UX to capture a customer as they’re looking for a new supplier. If you make it easy for them, then you lock them in with your pricing and your negotiated prices and making it easy for them to re-order – those kinds of things. I think UX can probably play a role in acquisition, retention, maybe once you got them, you got them. What’s interesting about this is that we’re talking about that B2B at its core is just more complex. We think about things like complex products and huge catalogs and finding products amongst all these technical specifications. You relate that to a consumer site, like a clothing site, what are your product variants? Their size and color. Think about high complexity in electrical products. You’ve got compatibility issues, you’ve got sizing, you’ve got, “Does this work with that? What are the technical specifications? What are the power specs?” All kinds of different things that you need to think about in terms of product findability. And then you make, if you’re making those products specs difficult to find on your site, these are some of the things that make it more difficult in a B2B environment to deliver great UX.

Andy: Just massive complexity variants here. Like you said, a shirt, small, medium, large, extra large, but a fastener could have thousands of viable combinations here. So, CPQ really matters. CPQ is inherently complicated. Imagine for B2C people, think about buying a laptop and all the different variations. And there aren’t that many really in the end, but you can get like a different color screen or a different color shell. You can get a size of a screen. You can have this coating and that coating. Imagine that for every item and having tens of thousands of those items. In that case, the elegance of the site doesn’t really matter. It’s really about the efficiency. So, I think the thing that’s underdone about B2B is that speed to answer is really critical. It’s maybe a metric. I just made up. I don’t know if anybody actually measures that, but it should be, and that’s why I shuddered to think what you said about a site that took minutes because when you were saying that I was calculating in my head. The general rule of the problem is that for every one second delay in search result, the conversion rate goes down by 7%. So, it doesn’t even contemplate minutes. I mean, five seconds is a 35% decline in conversion rate. I don’t even know what two minutes would be.

Brian: My opinion on this, Andy, and we’ll see what our audience has to say in our poll, is frankly that UI, it’s different. It is actually harder, and it’s more important. If we think about not so much the design elements, but the elegance by which you get people to the product quickly, it’s your speed to answer. Get them to the right product quickly. It doesn’t have to be beautiful in B2B. It has to be fast and efficient. And therein lies the challenge in UX and UI in B2B. I think it’s actually more important than B2C. You know, I think it has to be great, but I think it has to be great in a different way. That’s my personal opinion.

Andy: I like your point, and I would add to it. It doesn’t have to be beautiful, but it can’t be ugly. And so that leads to a lot of gray area. And it depends on who your customers are, but I just don’t want people to walk away from this saying, oh, Andy and Brian said, we don’t have to do a great job with our UI/UX. No. You have to do a different job that’s more focused on getting answers quickly and efficiently, which by the way, ain’t easy either.

Brian: No, that’s exactly right. UX also crosses a lot of touchpoints in B2B. So it’s not only the eCommerce experience. It’s every other aspect of it. You think about post-purchase experience, where’s my order status, getting support in your product, it’s mobile, it’s field support. It really crosses a lot. And you know who does this well, Andy? Granger was one of the companies that came up when we asked ChatGPT. And they have long invested in this channel – decades, several decades at least – in delivering a speed-to-answer solution. And you can see it on their website. You don’t need a login to see what they’re doing. They’re mimicking a lot of B2C best practices, but they’ve also layered in quite a bit in terms of the B2B requirements for a buyer to find what they need quickly. So if you laid it up against, I don’t know, one of the big consumer brands, is it as beautiful? Does it need to be? Absolutely not? Is it elegant in different ways? Yes, it gets the customer to their product quickly. That’s the thing that matters. That’s why Amazon Business is winning business and new entrants are winning too. Anyhow, any thoughts on Grainger?

Andy: I agree with that 100%. It’s not the prettiest thing I’ll ever see, but it’s pretty damn effective. And I think it shows in the numbers. There’s work that can be done for sure, but I think they’ve got a handle on who their customers are. And that’s the key to this. The UI/UX has to be based on your customers, and you can’t just create a UI/UX in the abstract It’s going to depend on how customers use your site and what they’re looking for. That’s the definition of great. What is great for your customers?

Brian: That’s right. That’s absolutely right. And there’s best practices that we can adapt or adopt, excuse me, from B2C in B2B. Things like card sorting exercises, customer focus groups and studies, A/B testing. There are a lot of best practices here that can be adapted. We can go through some of those in one of our other Friday 15s.

Andy: Well, it’s just something quickly that you might find interesting is I’m taking a deep dive into search here and there’s a new area…well, not a new area, but there’s an emerging area within B2B in search called guided selling. Which is where people enter something in the search box and it’s pretty clear they don’t exactly what they’re looking for. In the past, it would just leave the binkling cursor and you have to figure it out yourself. Now, they’re parsing that and saying, hey, did you mean this? Now, are you thinking about that? So the search becomes almost like an intelligent guided browse in a way. But in B2B, that really matters. Not so much in B2C … but in B2B, it might be like, oh, are you looking for this fastener in this particular use case for this kind of temperature rating? You know, things you haven’t thought of that address to some of that complexity.

Brian: Well, we asked our LinkedIn audience- Is great UI UX design necessary in B2B commerce or is good, good enough to be successful? Our LinkedIn audience responded and 73% said great is necessary. Only 27% said good is good enough. I thought this would go the other way. No?

Andy: I’m not surprised by it because it’s aspirational. If we put a price tag and a timeline around it and said hey, it may cost you five times as much and take you three times as long. Do you still think it’s necessary? I think the numbers might be different.