B2B Ecommerce Best Practices for a Successful Online Store

It’s an exciting time to be in B2B ecommerce. Today, more than half of all B2B transactions over $1 million are processed through digital self-serve channels. The move online is making B2B more accessible for all brands, but comes with its own challenges. 

Compared to other ecommerce models like DTC (direct to consumer), the advantages of B2B ecommerce are particularly future-forward: lower costs, higher order value, and increased ability to scale. But success in this space takes substantial commitment and informed planning—simply reusing the playbook of DTC or in-person B2B would be a costly mistake. 

B2B sales cycles are often long and complex, but they can be extremely rewarding. Because they involve frequent interaction, they present many opportunities to get to know your customers, introduce them to different products, and build a fruitful relationship over time. 

Here’s a timely list of best practices to keep you on the pulse of digital B2B commerce.

What are B2B ecommerce best practices?

B2B ecommerce best practices are strategies that create modern and personalized buying experiences for wholesale customers. They help brands meet buyers where they are actively shopping for B2B products. 

Today, 7 in 10 B2B buyers prefer to place orders online rather than via phone or email, and they span an average of 10 digital and in-person touchpoints before clicking “buy.” Following proven best practices, along with the right B2B ecommerce platform to implement them, helps reduce costs and improve efficiency for teams. 

Evolution from traditional B2B to digital-first commerce

A 2024 Forrester-commissioned survey found 73% of buyers expect the same convenient online experience they enjoy in B2C, from real-time stock to one-click reorders.

When you’re conducting five-figure deals on your smartphone, the quality of your company’s online presence is paramount. This means everything from a fast, secure storefront to thought-provoking articles and social media content that make potential customers think of you as an industry leader before they even hop on a call. 

Strive to have your business on buyers’ minds as much as possible—when they’re tapping “buy” on your checkout page, and when they’re researching a pressure point on their next big initiative. 

Why best practices matter in a $19.4 trillion market 

The digital shift in B2B is happening rapidly and is driven by evolving buyer expectations. In 2025, buyers are bringing their consumer shopping habits into their professional roles, and they’re comfortable making big purchases online. 

According to a 2024 McKinsey study, 73% of business buyers are willing to spend $50,000 or more in a single online transaction, and nearly 40% will place self-serve orders exceeding $500,000. These shifts in buyer behavior are pushing the market for B2B ecommerce to new heights. Research and Markets estimated that the market was worth $19.34 trillion in 2024 and is on track to more than double to $47.5 trillion by 2030.

Leading B2B companies are responding by investing in their digital capabilities. The same McKinsey survey found that a third of B2B sellers boosted their ecommerce budgets by 11% in 2024 to capitalize on the efficiency and reach of digital channels. Commerce platforms like Shopify B2B are ushering in this change, helping brands create a more streamlined buying experience and reducing operational costs. 

In a growing marketplace, implementing B2B ecommerce best practices is how businesses become strategic partners. It’s the key to building a resilient and scalable operation that can capture a meaningful share of the market. 

Foundational best practices for B2B ecommerce success 

Start with the building blocks for a successful B2B ecommerce operation. These best practices will help you meet the modern B2B buyer and make your teams more efficient: 

1. Enable self-service with intelligent B2B portals
2. Implement account-based personalization
3. Offer flexible B2B payment options and terms
4. Build mobile-first experiences for on-the-go buyers

1. Enable self-service with intelligent B2B portals

Speed and efficiency are at the heart of B2B ecommerce, and an online storefront equipped with self-serve options provides both. 

Self-serve facilitates bulk orders, customized pricing, and personalized customer portals. It empowers buyers to place those bulk orders regularly—whether daily, weekly, or monthly—saving your sales team valuable time not spent manually initiating purchases, sending invoice reminders, and other resource-draining tasks. 

• Give your site a self-serve portal that exceeds B2B buyer expectations. Shopify provides the tools you need. For example, the laboratory supply company Filtrous enjoyed significant growth after switching from BigCommerce to Shopify and implementing Shopify’s self-serve purchasing system, tripling their order frequency and saving 12 hours of manual work for their teams each week.
• If you don’t have transparent pricing alongside each product, instruct prospects how they can get a custom quote, and make the process clear. For instance, PATCHBOX, a brand that sells cable management systems, gives customers the option to request a quote for specific use cases, bulk orders, or different connector types. 
• Intuitive buying experiences add a positive, personal touch. For example, allowing customers to save their payment, order, and shipping information eliminates the need for customers to reenter their data each time they place an order. 

Shopify B2B lets you attach price lists, payment terms, and quick order grids to each company profile.

2. Implement account-based personalization

B2B buyers expect suppliers to personalize interactions, anticipating where, when, and how they want to engage. Meeting this expectation shortens the sales cycle and provides a clear competitive advantage. 

B2B ecommerce personalization involves tailoring every part of the buying experience, from catalogs and pricing to self-service portals and checkout, to each business account and its individual stakeholders. It relies on unifying first-party data from your storefront with your enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) systems to create a seamless buying experience. 

To offer account-based personalization, use purchase history to provide relevant cross-sells, upsells, and replenishment reminders. Truck-bed storage retailer DECKED, for instance, used a post-add-to-cart customizer to send emails suggesting compatible accessories. As a result, half of their buyers now accept at least one suggested add-on, resulting in a 4% revenue increase without discounts.

3. Offer flexible B2B payment options and terms 

B2B purchasing operates on a different model than B2C. Buyers often negotiate terms and purchase volumes with suppliers, and these terms should be reflected in their accounts. Manually confirming prices or quotes for every order is tiring and inefficient. 

A B2B ecommerce platform lets you assign these terms directly to a company profile. That way, each supplier can see their own payment terms and methods, as well as any custom pricing and volume discounts. 

Australian fragrance label WHO IS ELIJAH implemented custom pricing across their eight expansion stores. Each region had its own catalog and price matrix, which helped push international wholesale revenue to climb 50% year over year.

“One of the reasons we needed custom pricing for our wholesale customers was that many of them fall into different B2B categories; some have hard margins, and some we can control,” says the brand’s technical leader, Brylee Lonesborough. “The custom catalog capabilities in B2B on Shopify meant we could set individual pricing categories and attach them to the various types of B2B customers we have, so they get a more personalized experience.”

4. Build mobile-first experiences for on-the-go buyers

Potential buyers expect a fast and frictionless shopping experience. This presents an opportunity to seize market share from slower, outdated sites—especially when it comes to mobile. Internet traffic is shifting rapidly from personal computers to mobile devices, with 65% of traffic now happening on mobile. 

How can your site reap the benefits? 

• A B2B ecommerce site that runs smoothly can attract more visitors and convert them at higher rates. Data from Shopify research on site speed shows a mere half-second improvement can increase conversion rate. 
• Use a responsive design to ensure your site looks great and functions properly on any device a customer uses.
• Optimize your site for mobile to improve user experience. There are numerous mobile site speed optimization tactics, such as implementing browser caching, lazy loading, and mobile checkout options like Shop Pay.
• Search engines like Google prioritize websites that load quickly. On top of improving user experience, a site’s speed has a significant impact on search engine optimization (SEO) performance.

(SEO) performance.

Advanced optimization strategies

Once the fundamentals are in place, these advanced strategies will help you create a competitive advantage:

1. Leverage AI for predictive ordering and recommendations
2. Create omnichannel experiences across all touchpoints
3. Implement real-time inventory and order tracking
4. Use data analytics for customer insights

1. Leverage AI for predictive ordering and recommendations

Offering recommendations and simple reordering is another requirement in B2B ecommerce. Buyers are more likely to add complementary products to a purchase if the value is clear and the price is right. 

For example, DECKED used Shopify’s Search and Discovery app, plus a post-add-to-cart customizer to suggest compatible rails, tie-downs, and protective cases. Half of buyers accept at least one suggested add-on, boosting revenue for the brand. 

“We can match dealers not just by proximity and location, but also based on those who have our product displays or only carry specific items from our range,” says Taylor Straley, VP of ecommerce at DECKED.

“This capability allows us to tailor our customer experience and product discovery recommendation efforts more effectively. Importantly, it benefits the customer by enabling us to gather and utilize search and contact data, ensuring a direct connection from our website to the appropriate dealer.”

For products your buyers rely on day in and day out, like consumables or components, you can make it effortless for them to reorder. Create a personalized quick reorder list within their account page to save them time searching for the same items again. 

You can even set up automated replenishment reminders. For example, if a customer buys a filter that needs replacing every 90 days, a friendly email reminder around day 80 is a thoughtful touch that leads directly to a repeat sale.

2. Create omnichannel experiences across all touchpoints

Create an intuitive experience across the buyer journey, prioritizing ease of use and making customers feel at home with features that respond to their needs. Apply this online beyond your site, anticipating how your customers behave in the marketplace. 

• Provide intuitive self-serve experiences in customer orders and account management. 
• Build a buyer-focused FAQ that answers the right questions.
• Create content that answers additional questions prospects may have.
• Use social media to engage with potential customers, experimenting with different platforms to see what resonates most with your audience. 
• As you craft your brand’s online persona, it can be inspiring to learn from other companies’ success stories. Read about 16 recent examples of B2B ecommerce websites that used forward-thinking methods to improve their buyer experience. 

3. Implement real-time inventory and order tracking

There are few things worse than calling a major wholesale client to tell them a big order is actually out of stock. It can happen when all your systems aren’t talking to each other. Maybe a TikTok video went viral and customers drained your inventory, leaving your wholesale partners with an unfulfilled order. 

A good way to avoid this is to run your entire operation from one admin. With a unified commerce platform like Shopify, you can view inventory across all channels, so stock levels are always in sync. In your self-serve portal, give buyers the option to check order history and tracking status to minimize the number of “where’s my order” calls your support team receives.

4. Use data analytics for customer insights

For many B2B brands, data lives everywhere— a separate ERP, CRM, and ecommerce platform. This makes it impossible to get a single customer view without brittle integrations that break often and cost money. Your chances of creating personalized experiences and being a more productive partner? Gone out the window. 

The solution is operating under a unified data model, a core component of Shopify’s B2B platform. Shopify creates unified customer profiles by automatically capturing data from all your buyers' touchpoints, including web pixels and APIs for customer events. Every event is consolidated into a data model that links buyers to their parent company record, creating a single source of truth for each account. 

With a unified profile, you can use segmentation tools to create buyer cohorts. These segments can then be fed into tools like Shopify Audiences to create high-converting retargeting campaigns and lookalike lists to reduce customer acquisition costs (CAC). 

Outdoor gear supplier DARCHE moved from OroCommerce to Shopify, connected their ERP, and launched Shopify B2B features like company profiles, custom catalogs, and personalized price lists. This change let wholesale buyers place self-serve orders through tailored catalogs, helping DARCHE project a threefold year-over-year increase in B2B sales while cutting manual phone and email orders.

⚡️Tip:Shopify integrates with apps like NetSuite, Acumatica, and Brightpearl. Eliminate manual entry—and improve data accuracy—with native integrations that pull data in real time, placing your most important metrics in a single dashboard.

Sales enablement best practices

A good B2B ecommerce platform will empower your sales team. The following best practices will help them close bigger deals:

1. Empower sales teams with digital tools
2. Automate quote-to-cash processes
3. Enable collaborative buying experiences

1. Empower sales teams with digital tools

As more buyers become comfortable with self-serve commerce, what will happen to your sales team? Well, they can focus more on building relationships and closing larger, complex deals. 

As mentioned above, with all your tools connected under one roof, sales reps can access real-time data about an account to better understand their needs. For example, say you use HubSpot to track leads and manage the pipeline. Connect HubSpot to your Shopify account to automatically sync customer, product, and order data in one place—sales has the entire buyer story, right in front of them. 

Sales reps will now know what buyers like, how often they buy, and how much they spend, so conversations are more relevant and personal. If a customer regularly buys a certain component, for example, reps can tell them about new compatible products or even offer a bulk discount on their next order. 

2. Automate quote-to-cash processes

Your buyer catalogs should be an active member of your sales team. How can you attract repeat customers and make them feel valued, while putting the whole thing on autopilot?

Imagine a wholesale customer logging into their portal and instantly seeing their pricing and terms. They can build an order, have it automatically routed for internal approval if it’s over a certain threshold, and check out with their established Net 30 terms, all without ever needing to contact your team.

🥇 Case study: Superfood brand Laird Superfood scrapped phone-in wholesale orders for a password-protected Shopify portal. The switch saves $50,000 to $60,000 in labor each year and flipped the revenue mix. Wholesale now accounts for 75% of total sales, up from 25% before the move.

3. Enable collaborative buying experiences

B2B purchases are never made by one person. It’s a team sport that involves folks from procurement, finance, and leads from the team actually using the product or service. A standard ecommerce experience built for one shopper doesn’t account for this type of buying. 

Use a platform that lets you place multiple buyers under one account. Shopify B2B lets you add up to 10,000 contacts to the same company, each with their own permissions, like Ordering only (build their own carts) or Location admin (see every order, edit addresses, manage vaulted credit cards). 

At the company or location level, you can enable or disable the “Submit all orders as drafts for review” option. Buyers hit “Submit” for approval when they are ready to buy, and an approver (or your sales rep) converts the draft to a live order once budgets are cleared.

Security and compliance essentials

Buyers will only make six-figure deals with suppliers they trust. Protecting sensitive data is a non-negotiable on the buyers’ checklist. Here are the security measures to implement that’ll protect everyone equally:

1. Ensure PCI compliance and data security
2. Implement role-based access controls
3. Maintain audit trails and compliance reporting

1. Ensure PCI compliance and data security

Businesses lose between 3% and 5% of their yearly revenue to fraud-related issues, according to recent studies, and fraud can hurt both your bottom line and your relationships with clients.

• Protecting customers’ data against breaches and fraud during B2B payments should be a top priority for every B2B ecommerce business.
• Use a compliant payment service provider with advanced security features. B2B storefronts created with Shopify have instant access to Shopify Payments, a PCI-DSS-compliant payment gateway that secures your customers’ info within a convenient shopping experience. And if B2B customers request a fraud-based chargeback, Shopify Protect covers the total order cost and chargeback fee. 
• To further protect sensitive data during transactions, make sure your site serves HTTPS. 
• Deploy an infrastructure designed to help merchants meet their obligations under privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA.

2. Implement role-based access controls

Identity-based attacks are rising fast. IBM’s 2025 X-Force Threat Intelligence Index found that 3 in 10 intrusions now rely on valid, stolen credentials. Any brand operating online has to step up on their access controls. 

With Shopify B2B, you can give sales access to your admin using staff permissions, so they see only the companies, prices, and orders they need to serve:

• Create a role using template control permissions for every user.
• Grant companies permissions so staff can only see B2B records tied to their accounts. 
• Restrict by location so reps for Studio 1 Mexico can’t peek at Studio 1 US’s pricing or invoices. 
• Assign staff to locations and assign up to 10 reps per location. 
• Automate provisioning. Sync users and roles from an identity provider via SCIM. 

Be sure to require MFA on all staff logins and monitor SCIM logs for suspicious activity like role escalations. Revisit roles whenever new workflows roll out. 

3. Maintain audit trails and compliance reporting

Data breaches are an expensive problem, and they are all too common online. The average cost is also climbing toward $5 million as of 2024. For any B2B business, having a clear, unchangeable record of who did what and when is a critical line of defense. 

Inside the Shopify admin, every meaningful action, from a staff member logging in to a change in user permissions, is automatically recorded and time-stamped. You can export these logs on demand for your security team to review or for long-term archiving.

To help you meet regulations like GDPR and CCPA, Shopify automatically logs every change to your customer privacy settings.

Customer experience optimization

The B2B buying process is lengthy and certainly not over once a new partner signs. This last group of best practices focuses on building loyalty and getting the data required for continuous improvement:

1. Provide 24/7 customer support options
2. Create educational content and resources
3. Build loyalty programs for B2B buyers
4. Gather and act on customer feedback

1. Provide 24/7 customer support options

In DTC, customer support often begins and ends with a couple of automated follow-up emails. B2B calls for a more bespoke, hands-on approach.

• Great customer support builds trust and loyalty.
• Make sure you have a dedicated customer support team, with dedicated account managers who offer customers assistance throughout the buying journey, beginning with onboarding. 
• Provide multiple avenues for support. A forward-thinking B2B company could provide resources like videos, walk-throughs, and forums for each industry and use case.

2. Create educational content and resources

The B2B sales process is long and often involves multiple stakeholders. The average B2B buyer spends 70% of their time in the purchasing process researching online, and they’re often looking for advice. Position your company as an expert, so when buyers are ready to buy, you’ll already be front of mind. 

• Useful content—like blogs or knowledge base articles—can help you attract prospects if it ranks highly in search results. For example, the boxing and fitness equipment supplier Morgan Sports features dozens of instructional guides on their website to help fitness professionals use their gear.
• Create content that helps your current customers by addressing their goals and pain points. This can form the basis of your B2B SEO strategy to find relevant keywords. For instance, if retailers are Googling “customer retention,” you might write a blog post about best practices in customer loyalty programs.

3. Build loyalty programs for B2B buyers

Buyers stick with companies that treat them like partners and invest in their success. One way to say “thanks for doing business with us” is by offering a loyalty program. 

It won’t be like your standard B2C loyalty program with multiple redemption options. But it can still reward buyers for their loyalty by putting more money in their digital wallet. For example, you can create tiered loyalty pricing where buyers get price breaks once they hit a spend or quantity threshold. 

Dermalogica Canada took this approach with their B2B program. After moving their wholesale experience to Shopify and adding loyalty pricing, saved cards, and one-click reorders, the brand saw conversion climb from 74% to 92%, and 75% of buyers rate the customer experience 4 out of 5 or higher. 

👉 Read Dermalogica Canada’s story.

4. Gather and act on customer feedback

Ecommerce companies have a wealth of data at their fingertips, and synthesizing that data into actionable insights can reveal unseen value. 

• Use analytics to uncover vivid stories about your audience, as well as insights into product, channel, and promotion performance. From there, you can improve your offerings and guide your business decisions.
• Turn insights into action by testing new initiatives and adapting them quickly as you learn more from your customers.
• Track KPIs such as conversion rate, average order value, customer retention rate, and cost per acquisition to quantify the value of your efforts.

Run B2B and B2C on the same platform

Whether you’re pivoting from DTC or taking your in-person B2C operations online, the opportunity is clear: digital B2B is now worth an estimated $19 trillion. Ecommerce is revolutionizing what B2B sales can achieve. And smart ecommerce leaders are following the play-by-play.

By adopting these best practices and partnering with a best-in-class platform like Shopify, your business can realize remarkable potential: high-performing checkout pages, secure transactions, and customer relationships that are truly rewarding.