Nearly Two-Thirds of B2B Sellers Saw At Least 25% eCommerce Growth During the Pandemic

More firms have shopped online for goods and services amid pandemic-imposed business constraints. In fact, 62% of business-to-business (B2B) sellers said their eCommerce sales grew by at least 25% during the first year of the pandemic, as reported in the Next-Gen Digital Payments Report, a PYMNTS and Transcard collaboration.

Get the report: Next-Gen Digital Payments Report

These corporate buyers want seamless purchasing experiences, so companies need to ensure that they have appealing checkout experiences to help them keep business clients satisfied. Many buyers also no longer want to send paper checks or wait to receive mailed invoices, which could create opportunities for vendors to offer clients embedded payments on their websites or sell via B2B eCommerce marketplaces.

“There is certainly a trend in going from paper to electronic payments and switching from batch processing to real-time processing,” Transcard CEO Greg Bloh told PYMNTS.

Delivering Straightforward, Streamlined Transactions

This shift represents a significant change for vendors that have been employing manual, paper-based transactions for years. Traditional procurement flows in which corporate buyers place orders with suppliers, wait for invoices in the mail and use paper checks or online payment portals to finish their transactions can seem burdensome and overly complex — especially for companies that started exploring digital purchasing options during the pandemic.

Corporate clients making purchases from B2B vendors value straightforward, streamlined transactions that can keep them from facing those weeks-long, multi-step purchasing processes. Clients may ultimately favor suppliers that offer embedded payments options.

Any eCommerce purchasing experiences that are too complicated or time-consuming run the risk of frustrating procurement professionals and leading them to abandon their shopping journeys. B2B vendors seeking to cater to the rising demand for digital purchasing options may therefore wish to examine the tools and solutions that are removing frictions from consumers’ online shopping experiences and apply them to their own B2B platforms.

Offering Compelling Digital Purchasing Experiences

Among the website features that offer compelling digital purchasing experiences are buy buttons, which have fared well in the consumer eCommerce space and could also facilitate B2B payments. Consumers have shown considerable interest in using click-to-purchase buy buttons to quickly complete eCommerce transactions.

Together with these benefits in customer satisfaction, electronic payments and real-time processing deliver additional value to merchants.

“Regardless of the payment method, the key benefit is the data flowing from the buyer to the supplier on the receivables side,” Bloh said. “Organizations’ ability to monetize the data transfer with the payment really puts a whole new economic value proposition on the transaction itself.”