When The B2C E-Commerce Business Model Meets B2B Demand

As a startup, Seattle-based ski outfitter Northwest Tech must endure a few growing pains to figure out the best way to operate its business. While its founder and CEO Nick Marvik has only been at the wheel selling custom ski and snowboard gear online for about three seasons, he has already recognized the demand for businesses in search of high-volume, customized orders – and he has seized that opportunity.

Northwest Tech, also known as NWT3K, is in the midst of its test year for fulfilling business-to-business orders. While the chance for larger sales is there, so are the unique hurdles B2B vendors must overcome. Marvik told PYMNTS about these hurdles and the solutions he has found to be most helpful in adding a B2B side to what was originally a B2C-only business.

As a seasonal company, NWT3K offers high-quality, customizable waterproof skiing and snowboarding apparel. The firm first launched on a traditional business-to-consumer model, after just a few years, Marvik said he noticed a demand from businesses, ski teams and clubs for high volume orders.

“In a nutshell, the market validated this hypothesis of whether selling jackets or outfits in volume is a viable business option for us,” the CEO said of entering B2B operations. “Before we had manufacturers or any of the logistics in place, we had multiple potential buyers in the market coming to us requesting orders.”

With this obvious demand, Marvik decided to lay out a strategy of selling his products to businesses. Already with one manufacturer in place to fulfill the average customer order, NWT3K added a second manufacturer specifically for B2B orders. In doing so, Marvik said he recognized key differences in the purchase process between the individual consumer and a business customer.

For example, the payment process is “absolutely not” similar for businesses as it is for consumers. “When we get into the hundreds of units,” Marvik said, “we’re talking, $10,000, $50,000, $100,000 or even $200,000. These are significant payments. We don’t handle that type of transaction as you would checking out with a credit card on, for example, Amazon or PayPal.”

Business customers, he added, pay with a bank transfer, and must pay the full cost of the order up-front. The B2B manufacturer is paid only when there is an order to fulfill.

Compare that with the B2C side of NWT3K’s operations, in which customers can check out using a credit card, and the company’s B2C manufacturer gets paid on a recurring monthly basis.

In addition to the manufacturing and payments process, Marvik said he found buying habits of businesses to also pose in stark contrast to those of individual shoppers. “What we’re learning on the B2B side is that the purchasing cycle is quite long,” he said. “You see initial interest, and then it’s our job to educate that potential lead on why our products are meant for them and better than our competitors’.

Capturing leads, Marvik said, can generally take about eight weeks between a company receiving an initial quote for an interested purchase, and actually paying for that purchase. It’s almost an inverse to the B2C cycle, he added, as individual customers making individual purchases are able to be converted into paying customers in a shorter amount of time.

While working on two separate business playing fields, there is a lot to juggle. But Marvik said there are certain tools crucial to facilitating and streamlining B2B operations at NWT3K.

The customer relationship management software Insightly, for example, aggregates the data Northwest Tech needs to turn business leads into paying customers. At first, he said, companies showing interest in Marvik’s products submitted their email, which was automatically dropped into Gmail. But as the demand grew, so did the demand for a more efficient tool to collect customer data. “As leads start to increase, it gets messy,” Marvik said. “You have to capture data, and we want to look at actual sales reporting to ask, ‘Why isn’t this lead converting?’ ‘If they’re converting, how long is that period of time?’ We need a quick tool to consolidate all of that information. That’s where Insightly comes in.”

The solution allows NWT3K to collect data entry fields when customers visit the site – their name, their role, details of their order – and then consolidate that data into information that can be analyzed and used to improve sales.

And with a background in search marketing, Marvik said he knew how important it would be for his B2B operations to be searchable on the Web. To do so, Northwest Tech built an organic landing page for business shoppers searching the web for phrases like “custom ski jacks” or “custom ski team jackets.”

“We could go on for days about the different keywords we rank for,” Marvik said, adding that the landing page for businesses searching for these terms is entirely separate than that of an individual online shopper. “I like to call it the ‘customer journey,’” he said. “The customer journey between a customer versus a business buyer is entirely different, and they have different intents.”

These landing pages were designed with these specific customer intents in mind, he added. “We’re trying to define that persona and that journey to the right pages on our website. We’re building those pages, optimizing them, and making sure they’re targeted for those personas and, more important, the intent of that user.”

Northwest Tech may still be in its test year of B2B operations, but in establishing a separate relationship with a second manufacturer, modifying cash flow management with high volume purchasers, and optimizing the website landing page for business customers, Marvik seems to have quickly caught on to the unique needs of B2B operations, especially as even seasoned B2B players are slow to bring their commerce to the digital space.