It’s a frustrating reality for many B2B organisations: the e-Commerce channel you worked so hard to launch isn’t delivering. Customers aren’t adopting it. Sales teams resist pushing it. And every update seems to add cost without moving you forward.
You’re not alone. Scaling B2B ecommerce is hard. Legacy systems, siloed data, clunky UX, and cultural roadblocks all play their part. And all this comes at a time when digital expectations in B2B are rising fast. Gartner reports that e-commerce sales are on track to reach 80% of all B2B transactions by the end of 2025, and this year’s commercetools annual trends report found that more than half of all B2B buyers are crying out for an omnichannel offering.
What’s more, there is a movement of buyers who say they’ll pay a premium for suppliers who deliver an excellent digital experience.
So, what are the signs that your e-commerce channel is flagging?
Here are three of the most common:
- Low adoption by customers: If your buyers aren’t logging in, it’s usually because the experience isn’t good enough. Complex buying flows, missing features like quoting or approvals, or simply slow performance are all adoption killers. Marketing and rollout matter too — “build it and they will come” is a myth. Without a clear plan to onboard and support customers, uptake will stall.
- High maintenance costs: Retro-fitting B2C systems for B2B needs, or endlessly patching legacy platforms, quickly leads to ballooning technical debt. If adding a new product line or updating pricing feels like a major project every time, your platform is holding you back.
- Siloed systems and data: Customers want seamless, personalised journeys. That’s impossible if product data, pricing, and order history live in different systems with no unified view. It frustrates buyers and creates inefficiencies for your teams.
Recognising these and other symptoms is the first step. The harder question is what to do about them.
Broadly, you’ve got three options:
- Make incremental improvements - Audit the customer journey, simplify buying flows, strengthen integrations, and fix the pain points with the biggest impact. This works when your platform is basically sound and you can build on what you’ve got.
- Replatform - Move to a modern, composable architecture designed for scale. Yes, it’s a bigger investment, but if your current system can’t keep pace with your ambition or your data is too fragmented to be useful, this might be the only way forward.
- Start again - Sometimes the best option is to sunset the old system and rebuild from scratch with e-commerce as a strategic function. This is the most disruptive path, but it’s also the cleanest when technical debt and organisational misalignment have gone too far.
None of these routes is easy, and each comes with trade-offs. The point is to make a conscious choice, and not to drift along with a channel that isn’t fit for purpose.
That way disaster lies.
