Forrester recently partnered with Internet Retailer magazine to survey business-to-business (B2B) eCommerce professionals and produce first-of-its-kind sell-side B2B eCommerce benchmarks. The joint survey developed detailed insights related to B2B budget/spending plans, customer experience comparisons with business-to-consumer (B2C) retailers, feature/function/site component priorities, site measurement/metrics, and mobile and tablet plans.

Today, I’m pleased to announce the release of two reports that analyze and discuss B2B eCommerce sales and marketing benchmarks and technology spending benchmarks. In “Benchmarking B2B eCommerce Sales and Marketing Initiatives” and “Benchmarking B2B eCommerce Technology Investment Initiatives,” Forrester found that B2B companies are:

  • Increasing customer channel-shift and seeing improved year-over-year metrics. A significant percentage of offline customers are moving online.  In fact, 86% of the B2B companies we surveyed said that they had recently migrated offline customers online, while only 14% said that they’d moved online customers offline. B2B eCommerce companies also report that they’re seeing improved Average Order Values (AOVs), conversion rates, and number of lines per order in 2013 versus 2012.  Moreover, B2B eCommerce professionals indicate that they are generally maintaining their margins year over year.
  • Investing heavily in eCommerce technology to retain existing customers and capture new ones. Nearly 70% of B2B eCommerce professionals anticipate increasing their technology budgets in 2014.  Further, a majority of those we surveyed said that they have plans to change or upgrade their eCommerce platform in the next 18 months. Forrester’s research shows that B2B eCommerce executives are responding aggressively to the demand for B2C-like customer experience expectations and mobile-specific use cases.  In addition, B2B companies are focusing heavily on back-end integration and content management tools.

Are you seeing positive indicators for the next generation of your eBusiness?   Are you keeping pace with industry standards? We’d like to hear from you.  Feel free to post a comment here or on Forrester’s community for eBusiness and Channel strategy professionals.