B2B eCommerce Trends 2024 and B2B Statistics

The global B2B ecommerce market size is expected to reach $18,771.4 billion by 2027. It is growing right now: according to McKinsey B2B stats, we are witnessing how eCommerce becomes more important than in-person sales. Below, we take a close look at the rising B2B ecommerce trends 2024 and B2B statistics that you can incorporate into your business strategy to help increase your competitive advantage. Some of these trends originate back in 2022, 2021, and even 2020 (you can find them in this article, too), but all of them are true guidelights for you to start your eCommerce 2024 perfectly.

1. TOP 15 B2B ECOMMERCE TRENDS 2024 
2. GOING DEEPER INTO TECHNOLOGIES​​​​​​
3. USING THE CAPABILITIES OF THE FUTURE
4. STAYING CLOSE TO YOUR CUSTOMERS
5. CONSTANTLY GROWING VALUES
6. BEING RELEVANT
7. B2B ECOMMERCE TRENDS RETROSPECTIVE
8. B2B ECOMMERCE TRENDS 2020
9. B2B ECOMMERCE TRENDS 2021
10. B2B ECOMMERCE TRENDS 2022
11. B2B ECOMMERCE STATISTICS
12. B2B ECOMMERCE STATISTICS OVERVIEW
13. FAQS

Below, we’ll look at different B2B commerce trends to expect in 2024. This way, we’ll look at global strategic changes, market-driven and marketing trends, and current developments in customer experience and technology: 

• Going deeper into technologies 

Trend 1. Technology Investments Are Set to Grow 

Trend 2. More Cloud Adoption 

Trend 3. Staying mobile-first  

• Using the capabilities of the future 

Trend 4. Headless Commerce: API-Based Digital Commerce  

Trend 5. AI for Content Marketing 

Trend 6. Augmented reality and virtual stores 

• Staying close to your customers 

Trend 7. Omnichannel communication as the first thing to go 

Trend 8. Market and sell through social media 

Trend 9. Focus on your customers and their personal experience  

• Constantly growing values 

Trend 10. Services That Provide Added Value 

Trend 11. Self-service portals 

Trend 12. Great customer support 

• Being relevant 

Trend 13. Fast Implementation & Integration 

Trend 14. UX as a Powerful Driver of Good Quality Customer Experience   

Trend 15. B2B Online Marketplaces get more popular 

The growing need for finding cheaper and more flexible alternatives has driven businesses to use more cloud solutions and work remotely. B2B ecommerce platform vendors, such as Virto Commerce, have become robust and very adaptable to changes. 

The cloud revolution has been gradually and consistently taking over businesses for many years now. For good reasons: the cloud offers better security, stability, and flexibility while simultaneously reducing costs and allowing businesses to save and scale up. Take a look at the following stats:

The migration to the cloud continues as companies realize cloud benefits and turn to remote working. Gartner shows that pretty soon, over 20% of end users will buy cloud storage. 

This is an evolving trend of 2020-2024 ant beyond. According to Forbes, the number of mobile B2B orders increased by 250% in the past three years. It’s estimated that B2B ecommerce sales via mobile devices in the United States are going to exceed $710 billion by 2025.  

The pandemic pushed buying on mobile, and it still evolves. Mobile engagement keeps being important. For example, 62% of people said they are less likely to purchase from a brand if their mobile buying experience goes wrong. 

What you have to do is to optimize your mobile channels to make them convenient for your customers. Your own mobile app would be good, but if you are unsure you really need it, just create a nice user-friendly mobile version of your website. You’ll see how much it can change your selling!

The growth of APIs has opened up new e-commerce opportunities, allowing companies to go headless and experiment with different online sales channels. Moreover, APIs enable businesses to build sophisticated ecommerce infrastructures where all vital internal and external applications are connected within one unifying and collaborative solution. Connecting and integrating multiple applications, such as real-time inventory and fulfillment services, have finally become possible. 

Moreover, 77% of businesses using headless technologies expand into new channels compared to only 54% of non-headless companies. 

AIs may not be ready to craft high-quality content yet. But with tools like generation analytics and predictive analytics, AI can participate more noticeably in the creation process and help with research, outcome tracking, microtargeting, and digital marketing. As machines develop better content editing skills, they could also help streamline content creation and reduce costs in the future. 

Virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR) is one of the biggest B2B trends in 2024. And this is a brabd new trend! According to Statista, the VR market tends to grow from $12 billion to $22 billion by 2025. Gartner believes that in 2026 a quarter of all people (25%) would spend an hour daily to be in Metaverse.

For an eCommerce business, it all means great opportunities for deeper personalization straight to your customer. An immersive experience of learning more about the product with one click only or even buying in VR gives people a feeling of deeper trust and confidence in buying from a particular vendor. 

Starting back in 2020, this trend keeps evolvong. Research shows that companies with strong omnichannel marketing strategies retain on average 89% of their existing customers compared to 33% of companies that lack such strategies. B2B sellers must embrace that all customers are now omnichannel and work toward accommodating them. 

In an environment where more B2B customers prefer to do their own research online, customer expectations should influence an organization’s B2B selling priorities. To meet those increasingly complex and sophisticated expectations, it’s essential to have a flexible, scalable commerce infrastructure with an integrated online selling platform at its core. From a technological point of view, an organization requires a robust B2B ecommerce platform and a strong CRM system that would help create a comprehensive B2B buyer persona. A CPQ system is also essential for expediting full-service sales and letting the ecommerce platform effectively support complex products and variations in product lines. 

The data indicates that B2B buyers don’t have specific preferences toward either self- or full-service. Instead, they switch between the two depending on the purchasing scenario. The combination of human-assisted options and self-service, therefore, makes for a sensible strategy. Flexible ecommerce infrastructures typically offer a full spectrum of possibilities, from self-serve to sales team-delivered full service along with hybrid selling models. 

It’s worth putting extra effort into migrating B2B buyers online in an attempt to convert them into higher-value customers. 

Customer service via email is no longer an acceptable option. Because B2B buyers demand even more attention than B2C customers, your website needs all possible customer care options, from live chats with customer service and sales reps to chatbots outside working hours. Optimize your platform for advanced search by adding online search tools and other helpful perks to help customers navigate your site, learn more about your products or call you if they require assistance. Customer self-service portals are no longer among emerging trends but rather an outright necessity. Consider gradually adding digital self-service features to make customers adopt new functionality before moving on to the next, more sophisticated features. 

According to recent reports, the global social commerce market will reach US$2.9 trillion by 2026. 46% of B2B clients already use social media when choosing their perfect buy to find more product info or compare to competitors. 

Collecting info on how your clients use your portals to search for products and choose them is vital! Customers wish to get more personal messages from brands to make their choice easier. Moengage asked 1,000 customers from the US, Canada, the UK, and Germany and found out that 27% of respondents never liked inconsistent messaging. The same 27% know when marketing is irrelevant and give up on buying from the chosen brand. 

Technology innovators have significantly improved marketing personalization tools, and we expect personalization and recommendation machine learning (ML) engines to become even better in the coming years. 

The more sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) mechanisms now offer personalization techniques as a package: push notifications on mobile phones, email messaging, and content recommendations on social media and websites — all can become a customized and personalized customer experience from customer data gathered across different digital channels. This means that instead of personalizing select interactions with the customer, you can now personalize an actual customer journey and walk them through it, offering personalized content at every touchpoint. 

A McKinsey survey of nearly 3,500 decision-makers made in 2022 showed that customers want a more personalized experience along with more channels and convenience. 

We’ve written an interesting article on content contextualization, which you may want to check out. 

Particularly relevant for those operating their own B2B ecommerce marketplaces, value-added services provide unique opportunities to retain and lock in existing customers, attract new ones, increase revenue, and stay on top of the current market trends. In its most simplistic sense, value-added services are those you add to your existing product or service. For example, if you’re operating a subscription-based marketplace, you can start selling advertising or marketing services in addition to your primary subscription or membership offers. 

McKinsey says that many buyers today feel more comfortable using self-service technologies to make their purchases rather than one-to-one communications. Other surveys show that up to 81% of all buyers prefer to do everything on their own, while only 5% express their will to communicate with a real support worker.

Such self-service experience should be of a high quality: 90% of the surveyed agree that they wish to recommend your product to other people if their experience searching for the product's information and content was good.   

In a faster world, being one step ahead is important. While preferring self-service, users still need quick and efficient help in non-standard situations. That’s why one of the trends in B2B e commerce still belongs to client support.

You can prepare for these moments by constantly analyzing the client journey to find out potential glitches and being 24/7 online. Sounds crazy, but with chatbot technologies and in-app messaging via the channels mostly used by a particular buyer, you can start the support campaign before the user even asks. This is the way to release them from needing to search for your support contacts first. 

Implementation speeds have increased dramatically in recent years. These days you can complete the entire implementation process within a few weeks. Composable ecommerce platforms allow businesses to implement individual, specific functionalities keeping the rest of the business intact until all processes and features are implemented. 

Almost 95% of your buyer’s first impression when visiting your website depends on good UX. High-resolution pictures, detailed descriptions, and additional content (FAQs, for example) make your website attractive and force users to stay. 

And here is one more reason why user experience (UX) became one of the ecommerce B2B trends – 2024. 86% of buyers express their readiness to pay more if the UX is good. 

B2B online marketplaces continue to grow in size and numbers: a perfect moment to scale your sales! According to Gartner, 70% of existing enterprise marketplaces will be engaged in B2B transactions in 2024. Niche marketplaces, in particular, have become a vital place for the online presence of B2B sellers. As marketplaces have become much more attractive to manufacturers, wholesalers, and distributors, now is the time to jump on the wagon.

B2B eCommerce has been evolving since 1979 (see the full retrospective we made). To see the changes in the state of B2B ecommerce today, we will start with the most significant trends of the past three years that are still important.

Forbes informs that over 90% of B2B companies then reported eCommerce usage growth due to the Covid-19 impact. Here are the main trends and statistics for 2020: 

Being flexible in digital payments is absolutely critical for ecommerce companies. In 2020, B2B platforms offering different payment options became exceptionally popular. Some offered trade finance options to enable businesses to sell on credit and finance their vendors and buyers. 

Adding more reliability to classic supply chain management, these technologies include predictive analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, robotics, automated order management and replenishment solutions. 

B2B sales trends 2021 are featured with ideas of growing as the crisis passes. Here they are: 

Open source is a fantastic way to improve functionality and scale continuously and together with partners. Virto Commerce is an excellent example of how open-source can be used around the globe. 

The strategy is gaining more and more prominence in the increasingly crowded B2B marketplace. Video marketing is a go-to strategy to attract new and retain existing customers. Great for growing your audience! 

Just like B2B trends 2021, the goals of 2022 continued working on better CX and client retention. Here is what we can tell about 2022: 

In the US alone, there are more than 300 million smartphone users. 9 out of 10 business users will buy from a website again if it offers a first-grade mobile experience. 61% of them, says Amazon, use mobile devices to research products before they buy them. 

PWAs (Progressive Web Applications) bring native-app experiences to cross-platform web apps. B2B services providers can upgrade them seamlessly, while buyers benefit from a quick performance and offline work mode. 

Here, we have collected B2B ecommerce statistics 2022 and 2023 on sales, mobile popularity, some replatforming statistics, and more. B2B ecommerce stats in this article clearly show that the main things businesses think about in 2024 are better client engagement, team retention, and profit growth. 

• 3/4 of the organizations who deeply personalize their marketing report their market share grows.
• 4 billion smartphone users are expected worldwide in 2023.
• 60% growth of customer acquisition costs is registered during the last 5 years.
• 70% of buyers expect good performance, online access, choosing a convenient channel, and great omnichannel support.
• 82% of decision-makers prefer partners who can guarantee a smooth performance.
• 2 of 3 users look for self-service rather than communication with a real person.
• 90% of buyers want to get their purchases no later than 3 days after the order.
• 65% of businesses keep working remotely after COVID-19 relief.
• 20% of eCommerce revenues are spent on fulfillment.
• 40% of companies think about replatforming when something doesn’t work.
• 10% bigger client lifetime value is registered if the team works well.
• 97% of companies believe additional employee training can improve performance.
• 85% of B2B businesses consider strong employee knowledge of their products as the most important skill.

Global e-commerce rose from 15% of total retail sales in 2019 to 21% in 2021, according to B2B ecommerce statistics – 2021. It now sits at an estimated 22% of sales. “We believe that the Covid-driven bump will not flatten future e-commerce growth,” says Brian Nowak, a Morgan Stanley Research equity analyst covering the US internet industry. He sees e-commerce reaching 27% of retail sales by 2026.

According to B2B statistics, as of 2020, there were over 3.6 billion smartphone users worldwide, and the number is expected to grow even further, reaching more than 4 billion by 2024.

Over the past 5 years, customer acquisition costs (total marketing & Sales Spending shared by the total number of customers) became an average of 60 percent bigger. This means it’s time to pause investing the same big money in paid marketing and turn to a better engagement.

However, only 8 percent of companies really care about making their marketing more personalized to get and retain more clients. But three-quarters of them have noticed a significant improvement. 

Here are the most important things 70%+ of your clients expect besides the personalization:

• A guarantee of a good performance. 82% of B2B decision makers will actively look for a new supplier if a performance guarantee is not offered.
• An online availability.
• Buying via any channel offered.
• Real-time support.
• Great omnichannel experience. 

And while 2 out of 3 buyers prefer a remote purchase or self-service, if you offer delivery, 90 percent of your client base would expect to get their purchase by 2-3 days after ordering. 

Due to the Covid-19 impact, over 65 percent of organizations choose to work remotely rather than opening brick-and-mortar stores. This requires less spending related to renting and logistics but more attention to keeping contact with their clients.

Fulfillment costs still take up to 20% of the revenues eCommerce business gets. That’s why searching for new ways to reduce expenses in this process is still important.

According to the Insider Intelligent forecast, the total eCommerce sales in the US are close to $1.06 trillion, growing by 16.1% bigger compared to the previous years.

Moreover, around 40% of companies consider replatforming while searching for better business capabilities. 

Besides all the business-related statistics, we’ve collected some data on how companies hire their teams today. In their recent report, McKinsey claims that sellers' lifetime value becomes up to 10 percent bigger if the company employs the right people and helps their teams develop.

Most business leaders are aware of this; at least 97% of respondents said that training their Sales leaders is their main goal when we talk about human resources. Around 50% of Sales reps, in turn, think that most of the reps they work with need additional training. Ecommerce B2B industry statistics show that most companies prefer developing their IT deps to provide a better experience to their clients.

As for the skills demanded, solution selling has become the key capability recently. Up to 85% of the companies asked by McKinsey believe that their new team members must have a strong knowledge of what they sell and account-planning skills. 80% require analytical skills as the most important.

Another important trend related to the youngest workers generation (Gen Z) is that most of them prefer the hiring company to have the same values that they have and a great corporate culture over money. Probably, the freedom caused by remote work during Covid-19 changed their priorities to searching for a place where they have more flexibility and opportunities to grow.

Since B2B ecommerce is constantly evolving, no matter how closely we monitor the current B2B e commerce statistics and trends. The pandemic, which has brought massive dislocations in the business and social fabric, has certainly contributed to the acceleration of digital transformation in B2B companies on an unprecedented scale: what we’ve seen accomplished within a few weeks and months previously could have taken up years. There’s an immense array of opportunities that are hiding in store in 2024: with the proliferation of B2B marketplaces, democratic wide-spread availability of AI and ML technology, and sweeping cloud adoption, the future for B2B looks as bright as ever!