B2B UX Design: eCommerce UI/UX Best Practices

B2B decision-makers use their phones to buy retail products like other groups, so they've come to expect the same high-quality user features on business websites that they find in their business-to-consumer (B2C) shopping experiences. User experience or UX can be defined as everything that websites try to accomplish to encourage greater interactions between customers and business brands at various touch points along their browsing and buying journeys.

B2B Companies can customize each user journey with special website designs, varying levels of functionality, interactive characteristics, architectural details for navigating through websites, high-resolution images, videos, apps, and other features.

Together, these personalized and targeted efforts comprise the user interface, or UI. The best practices for designing UIs and UXs depend on a company's products, demographic profiles of its customers, and other people who actually use the site such as third-party vendors, resellers, distributors, purchasing managers, consumers, bloggers, social media members, etc.

Each website user might be a customer, company decision-maker, investor, employee, purchasing manager, or even a company executive who's screening companies for a potential business partnership. It's critical to create different customer segments to provide the features that educated guesses predict that visitor wants but with easy ways to correct any mistaken impressions quickly.

That means customers see different screens when they log in to websites or applications, and company stakeholders get very different sets of features and custom dashboards to manage administrative functions and collaborations. This highly personalized approach is essential because more and more businesses compete primarily on providing better customer experiences.

However, best practices for B2B developers designing interfaces involve using heuristic information and UX research on their habits that they gain through segmentation, buyer behavior, website analytics, trial-and-error, demographics, and interface testing on multiple device models.

Matching Customer Profiles

Intuitive interfaces speak the user's language by using phrases and concepts that they understand. If targeting a sophisticated business buyer, don't speak as if trying to convince a trendsetting Fashionista. Information should be presented logically.

Code for Automatic Recognition

Customers who supply information or research products in one area of the website should not continually need to re-enter the same information. The interface should recognize what customers are investigating throughout their website journeys.

Maintain Standard Word Usage

Don't confuse users by using the same words for different things, confusing phrase variations, industry jargon, or complex acronyms without explaining what things mean in the content's context.

Proactive Error Prevention

Address potential navigation errors proactively, and include confirmation options to limit user mistakes.

Easy Control

Users are unpredictable despite careful analyses. If a customer wants to navigate to another area, make it easy to do so. Make it easy to leave any given section if users navigate to them by mistake.

Limit Unrelated Dialogs and Links

Seeing too many unrelated options and dialogs frustrates customers and waters down the impact of relevant suggestions and information.

User interfaces aren't static but dynamic tools that need to change based on evolving customer profiles, marketing trends, new product lines, technology advances, changes to the SEO best practices and ranking algorithms of search engines, and other criteria. B2B companies should strive to create dynamic, evolving eCommerce platforms that continually adapt, so it's perfectly acceptable to innovate in small ways, use trial-and-error methods, and adapt.

If a B2B company sells to plumbers, electricians, contractors, and other practical engineers, then product catalogs could be overwhelming. Designing a great user experience takes these customer problems into account and provides solutions such as product-locator wizards, custom searches by manufacturer, product type, product function, materials, specifications, and other searchable characteristics.

Robust B2B eCommerce platforms solve problems for buyers by focusing on different customer profiles and providing each demographic group of customers with the tools they need to locate products, pay for them, research substitutes, consult outside industry experts, set buying limits in their organizations and accelerate committee or multiple decision-maker approvals of orders.

Back-end customizations should maintain current inventories across multiple channels, provide versatile shipping options, show photos for product searches in real time, and display snippets of information to accelerate complex searches.

However, the most important back-office use feature for most B2B companies is optimizing product searches. Designing a robust SKU table that includes alternate names, part numbers, manufacturer information, and recommended substitutions for discontinued products can provide daily benefits to harried customers and a B2B platform where expanded search functionality generates increased sales.

User interfaces drive the process of showing the right features to customers and delivering the same convenience that B2C websites offer. If the customers have been segmented correctly, they'll see what's most important to them when they log in on a mobile phone.

The process is an ongoing effort that needs to adjust based on new buying behaviors, seasonal buying habits, availability of new products, and other sources of information about customers that become available through strong back-office analytics.

At Clarity Ventures, our UX designers have the technical skills to build custom features and interfaces that deliver focused and expansive user options, but more importantly, we work with your IT teams and stakeholders in the development process.

Contact us today to see how we can work with your IT staff and stakeholders to develop multifaceted search options, differentiated catalogs, custom pricing options, better customer-segmentation strategies, and other features that define a user-friendly, dynamic platform for B2B eCommerce.