How to Design Customer-Led B2B E-commerce #579

For years, B2B sites were the forgotten sibling of ecommerce: functional, clunky, and built for systems, not humans. But AS Colour’s Joe Sharplin is flipping that script. A designer turned digital lead, he’s bringing craft and customer-first thinking to wholesale. And those subtle differences are making a world of impact.

In today's Playbook:

• Why the customer (not the tech stack) should drive every B2B decision
• How AS Colour blends D2C simplicity with wholesale power
• The importance of knowing your professional buyer and their real purchasing behaviour
• Lessons from Total Tools on using data and loyalty to personalise B2B at scale
• How Dan Ferguson grew B2B revenue by leveraging platform-native features
• Why self-service is becoming the default expectation for modern B2B buyers

Connect with Joe
Explore AS Colour

Brett Sinclair's Episode
Darren Gunton's Episode
Dan Ferguson's Episode

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:01

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SPEAKER_00: 4:23

Yeah, it's a great question. It's in some ways, it's, you know, for us as a brand, it's quite straightforward. But there is, there are, there are definitely some intricacies built into that. So, you know, I'd say from a from a high-level perspective, we do try to keep both the B2B and D2C kind of flow or user experience on the website very similar. So, you know, everyone who comes to site initially is almost there as a D2C customer. And it's until you log in as a B2B customer where you're going to see some subtle differences, but nothing, nothing too major.

SPEAKER_01: 4:55

It kind of felt that way because I was on there having a play around and I was like, this just feels like a D2C website. Because in all my research, you know, a lot around the B2B side of the business in terms of what you're doing and how you're established. And I was like, this just feels like a D2C site. And I've ordered through you before, but never through the critical lens of like looking at it from an e-commerce project perspective. But I was like, this just feels like a D2C website. It doesn't feel complicated. Like there's definitely more detail on the product page. And even in the footer, it's not like there's huge call-outs on trade or anything like that. It's not until you press that create an account button up in the top right if you're on desktop that you start going, oh, there's a wholesale channel through here.

SPEAKER_00: 5:33

Yeah, yeah. And that's been quite intentional. And it's always been that way throughout the businesses uh 20 years, where, you know, when we talk about AS Color product as a business, you know, we kind of lean on some of those things around quality, premium, blank apparel, sustainability. So we want the websites themselves and the e-commerce experience to to kind of encapsulate some of those kind of core features of the product itself: quality, premium experience, kind of timeless design. So we we try to marry up the two, which ultimately I think you're right, lands you in this space where it looks and feels like a D2C site. And then you have those little B2B kind of tricks tied into it, which do become more apparent when you log in and you get a bit of a different view on the order grid. So you're able to kind of add things to car at scale quicker. You know, there's some little things we do like that. We have a we have a B2B loyalty program, which you get access to where you can kind of track your spend throughout the financial year, see what you need to spend to get onto the next pricing tier, if that makes sense. You know, so there's there are some subtle differences, but ultimately you're right, it's still kind of skinned in this in this kind of D2C experience, I guess. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 6:40

Tell me about your B2B customers, because I know in the world of B2B, it feels like there's definitely momentum and shift towards ordering online and managing your own account, self-service, but it's taken a while to get there. Are you finding that your customers are wanting digital as a non-negotiable? You know what I mean? Are they pretty self-reliant or are you still is it very manual?

SPEAKER_00: 7:01

I'd say massively, massively self-reliant. So we we have a global sales team and we have a global uh customer service team who are based throughout the world in each in each region who are a massive support for the customers. But ultimately, yeah, a huge percentage. And I wish I could tell you the percentage, but it's it's massive. It's high. Is it's just self-service. It's it's customers, you know, coming to site, adding to card at site and checking out and transacting through the website with ideally, you know, hopefully minimal to no contact with CS or sales, you know, because the stock is there, the inventory is there, the questions that might need to be answered are readily available in a secondary page or on the shipping page or where wherever it needs to be. So yeah, again, I wish I could get you that stat, but it is, it is pretty self-service.

SPEAKER_01: 7:46

Awesome lessons. And I love, love how passionate Joe is around B2B. He's a designer. That was his first job as a designer, and now he's in the world of B2B. That's a bit wild. I'll bet he never had that on his cards. That's where he would end up. But he is passionate about and passionate about creating a great customer experience. So I want to take us back to a few other episodes that talked about B2B. And again, if you go on the Ad to Car website, you can Google, if you go back to the Add to Car website, you can actually put in the search B2B and it'll bring up all our episodes that talk about B2B. It's a really awesome resource. But if we think about some of the biggest lessons we've got, here's what stands out to me. First is don't build around the tech. Your customer is the system. Anyone who's ever done a B2B transformation will know how intensive the tech is because it often integrates into some of your larger systems and your most complicated systems within your business. That might be your ERP, your warehouse management system, especially finance. It's often not as straightforward as D2C. But Brett Sinclair from the B2B E-Commerce Association, who I mentioned earlier, said it best. He said seamless B2B isn't just about the tech, it's about aligning your entire organization to serve the digital customer, aligning your entire organization to serve the customer. So this isn't even about the customer experience on the site. This is about customer service. This is about delivery options. This is about everything that the customer needs, whether they're B2B or D2C, to have a really good experience. As businesses cut costs, they're going to look for ways to automate things, such as ordering from suppliers. If you can meet them and you can have that seamless experience that reduces their overheads as well as reducing yours, you're going to be onto a winner here. And we heard from Joe on that episode that he didn't rebuild the website around an ERP. He built it around customer behavior. Fast reordering, bulk selection, transparent pricing tiers. These are some considerations that are very different from D2C, but are hugely important. And you need to think about them as integral to that customer experience, not as an add-on to your D2C. If your B2B project is stuck in the technology department or maybe being led by IT, it's really time to question that, to pull it out and place it under the strategic lens of operations and commercial teams. This isn't just a technology play. This is a business model play to make sure that you are set up to serve those B2B customers in the most efficient way for both them and for you. It's still about the experience. The second lesson here is just like D2C, you need to know your professional buyer. And this was made very, very clear in a highly entertaining episode that we had with Darren Gunton, who was the MD of Marketing for Total Tools. That's a very spicy episode, very entertaining one, actually, if you want to go back to that one. He talked a lot around understanding who's coming into your business. Is it the tradie who turns up dirty and just needs a quick fix because they're going to go back to the trade side? Or is it about the office worker who's ordering a whole bunch of supplies to keep the team happy over the next three months? Very different customers. And as we know in B2B, there's a huge difference to the people who are on the tools versus maybe the office manager who is ordering on behalf of someone else, or maybe the business owner who is making a huge decision on the future of their business. Very different use cases. You need to understand who your professional buyer is in your instance. For AS Color, that insight shows up in their simplicity. Their wholesale customers want efficiency, not a thousand page catalog. Remember those days of thumbing through thousand-page catalogs? They don't want that. They want self-service, real-time stock availability, and clean UX. That matters more than fancy features. Sometimes you're going to have to strip away some of those D2C features to serve that professional buyer. But knowing that buyer means that you're designing for speed and automation, not your structure. Don't just digitalize your wholesale catalog, upload it, and say that the job's done. Think about that buyer. What do they want in that moment? If they're that office manager, they probably want to know that the job is done to a high level of satisfaction and they can tick it off their list. Things like email follow-ups with clear invoices and knowing when that delivery is expected will be really critical to them. It could be your founders who are making big investments on the future of their business. What do they want? They want certainty and guarantees that what they're buying is doing what it says. Things like warranties, customer service, maybe even account management will be really important for them. Or it might be that you're on the tools and you're in and out all the time. So things like loyalty, things like product descriptions, customer service become really important to those people. So knowing who your professional audience is is really important for relevant one-on-one relationships in B2B. And lastly, build on what already scales. So one of the biggest challenges that I see in B2B businesses going digital is that they've got complex business rules and structures. If you try and translate every business rule, every pricing tier, every little unique thing that you've built up in your business and try and digalize it, it probably won't work. And you're going to spend a hell of a lot of money translating what you do today with what you want to do in the future. Instead, have a look at the platforms that are out there, the best of breed platforms. Dan Ferguson from Adore Beauty talked about this with not trying to custom code your way to B2B success. Have a look at what platforms you've got and what features they have. And then think about can we redesign our business to make this as simple as possible to follow their roadmap. Joe at AS Color, as you heard, talked about this because they're on big commerce and he's leveraging out-of-the-box B2B tools like customer groups, priceless, and multi-login access. It likely doesn't do it exactly like they have in the past, but they've looked at the future of their business and are following the big commerce roadmap. So don't rebuild what your platform already does well. Instead, think about do you actually really need this in your business? Is this a chance for us to step back and reevaluate what we look like in the future? That is a really brief dive into B2B. I think it's one of the most exciting areas in e-commerce right now. And if you haven't already dived into it, get up to speed on it because it's only going to be more and more in the next five years. That's it from the playbook this week. If you liked what you heard and you want more playbooks from Ad to Cart, subscribe wherever you're listening. YouTube, Spotify, Apple, whatever podcast play you're on, and we'll keep bringing them to you every week. And as always, if you want to discuss B2B and how you might enhance that B2B experience, come and join the Ad to Cart community. We've got a number of B2B experts in there who are doing this really well. Come in and ask your questions, get some advice, throw some ideas out there. We'd love to have you in there. Head on over to adtocart.com.au to join up for free. Until next time, see you then.