B2B Mobile Ecommerce: Pros and Cons

Learn about mobile’s growing influence in B2B ecommerce and how to build better customer relationships with buyers on their phones.

Mobile devices have become the new frontier for B2B commerce. 

By 2025, a staggering 80% of all B2B sales are expected to occur online, with millennials—who demand a digitally sophisticated purchasing experience—projected to make up 70% of buyers. 

With nearly half of B2B (business to business) purchases now happening online, companies must adapt quickly. A striking 85% of B2B organizations now prioritize unifying their commerce on a single, mobile-friendly platform. 

This push reflects a broader B2B ecommerce trend—businesses are streamlining tech infrastructure to create seamless omnichannel experiences for the new generation of mobile-first buyers.

This article explores mobile’s growing role in B2B ecommerce, its effects on buying habits, and how to build better customer relationships with buyers on their phones. 

What is B2B mobile commerce?

B2B mobile commerce lets companies buy and sell goods or services via smartphones and tablets. This shift reflects the surge in mobile internet usage, with over 61% of searches now mobile-based. Considering mobile influences, on average, more than 40% of revenue in leading B2B organizations, forward-thinking companies are embracing mobile-first shopping and marketing strategies.

What are the benefits of B2B mobile commerce

Meet changing buying behaviors

B2B mobile commerce helps businesses adapt to new buying habits. Young professionals who grew up with digital technology now hold key purchasing roles in companies. According to Forrester, 73% of people involved in B2B buying decisions are millennials.

These buyers expect work-related purchases to be as smooth as their personal online shopping. Businesses need to meet these high expectations to keep existing customers. Research shows 87% of business buyers would switch to a different supplier or pay more for a better buying experience.

By offering mobile commerce options, B2B companies can:

• Cater to the preferences of millennial buyers
• Provide a modern, user-friendly purchasing process
• Reduce the risk of losing customers to competitors
• Potentially justify higher prices through an improved buying experience

Tap into first-party data to personalize offerings

B2B mobile commerce lets companies gather and use first-party data to create personalized offerings for their customers. You can learn directly from how their clients use their mobile apps or sites. Then, use this info to tailor products, deals, and experiences to each customer’s needs and preferences.

For example, a company might notice that a particular client often buys office supplies in bulk every month. Using this data, they could send targeted notifications about bulk discounts or set up automatic reorder reminders. 

Personalization can make shopping easier and more relevant for the buyer, improving sales and customer loyalty. A McKinsey study found that companies using advanced personalization techniques can increase their revenue by 15% and improve the efficiency of their marketing spend by 10% to 30%.

Improve customer experience

To make the most of this information, Shopify lets you create custom fields in customer profiles. These fields can capture specific data points that matter most to your company. For instance, you might track a client’s preferred delivery schedule, industry-specific needs, or participation in loyalty programs.

Plus, through Shop Pay, you can match credit card information to existing customer profiles, creating a smooth checkout experience. This feature gives businesses instant access to a buyer’s history, allowing for personalized recommendations and targeted offers.

Tapping into first-party data lets you create a shopping experience that feels custom-made for each B2B client.

Increases sales with faster website speed

A fast website is necessary to sell anything online these days. Quick-loading websites result in a more seamless shopping experience that increases sales.

Recent data from Shopify reveals some eye-opening facts. An analysis of nearly 200,000 online stores found that Shopify stores load 1.8 times faster, on average, than their competitors. 

Even a small speed boost can make a big difference. Improving your site speed by just half a second can increase your conversion rate. More conversions mean more revenue for your business.

Here are some key numbers to consider:

• Shopify stores load in about 1.2 seconds, on average
• Other platforms take about 2.17 seconds
• Shopify’s server speed is up to 3.9 times faster than competitors

These aren’t just abstract figures—they lead to real business results. Take Molekule, an air purifier company, for example. When it switched to a faster platform, it saw:

• A 75% increase in mobile device purchases
• A 10% boost in overall website traffic

With Shopify now managing the ecommerce complexities for us, our team is fully dedicated to solving technical challenges, fostering product innovation, and delivering exceptional value to our customers through the Molekule app.

Rachel Beisel, Senior Vice President of Marketing, Molekule

So why does speed matter so much? It’s simple: Fast sites keep customers engaged. Slow sites frustrate users, often causing them to leave before buying anything. In B2B mobile commerce, where buyers need to make quicker decisions, a speedy website can be the edge you need over your competitors.

Leave competitors behind on legacy B2B platforms

Many B2B companies are stuck using old, clunky online tools that don’t work well. These outdated platforms make it hard for businesses to:

• Show off their products effectively
• Tell their brand’s story
• Run sales and promotions
• Grow their customer base

While these old tools get the job done, they’re not user-friendly. This creates a problem because most buyers (83%) want to place orders on their own online. But they won’t use a new system if it makes ordering harder.

As more B2B sales move online, how a company presents itself becomes super important. Businesses with modern, easy-to-use mobile platforms stand out from the crowd. They can attract more customers and keep them coming back.

By upgrading to a mobile-friendly B2B platform, companies can leave their competitors in the dust. They’ll offer a better shopping experience that meets the expectations of today’s buyers.

Streamline the buying process with mobile payments

B2B ecommerce has many advantages related to mobile conversion:

• Larger than average transaction sizes
• Much higher order quantities
• Advanced customizations to both product and pricing

Rather than paying upfront, often B2B buyers require quotes, which means there are often different payment arrangements needed. Within the Shopify wholesale ecommerce channel, you can:

• Create custom price catalogs for individual customers or groups
• Enable fixed-price lists, percentage off, or volume-based discounts
• Automatically receive and review draft orders before invoicing for negotiated deals

On the other end of the spectrum—especially on mobile—are one-click purchasing options for routine items. Gateways like PayPal, Google Pay, Apple Pay, and Shop Pay all dramatically shorted the purchase process.

That means no entering a credit card, no creating an account, and no filling in a long, complex address. Even shipping is a simple drop-down, so the order takes seconds, instead of minutes.

What are the challenges of B2B mobile commerce

Making the choice to build a native mobile app

When considering B2B mobile commerce, many businesses face a big challenge: whether to build a custom native app or use an existing platform. This choice can have a big impact on your business.

Building a custom app comes with several challenges:

• High TCO: Creating a native app from scratch is expensive, and you’re looking at 12+ month implementation windows before you go live. 
• Ongoing maintenance: After launching, you have to continuously maintain the app to keep it working as intended. This means more money spent on bug fixes and software updates, before considering building and launching any new feature.
• Complex setup: Custom apps offer many opportunities for customization. The caveat is that it all requires extensive developer resources. Nothing comes out of the box, you have to build it.his can slow down your ability to adapt to market needs. .
• Long-term problems: As your business grows, a highly customized app can quickly become outdated. Adapting to changes based on customer feedback or trends becomes a cumbersome task.

On the other hand, using a platform like Shopify can solve many of these problems:

• Ready-to-use features: Shopify offers over four dozen B2B features out-of-the box to give you faster time to value and lower total cost of ownership
• Seamless integration: Shopify’s ERP integrations and extensive APIs make it simple to connect with your existing tech stack
• User-friendly design: Configure store content, customer-specific pricing, discounts, and order workflows to match each customer's needs directly from our intuitive admin interface.
• Scalability: As your business grows, Shopify can grow with you without becoming more complex to manage. Shopify’s platform is designed with the future in mind. Immediately take advantage of all of our newest releases to continuously improve the commerce experience for you and your buyers, without worrying about costly upgrades or compromising future performance

The key is finding a balance between customization and ease of use. While custom may sound like a good option good, it can lead to a complicated system that’s hard to use and expensive to maintain.

For B2B ecommerce to succeed, you need features that work well right from the start. Look for a platform that lets you quickly set up the functions you need, without having to write custom code for every change.

Legacy ecommerce platforms

Legacy ecommerce platforms can slow down B2B mobile commerce efforts. Businesses using legacy systems often face issues with integrating newer tools and technologies. For instance, 48% of B2B companies reported struggles in maintaining and updating their legacy ecommerce systems.

These outdated platforms often have clunky interfaces that look awful on mobile screens. Tiny buttons, weird layouts, and hard-to-read text make it frustrating for users to browse products or place orders on their phones.

Another big issue is that legacy systems usually can’t handle the complex pricing and ordering processes that B2B customers need. Bulk discounts, customer-specific pricing, and approval workflows often don’t work right on mobile when using these old platforms.

Legacy systems tend to be slow, which can lead to long load times, which is a huge turnoff for busy professionals trying to place orders on the go. Updating these platforms can also be expensive and time-consuming, and you might not even fix all the problems. Sometimes starting from scratch with a modern, mobile-friendly platform is easier.

Inventory management syncing

B2B companies often use multiple tools to manage their business, including ecommerce platforms, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, order management systems (OMS), and content management systems (CMS). 

Each system requires accurate inventory information, but maintaining consistency can be difficult when data is spread across different tools.

Shopify offers several solutions to address this challenge:

• Optionality: Shopify works as a standalone system or fits right into your tech stack to streamline your operations.
• Powerful integrations: Shopify has partnered with a number of the leading ERP providers, like Acumatica, NetSuite, and Microsoft, so you can seamlessly connect your ERP to Shopify with out-of-the box integrations. Those with ERPs outside of those we have partnerships with can connect to them using integrations from Jitterbit and Celigo.
• API access: Developers can use our suite of B2B APIs to create custom integrations between systems.

Despite these solutions, inventory management syncing remains complex. It requires careful planning and often custom solutions to fit each business’s unique needs. For B2B mobile commerce to function effectively, companies must find ways to maintain accurate and up-to-date inventory data across all their systems.

Make more B2B commerce sales with Shopify

B2B converges two mobile commerce trends that present a tremendous opportunity when combined. First, more B2B buyers want control over a simple, transparent purchase process. Second, more people are buying online via mobile devices. Today’s B2B buyers are digital savvy and do their research online before they make a purchase decision.

They are also less price conscious than the typical B2C consumer. That levels the playing field to compete on one thing alone: value. But providing “value” today doesn’t just mean offering additional features or a lower price tag. 

It involves optimizing the entire experience someone has when purchasing products and services on your B2B commerce site. To win and keep more customers, you must deliver more value, faster, and easier than the competition, via a mobile-first B2B buyer experience.

B2B mobile commerce FAQ

What is B2B mobile commerce?

B2B mobile commerce refers to business-to-business transactions conducted via mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. It allows companies to purchase goods, services, or materials from other businesses through mobile apps or websites optimized for mobile use.

What does B2B ecommerce do?

B2B ecommerce platforms facilitate online transactions between businesses, streamlining the buying and selling process for products or services. These platforms often include features like bulk ordering, custom pricing, push notifications, and integration with enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

What is an example of B2B ecommerce?

A common example of B2B ecommerce is Amazon Business, where manufacturers, suppliers, and distributors can sell their products to other businesses. Another example is Molekule, an air purification technology company that offers its products to businesses such as hotels, schools, and offices through its direct ecommerce website.

Is there a Shopify mobile app?

Yes, Shopify offers mobile apps for both iOS and Android devices. These apps allow merchants to manage their online stores, process orders, track inventory, and view analytics on the go.

Do Shopify stores work on mobile?

Yes, Shopify stores are fully responsive and work on mobile devices. They automatically adapt their layout and design to provide an optimal browsing and shopping experience on smartphones and tablets.