UX design in B2C and B2B e-commerce. Are they really that different from each other?

Why does this question arise so often? After all, in both of these cases, at the end of the buying process sit customers, whose goal is to find the best offer for themselves or for their business.

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The goal is the same — to find the best deal. Their needs and the environment in which they operate are diverse. Therefore, the path that leads to the achievement of the goal will be different for B2C and B2B. Just like shopping on mobile and desktop — we aim for the same thing, but the process is different.

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B2C and B2B UX in e-commerce — find the differences

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• The length of the purchasing process and its steps
  Adequate understanding of the purchasing needs of your customers is the basis for designing e-commerce well. In B2C we find a lot of publicly available research results, unfortunately in the case of B2B there are practically none at all. One of the most famous sites — Baymard Institute provides data for only... 66 results.
• Lack of human (qualified salesman/customer advisor) between UX designers, customers, and the purchasing process
  At each stage, the purchase path must be properly thought out and provide all the necessary information. This characteristic is common to both B2C and B2B, however, in the case of B2B sales we have much less benchmarks. This can significantly hinder proper mapping of the entire process and contribute to errors.
• In B2B there are more people involved in the purchasing process
  The PM is responsible for the analysis and research. The purchase, that is, the payment is made by someone from accounting, and the recipient of our service is the customer, employees or warehouse. It is easy to imagine a hotline in the Call Center, in the absence of the possibility of specifying a specific address, or a separate field for indicating the e-mail address for billing.

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How to communicate? Both B2B and B2C have a lot to improve in this area.

UX audit is a great option to verify errors in the website, the existence of which affects the audience, which translates into a decrease in the business results of the company.

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Whether it's B2C or B2B, the problem that rolls around is communication. Shops do not communicate in a clear way. Even if we are dealing with the correct user path, the content we receive on the interface misleads us.

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Below is a list of communication errors that we most often encounter:

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• Navigation errors, misnamed sections that don't suggest what's inside,
• Search engine for the whole page,
• Completely invisible — call to action pressed somewhere on the banner,
• Elements that look clickable and are not and vice versa.
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How to collect data?

We divide the data into:

• Quantitative
• Qualitative
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Among the qualitative methods of data collection, we can distinguish, among others:

• interviews
• desk research: searching for information available on the Internet
• internal workshops
• external workshops — those with users, so called participatory workshops
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Quantitative data collection methods are, for example, surveys.

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In E-commerce, practically in every project we study navigation through quantitative tests, we are able to improve the naming of categories so that they fit better with how the user understands them.

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Analytical tools such as GA or HotJar, or Microsoft Clarity, which record user sessions, are also helpful.

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A surprisingly simple UX solution, and they make a big difference

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It's hard to talk about one universal solution. Often it can be a change in the content on the button or the deletion of a field in the form, which have a real impact, such as cutting costs on our website. The results that we can get thanks to this are stunning!

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Let's look at a concrete example of a small change. Quite often it happens that users do not find all the information they need to make a purchase and send us questions. It is enough to regularly check the most frequently repeated questions and address them in the interface. We had such an example, when redesign of online furniture store, where one of our measures was to reduce the number of supply queries by redesigning this module. The project itself was not a small change, but it was essential to get the essence out of it. E-commerce owners can take such knowledge and try from implementing one remark at home.