5 Ways To Improve Your B2B Checkout Experience

The checkout is the final yet most critical moment in the B2B sales funnel. Any friction can lead to cart abandonment, damaged trust, and lost sales – a risk you don’t want to take.  

Creating a flawless high-conversion checkout experience means meeting the needs of B2B customers and your own compliance requirements. Get it right, and you’ll not only massively improve customer satisfaction but also boost conversion rates and increase trust in your brand.  

In this article, we’ll reveal five ways to improve your B2B checkout experience:  

B2B customers need to register before making a purchase through your e-commerce platform for the first time. This means asking first-time business customers to provide a few compulsory pieces of information, such as their company name, contact details, and ABN/ACN.  

It’s tempting to get carried away and ask for more information to help with your marketing and sales efforts. However, almost 60% of B2B buyers abandon their purchases because the checkout process takes too long.  

Respect your buyers’ time and ask only for relevant details. Let the buyer go from registration to purchase as quickly as possible, and you’ll significantly improve your conversions.  

For business customers, company registration details should be validated before the buyer can proceed to the purchase stage. This is known as Know Your Business (KYB) and ensures you know exactly who you are doing business with. 

So, how do you validate a company name? 

Relying on manual, paper-based checks takes up valuable business time and resources. It also delays the onboarding process, frustrating customers and creating a poor online experience.  

Manual checks also increase the risk of inaccurate company information, costing you more time and money in operational problems.  

That’s where real-time automated business validation offers significant advantages: 

Loqate’s Business Validation can be integrated as a single data field within your checkout, allowing you to view and validate business details when onboarding customers.  

It checks the company details against authoritative data sources from the Australian and New Zealand business registers to validate that the business is active and legitimate and if the business details are correct. And it does all this in just six seconds, ensuring “good” business customers can continue their purchase without delay.  

3. Add auto-fill forms  

Provide a speedy checkout process for your online store by adding an auto-fill feature to forms.  

Autofill saves customers time and effort and helps streamline the checkout process, improving the overall customer experience. In one study, Google found that users completed forms 30% faster when automated form filling was activated.  

Autofill also reduces the risk of errors. With automated form filling, users are less likely to make mistakes when filling in company details and addresses, which means you save time and costs dealing with the issues poor-quality data can cause.  

Loqate’s Business Validation can pre-fill business information as the user types, reducing processing time and improving data accuracy.  

B2B buyers often have specific payment needs. Higher average order values mean debit and credit cards are sometimes unsuitable for B2B sales. Instead, many B2B customers prefer invoicing, purchase orders, or payment terms. If your payment options are limited, buyers may abandon their cart in favour of a competitor who meets their payment needs. 

Offering multiple, relevant payment options means customers can choose the option that best suits their business needs and preferences.  

Almost half (48%) have abandoned a shopping cart because their preferred payment method wasn’t available at the checkout.  

With fraudulent activity more prolific than ever, you need to show your customers that they can trust you to protect their information and deliver the goods or services as promised.  

Security is a significant concern for e-commerce customers. Research suggests that 48% of cart abandonment is due to security concerns.  

You can overcome security concerns by using a range of trust signals: 

These trust signals are most important on the checkout page when you ask the buyer for their information and payment details.  

Streamline your B2B checkout for conversions and compliance 

Don’t give your B2B customers a reason to abandon the purchase and switch to your competitors at the last hurdle. Following the five steps above, you can maximise your B2B conversions, improve the customer experience, stay compliant, and keep operational costs and risks low.