You can make it difficult for customers to buy from you without selling a single thing online.
They can struggle to find the right product. Product information can be incomplete, inconsistent, or buried in PDFs. Comparing similar products can be harder than it should be. Finding a replacement part easily is troublesome. Customers can reach the point where they’re interested but have no obvious next step beyond a generic contact form.
These are ecommerce problems.
Your ecommerce problem starts before any transaction takes place
By the time somebody’s ready to place an order with you, a lot has happened.
They’ve found you, searched your product range, looked at different products, checked specifications, downloaded technical information, compared options, and probably involved other people in the decision. Depending on what you sell, that process could take minutes or months.
McKinsey’s 2026 B2B Pulse research, based on nearly 4,000 decision-makers across 13 countries, found that B2B buyers use an average of ten channels during the buying journey. Your website, product information, technical content, sales team, service channels, and distributors may all play a part in the same purchase. And much of all this now happens digitally, regardless of how the eventual order is placed.
The problems appear in the gaps – things you may not have considered because you don’t sell direct online. Perhaps a customer finds one of your products through Google but can’t navigate to it through your website properly. Maybe the specification they download doesn’t match information elsewhere. They’ve probably done their research but have to repeat everything when they contact your sales team. They could have even identified exactly what they need, via your website, but can’t work out where to buy it.
You don’t need an online checkout to see that any one of those problems could get in the way of a sale.
Can customers find your product if they don’t know what you call it?
This is one of the most obvious problems manufacturers with large product ranges encounter.
Search works well when somebody already has a product name or SKU in mind. It’s much less useful when they arrive with a requirement, but don’t know what the product’s called.
They might know the application, dimensions, material, performance requirements, certification, or compatibility they need. They may have the model number of something they bought ten years ago. Or it might just be a case that they only know the problem they’re trying to solve.
If your website’s search, navigation, and filtering are built around how you organise the catalogue internally, rather than how customers look for products, then you’re potentially losing out on a major sale.
The same problem occurs when somebody needs to narrow down the range of similar products. Putting 300 technically-relevant results in front of them is no better than putting 3,000, if there’s no useful way for them to get to the handful that actually meet their needs.
And it doesn’t stop with new purchases. If an old product has been discontinued, what happens when someone searches its product code? Can they find the current replacement? Can they identify compatible parts and accessories? Can they compare the old and new specifications?
Better online product discovery can do a lot of commercial heavy-lifting before a potential buyer needs to speak to you, and can help push a potential sale over the line.
How much can your customers do before they need your help?
With more complex products, finding something suitable may still leave your customer with tricky decisions to make.
Which version do they need? Will it work with the equipment they already have? Does it meet their technical or regulatory requirements? What other things do they need with it? What are the lead times? Can they get the drawings, certificates, installation information, or other documentation they need to get the purchase approved?
How well your website answers those questions depends, of course, on what you sell. A datasheet may be enough. A large or highly-configurable range may need more help around comparison, selection, specification, or configuration.
The point is to look at how far a customer can realistically get using the information and tools you give them.
If your sales or technical teams regularly have to answer the same questions before someone can ask for a quote or place an order, there may be parts of that process you can make easier online. That doesn't remove the need for those teams, but it does give them a better starting point when their expertise is needed.
The same applies when a customer has made their decision and is ready to contact you. If they’ve already spent time on your website choosing a product and working out what they need, don't throw that information away when they hit ‘enquire’.
A quote request for a particular product, specification, quantity, or application gives your sales team far more to work with than a generic message asking for more information. It also saves the customer from having to explain everything again.
We saw the impact of improving this wider journey in our work with Karndean Designflooring. Research with Karndean’s different audiences around the world led to changes to search, navigation, product taxonomy, and product finding, as well as making it easier for professional users to access commercial flooring and technical documentation. Karndean subsequently reported a significant reduction in website support queries.
For a manufacturer with a large customer base and product range, reducing routine enquiries can make a meaningful difference to the amount of time sales and support teams spend helping customers find information.
Does your website reflect the way you sell?
Your customers don't all necessarily follow the same route to a sale. You may sell some products through distributors and others through your own sales team. Large or complex orders might require a quote. Existing customers might order through an account manager. You could have different routes for different markets, product ranges, or types of customer.
Whatever the route to sale, your website needs to make the next step obvious.
If a product is sold through distributors, can a customer see who actually sells it? A long list of every distributor you work with isn't particularly helpful, especially if only some of them carry that product. Location, product availability, market, or specialism all affect where you should send that customer.
If you sell through your own sales team, think about what information they receive. If they’ve already identified the product they need and told you what they’re looking for, make sure that information reaches the right person in your sales team.
And don't forget the customers who already buy from you. Their needs can be very different from those of somebody researching you for the first time. They may want to re-order a known product, identify a spare, find a consumable, check an order, or get hold of documentation for something they already own.
None of this requires you to change the way you sell – but your website does need to support the different ways your customers buy.
Are you giving your website enough credit for the sales it helps create?
If someone researches one of your products on your website, finds a distributor, and buys it there, then your distributor has made exactly the sale you wanted them to make. But can you see the role your website played in creating that demand?
The same applies to sales that eventually come through an account manager or your sales team. The research may have started weeks earlier online, with the eventual order appearing somewhere completely different.
Perfect attribution is unlikely, particularly across a large global digital estate or distributor network. But CRM data, referrals, distributor feedback, and information shared by partners can give you more visibility than website analytics alone.
It also means looking beyond the measures you probably already have.
Traffic, page views, downloads, and form submissions tell you what people are doing on your website. You also need to understand whether those actions are contributing to sales.
How many customers get from search to a relevant product? What do they do next? Are quote requests turning into genuine opportunities? Are customers using the website to find distributors? Are the selectors or configuration tools you’ve invested in actually being used, and do the people who use them go on to buy?
There may also be a cost saving. If customers can find technical documents, replacement products, order information, and answers to common questions online, then fewer routine enquiries need to be handled by your sales and support teams.
Put those things together and you get a much better picture of what your website is doing for your business.
So, do you have an ecommerce problem?
If you don't sell directly online, you may never have thought you could have an ecommerce problem.
But look at how much of your buying process now takes place before an order reaches you, a retailer, or one of your distributors.
Your customers are finding products, checking whether they’re suitable, gathering technical information, comparing options, getting colleagues involved, requesting quotes, and deciding where to buy. How easy you make those things can have a direct effect on your sales.
Even when the transaction happens elsewhere, there’s a lot you can do online to make it easier for customers to get there.
At DotCentric, we help manufacturers understand how customers actually find, evaluate and buy complex products, then improve the digital journeys, product discovery, content and technology that support those decisions.
If you want to understand where your own opportunities are, talk to us.
