What are buyers demanding from B2B ecommerce in 2017?

It is hardly news that ecommerce platforms are "table stakes" in selling to retailers, distributors and manufacturers. What is new, and continues to evolve, are the demands that those buyers place upon sellers.

Jason Dias, a solution architect for the retail industry with Hitachi Solutions America, will describe those demands in the MSDynamicsWorld-hosted webinar, "E-commerce with Microsoft Dynamics" on September 28 (click here to register).

Microsoft Dynamics' native B2B commerce capabilities are rather limited, says Dias. "In terms of a distributor, you have Dynamics 365 doing all of your warehouse management, and fulfillment of the sales orders. But what Dynamics doesn't do is provide an ecommerce portal for customers to place orders, or for the sales orders to come in, as well as a portal where customers can view their invoices which are raised in Dynamics 365."

B2B ecommerce can never be too streamlined or easy to use, as far as customers are concerned. The more integrated and streamlined the checkout, the more the seller is rewarded with high conversion rates, posits Hitachi Solutions, which offers an ecommerce platform that integrates with the entire Dynamics line.

Dias describes the expectations of customers, between self-service portals and ease of checkout.

"In the B2B ordering process, unlike B2C, I'm not shopping in a catalogue," he says. Customers instead expect a product detail page, with for example options of size ...