Building a Customizable B2B Ecommerce Experience

It's more complicated than B2C

An interview with:
Chris Hiller
General Manager
Freund Container & Supply (a division of Berlin Packaging)

To excel at business-to-business (B2B) ecommerce, packaging company Freund Container & Supply (a division of Berlin Packaging) has unique site features just for B2B buyers, and lets them choose the way they want to buy. Chris Hiller, its general manager, spoke with eMarketer’s Jillian Ryan about how Freund Container's more than 40,000 active B2B customers get a customized ecommerce experience. Hiller was interviewed as part of eMarketer’s March report, "B2B Ecommerce 2018: Transforming Buying and Selling."

eMarketer:

Your ecommerce portal is unique in that it supports both your consumer and business customers. How does that experience work?

Chris Hiller:

About 70% of our customers are businesses, and the other 30% [of our business] is direct to consumer. If a customer is experiencing the site for the very first time, we have one user interface.

But if an existing customer wants to leverage the inherent B2B functionality baked into the site, we have an onboarding process to let them know about logging into the "my account" section, where we offer one-touch reordering, order history and viewing your available credit.

Interview conducted on February 6, 2018

"Behind the Numbers" Podcast