Why B2B customers order by email when you have built them a shop

A company invests in an online shop for its trade customers, and six months later most orders still arrive in the sales inbox. The usual explanation is habit: customers are slow to change. Sometimes that is true. More often, the email contains something the checkout has no place for.

Read a few order emails with that question in mind and the pattern shows quickly:

• “Same as last time, but 40 instead of 30.” The buyer is referring to a previous order. In the shop they would have to find every item again.
• “At our agreed price.” The shop shows list prices, so ordering there looks like paying more.
• “PO attached.” The buyer’s company requires a purchase order number or document on every order, and the checkout has no field for it.
• “What would you charge for 500?” The quantity is beyond the price tiers shown, and the buyer expects to negotiate.
• “If the stainless version is not available, would the coated one work?” A question about substitution that needs someone who knows the product.
• “Copying in my manager for approval.” The person who chooses is not the person allowed to spend.

Each of these is a task the buyer has to complete. Email handles all of them because it is free text with attachments and a copy line. The shop handles only the ones somebody designed for.

Before changing the shop, find out which reasons actually occur and how often. One month of order emails is usually enough, and the work takes a few hours.

1. Export or collect every email from the last full month that led to an order or a quote. Include the shared sales address and the personal inboxes of sales staff, because regular customers often write to a person.
2. Set up a simple sheet with one row per email: customer, order value, and one main reason why this could not have been a normal shop order.
3. Agree on a short list of reasons before you start, and add a new one only when an email really does not fit. Six to eight reasons is plenty.
4. Give each email exactly one main reason. If two apply, pick the one that would have stopped the order in the shop first.
5. Keep a category for “no visible reason”. These are the orders that could have gone through the shop as it is.
6. Count the emails per reason, and add up the order value per reason as well. A reason that is rare but carries large orders deserves attention.
7. Ask two or three customers from the biggest groups to confirm what you found. A five-minute call is enough.

The figures below are an illustrative example, not data from a real company. They show what such a count can look like for a supplier that received 120 order emails in one month.

Three things stand out in this example. Repeat orders are the largest group with 38 of 120 emails, just under a third. Together with agreed prices (22) and purchase orders (18), they make 78 emails, which is 65 per cent of the month. All three are routine: nobody is asking a question, the buyer simply could not do in the shop what the company’s own process requires.

The 26 emails about negotiation and substitution are different. They need judgement. And the 10 emails without a visible reason, about 8 per cent, are the only ones that are truly habit.

So in this example the shop is not being ignored. It is missing three routine functions that account for most of the email orders.

Now match each reason to a response. The useful question for every row is whether the request follows a rule. If it does, the shop can do it. If it depends on judgement, a relationship or an exception, a person should do it, and the shop should make it easy to reach that person.

Build in the order the count suggests, not in the order that is easiest. In the example, “order again” and customer-specific prices would come first, then the purchase order field. Approval steps come last: six emails a month rarely justify the effort, unless those six are your largest accounts. This is the core of a B2B ordering setup, and it usually depends on data that already sits in the ERP or accounting system. Agreed prices and order history have to arrive in the shop reliably through an integration. Retyping them by hand means the shop shows a wrong price sooner or later, and one wrong price sends the customer back to email.

Do not try to move everything. A buyer who wants to discuss 500 units or an alternative material is offering a conversation, and that conversation is often where the larger order is won. The goal is that sales staff spend their time on those emails and not on typing repeat orders into the system.

Repeat the count after the new features have been live for a full month, with the same list of reasons. Compare per reason, not only the total. If repeat-order emails have dropped but agreed-price emails have not, the price display is the place to look. A customer portal with order history, documents and prices in one place, as described under customer portals, often removes several reasons at once.