12 reasons why your B2B webshop is running low in sales (and what to do about it)

Many SME manufacturers and wholesalers are launching a B2B webshop, but their online turnover is at a fraction of what they had hoped for. The cause is rarely “the market is not ready”. In most cases, the platform itself blocks sales, or doesn't match how business customers really order.

Below are the 12 problems we see most often in Belgian and Dutch SMEs, each with the symptoms, the underlying cause and what you can do in concrete terms to solve them.

1. Customer-specific prices are not visible online

Symptoms: Customers log in, see standard prices that are higher than their negotiated rate, and call or email anyway. The office staff will continue to prepare offers for products that are perfectly ordered online. Some customers even drop out because they see the price as unfair.

Cause: The platform was built for B2C, with one price list for everyone. Or the B2B functionality is there, but the pricing logic only lives in the ERP and is not transmitted to the webshop in real time. Customer groups, contract prices, and discounts are spread across Excel files and account managers.

Solution: Make sure that each logged in customer sees their own catalog and price, automatically retrieved from the ERP. That means a platform with support for customer groups, contract prices and item-level exceptions, linked via a real-time API. A Customer Enablement Platform such as Fonda deals with this by default and gets prices directly from SAP, Business Central, AFAS or Exact, so that what your customer sees online matches exactly what your sales team would quote.

2. The ERP link is missing or unreliable

Symptoms: Online stock levels are not in line with the warehouse. Customers order products that are sold out, or see “not available” when there are 200 left. Orders must be manually retyped into the ERP. One mistake and trust is gone, sometimes for months.

Cause: The webshop is linked via a nightly export, a handwritten script, or not at all. The integration often goes through an intermediary who invoices any changes to the ERP at a daily rate. Updates to product data, prices or customers are lagging behind, resulting in inconsistencies.

Solution: Choose a platform with standard, maintained connectors to the most used ERP systems in your sector. Real-time synchronisation of prices, stock, customer data and orders is the norm, not an extra. This way, the duplication of work disappears and your sales team can rely on one source of truth. Standard connectors also mean that an ERP upgrade won't be a months-long integration project on your side.

3. Product data is incomplete, out of date, or inconsistent across languages

Symptoms: Products without a photo, without a technical sheet, without measurements. Descriptions that are correct in Dutch but still show the English standard text in French. Customers call to make sure the item is correct, or order the wrong item and return it.

Cause: Product data lives in five systems at the same time: ERP, old web shop, a shared drive with PDFs, a spreadsheet from the product manager and the heads of field service. No one owns it. Translations are kept up to date on an ad hoc basis. With each new product line, the backlog increases.

Solution: Centralize product data in a PIM (Product Information Management) and media files in a DAM (Digital Asset Management). One source, multiple languages, all channels powered at the same time: webshop, kiosk, customer portal, sales product catalogues. With AI enrichment, you can automatically fill in missing fields, translations, and categorizations. Fonda includes PIM and DAM as standard in the packages, so that your product data is good for every channel and language at once.

4. No self-service portal for invoices, orders and quotes

Symptoms: Customers are calling for the status of their order. They email accounting for a duplicate of last year's invoice. They request quotes via a form that is forwarded by three people. The office staff mainly does administration and does little commercial work.

Cause: The webshop ends at the checkout. Everything that happens after the order lives in the ERP or CRM, inaccessible to the customer. As a result, every simple request remains a phone call or an email. As the customer base grows, the service team scales with it, not sales.

Solution: Give customers a portal where they can view their orders, deliveries, invoices and quotes 24/7. Let them request new quotes, adjust pending orders, and track payments without contacting anyone. A customer portal reduces the administrative burden on your team and increases satisfaction because customers are in control. In Fonda, this portal is included in the Professional package as standard, linked to the same data as the webshop and ERP.

5. Checkout is built for B2C, not bulk orders

Symptoms: Customers must add 60 products one by one to a basket created for three items. The page crashes for large orders. Order history cannot be reused. Sales hears from customers that they “just mail it anyway”.

Cause: The platform comes from the B2C world, or is a B2B skin on a B2C engine. Bulk ordering, fast order module via SKU codes, CSV upload or scanner integration are missing. The experience is designed for consumers who buy one product, not buyers who post 80 lines a week.

Solution: Deploy a B2B checkout that works with SKU search, CSV upload, quick entry, and order history. Make sure customers can place, repeat, or expand a large order in minutes. A platform specifically built for B2B, such as Fonda, offers these flows as standard, along with customer-specific catalogues and prices on each order line. The difference between 5 minutes and 25 minutes per order decides whether a customer continues to buy online or fall back on mail.

6. No support for bulk pricing, MOQ and packaging units

Symptoms: Customers see a single unit price instead of a price that depends on the order area. They can order 1 piece where the minimum purchase is 12. Or they see a price per piece while you sell per box of 24 or per pallet of 480.

Cause: The platform lacks a product model that deals with packaging hierarchy and commercial rules. Logic that is standard in your sector, volume discounts, MOQ, packaging breaks, only lives in the heads of your account managers or in free text fields in the ERP.

Solution: Choose a platform where you can define multiple packaging units per product, including price, discount scale and unit minimum. Make it visually clear to the customer: “12 pieces per box, 7% discount from 5 boxes”. This way, you can prevent incorrect orders and increase the average order value. Fonda's product model supports packaging units and bulk prices natively, so that your commercial appointments land one-on-one in the webshop without workarounds.

7. The mobile experience is unusable for field service and shipyard

Symptoms: An installer on site wants to quickly reorder 10 pieces via his phone, but the site loads slowly, buttons fall out of the picture, and login fails. The field service only places orders from a laptop in the evening. Or call in and let colleagues enter it.

Cause: The webshop is designed on a desktop with a customer sitting in their office in mind. Mobile is a “responsive” afterthought. Filters, search, checkout: nothing is tailored to someone with gloves, a bad network and little time.

Solution: Test every critical flow on a phone: log in, search by SKU, add to basket, reorder, view order status. Optimize for low bandwidth and large tapping surfaces. A mobile-first approach increases orders from the field, where a lot of B2B sales are generated but rarely caught. Fonda is designed to work just as well on a phone as it does on a desktop, even when the Internet connection varies.

8. No smooth re-purchase or re-order flow

Symptoms: A customer who orders the same 30 products each month has to find and add them over and over again. No list, no quick reorder, no subscription. After three times, he gives up and emails his order to his regular contact.

Cause: The platform treats each order as a new transaction, with no memory. Order history is buried under two menus, recurring orders are not supported, and favorite lists are missing or not working across different users within the same customer account.

Solution: Incorporate repurchase as a central flow, not an afterthought. Show “previous orders” prominently, let customers make one click on “reorder”, support order lists that can be shared within an organization. In B2B, 60 to 80% of turnover is repeat business: make that flow so light that it happens naturally. A platform with strong reorder features increases online conversion without additional marketing expenditures.

9. The webshop is not being actively rolled out to existing customers

Symptoms: The webshop is live, but most orders keep coming in via email or phone. When asked, many regular customers do not know that the channel exists, or they did not receive a login. Online sales remain with a handful of early users.

Cause: The project is closed at the time of the go-live, not upon adoption. There is no plan for onboarding existing customers, no email campaign, no training for the office staff to actively refer. The field service does not receive an incentive to activate customers.

Solution: Treat the rollout as a sales and change project, not a tech project. Schedule a launch to existing customers with personal invitations, short how-to videos, and a first-order incentive. Train your office staff to refer to the portal first for each incoming question. Measure adoption per customer and activate where necessary. A good partner supports you in this with onboarding material and best practices from other implementations.

10. No quote flow besides direct online sales

Symptoms: For project-based purchases, large volumes or customized products, customers should still reach for the phone. The webshop only has “add to cart” and “checkout”, but many B2B deals start with “can I get a price on this?”. Sales misses those leads or only gets them in a detour.

Cause: The webshop is set up as a transaction channel and ignores the quote logic associated with B2B. Requests go through a general contact form that ends up in a mailbox and sometimes stays there. There is no link between web activity and the field service CRM.

Solution: Make the quote a first-class flow in your platform. Customers can place products in a quote request, add their specifications, and sales receive a structured request in CRM with customer, context, and history. The customer follows the status of his quote in the portal. This way, you can catch leads that would otherwise leak out and build a stronger bridge between online and sales. Fonda offers this quote flow from the Essentials package.

11. Search function and navigation crack under major SKU catalogs

Symptoms: The search bar does not provide results for half of the searches. Synonyms, typos, and alternative product names are not recognized. Customers scroll through hundreds of products with no useful filters. Bounce rates are high on category pages.

Cause: The search engine is a basic function of the webshop, not tailored to large technical catalogues. There are no synonyms, no facet filters for technical properties, no priority for customer-specific product relevance. Product data lacks the attributes that would make filters possible.

Solution: Invest in a search function that can deal with SKUs, technical codes, synonyms, and typos. Add facets to the properties that your customers really use: diameter, material, standards, power. Make sure that the search respects customer-specific catalogues: a customer only sees what is relevant to him. A well-structured PIM is the foundation here: no filters work without standardized product attributes. With Fonda's PIM layer, you can build that structure once and enjoy it across all channels.

12. Hidden costs and long deployment inhibit ROI

Symptoms: The monthly cost of the platform increases quarterly: per user, per SKU, per transaction, per integration. The implementation has been ongoing for 14 months and the first customer still has to go online. The ROI is consistently six months ahead of schedule.

Cause: The chosen platform works with a pricing model that scales successfully, while you need just the opposite. The implementation takes place via an agency with daily prices and customization on each component. Standard connectors don't exist, so everything is being rebuilt.

Solution: Choose a platform with a fixed price and structured onboarding. Ask in advance whether the price changes with more users, more products or more sales, and what the average implementation time is. At Fonda, the price per package is fixed regardless of the number of users or SKUs, and the average implementation time is one month thanks to standard ERP connectors and a fixed onboarding process. That difference between predictable costs and open-end invoices often determines whether your B2B platform will be an investment or a bummer.

FAQs

What is the main problem with B2B webshops run by SMEs?

In most cases, customer-specific prices and a reliable ERP connection are missing. As long as a logged in customer does not see their own price and catalog, they will continue to order offline. That one problem alone explains why many B2B web shops are performing below their potential.

How long does it take to implement a B2B webshop?

With standard ERP connectors and a structured onboarding process, one month is realistic for an SME. Custom projects via an agency often take 6 to 18 months. The choice of the platform largely determines the turnaround time.

What does a B2B e-commerce platform cost for an SME?

That depends a lot on the pricing model. Some platforms charge per user, per SKU, or per transaction, so the cost grows with your success. A fixed monthly amount (overview of Fonda fixed monthly prices) makes the TCO predictable and often lower when growing.

Can I connect my existing ERP to a new B2B webshop?

Yes, provided that the platform offers standard connectors for your ERP. SAP, Business Central, AFAS and Exact are the most common systems for which ready-to-use integrations exist. Specifically, check whether synchronisation takes place in real time.