Is Your E-commerce Strategy Wasting 97% of Your Demand?
Standard e-commerce conversion rates hover around 3%. What happens to the 97% of the visitors that don’t convert?
If you’re a hardware company, having an e-commerce channel was once a competitive advantage. Now it’s table stakes—and not having one, or having a poor experience, will drag your business down. The long belief that B2B buyers don’t purchase online is dated. Just look at Ingram Micro and CDW, together they generate over $40 billion a year through e-commerce alone. If your business involves SKUs, product bundling or configuration, and sells products under $10,000, your customers expect a seamless online buying experience—and your competitors likely already provide it. During my time as CRO at a 3D printing OEM, we sold $7,000 machines directly online with zero human interaction. E-commerce quickly grew to account for nearly 30% of our total sales.
Hopefully by now, you’re convinced that even in B2B, e-commerce is a must. So let’s talk about what your e-commerce site should do and how to measure success.
E-commerce ≠ Marketing Website
Your e-commerce platform has one core job, to generate revenue. This includes both:
Closing transactions, and
Initiating qualified sales opportunities that require follow-up.
Too many companies think of their marketing website as the driver of #2, while their e-commerce portal is focused only on #1.
However, an effective B2B e-commerce site seamlessly integrates both sites and supports customers not only in the decision stage but also during consideration. Apple’s website is a great example, you go from learning to buying in one click. Most companies only optimize their e-commerce journey for the decision stage—making it as easy as possible to click “buy.” But even best-in-class sites only convert 2-3% of visitors into purchases.
What about the rest?
Turning the 97% into Gold
Using real numbers from the past, let’s say you drive 200,000 visitors to your site per month. If your fundamentals are solid, you are likely to convert 4,000 into transactions (2% standard e-commerce conversion rate). That leaves 196,000 engaged visitors who didn’t buy.
These aren’t cold leads. Some of them are warm highly qualified leads. But unless you have a plan to capture and follow up with them, they’re gone. At the 3DP OEM, actual growth didn’t happen until we effectively targeted the 97% that didn’t convert online.
Step 1. Making sure your site is fundamentally sound:
SEO tools like SEMrush or SEO Site Checkup will assess your site’s performance and suggest improvements across meta tags, headers, broken links, site speed, etc.
PPC strategy must be aligned with your industry (make sure to review “The Paid Media Spiral”).
Product pricing and margin expectations should be aligned with the market
Once your fundamentals are solid you should achieve conversions close to 3%, so there’s still a massive opportunity in the 97% that didn’t transact.
Step 2. Identify and Nurture High-Intent Visitors:
This is where elite e-commerce strategies shine: identifying and segmenting high-intent visitors for follow-up. This implies that you can identify your prospects. But some wonder about the impact of forcing users to sign-in before checkout. There is a trade-off, asking to register will impact traffic, but leads will be of higher quality. My rule of thumb is the more specialized and higher-priced your product, the more important it is to at least capture an email address as early along the journey as possible.
One of the most obvious purchasing signals is abandoned carts. And even though these are by definition some of the warmest leads, many companies at best only send automated follow-up emails. That’s fine for $50 t-shirts. But for $3,000 equipment? A human touch might be that differentiation that gets you the deal.
Let’s go back to our example from real life. If your site meets the industry standard 8% add-to-cart rate, it will generate roughly 16,000 carts per month. It isn’t profitable to follow up on everything, so prioritization is key. Applying general filters—like business email only, cart value thresholds— and industry-specific filters that signal high intention —like uploaded CAD files (in online manufacturing services)— will be a powerful way to prioritize.
Step 3. Sales Execution, The Final Mile:
Continuing with our example, lets assume that after applying your filters and customer segmentation, you site is able to generate 300 highly qualified abandoned carts per day. That’s the blue ocean for your Sales Development Representatives (SDRs). Here’s a baseline of what a properly managed SDR organization should yield:
Each SDR should call and email 100 leads/calls per day
Convert 15% of their calls into sales opportunities
Close 5% of their calls into actual revenue
Success here depends on two things:
Speed: Follow up within minutes. (Just try filling out a form on an insurance site—they’ll call you in seconds.)
Skill: SDRs need to nurture, not just pitch. That means that regular training, call shadowing, and coaching is critical. I was skeptical of AI coaching tools at first, but they have proven to be highly valuable.
The Right Tools for the Job
Finally, let’s talk about the tech stack that will help you maximize conversion and follow-up efficiency:
1. Heat Mapping
Tools like Hotjar and Crazy Egg track where users click, where they drop off, and what frustrates them. You can even record real sessions to watch actual user behavior. These tools help refine the customer journey and identify the behaviors of high-intent users, critical to prioritizing the right leads.
2. Online Revenue Benchmarking
Grips Intelligence benchmarks your e-commerce performance vs. competitors—average order value, conversion rates, customer demographics. It will help identify gaps and opportunities in your strategy, including performance by customer segments.
3. Sequencing and Outbound Calling
For SDR follow-up, outreach.io is gold. It integrates with popular CRMs and auto-generates daily call lists, tracks outbound calling KPIs, and even analyzes calls with AI. Initially, I thought the AI feature was a gimmick, but it’s helped my SDR managers identify coaching opportunities and improve results.
Final Thoughts
Your e-commerce site is not just for transactions. In many B2B businesses, it’s your best demand-capture tool. If you’re only optimizing for online conversion, you’re leaving 97% of your demand on the table.
Invest in tools. Train your SDRs. Treat your site like the demand engine it is—and you’ll unlock growth that most companies miss.