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Simply increasing website traffic is just one part of the puzzle of growing a business-to-business (B2B) ecommerce brand; the other is optimizing your buying experience so accounts move from first visit to first order—and then reorder.
B2B conversion rate optimization (CRO) describes that process. However, it’s tricky when one account has multiple stakeholders and spans several months. In B2B, conversion isn’t always a single checkout moment—it can include milestones like account creation, quote requests, or a first order. How can you attribute behavior to a particular company and know whether your experiments nudge them closer to a sale?
This guide shares the answer. We’ll cover how B2B CRO benchmarks work, how to map customer journeys for an account-based funnel, and the self-serve optimizations that reduce friction and increase revenue—plus real examples from Shopify B2B brands.
In B2B, buying decisions often involve up to 10 stakeholders. There’s a much longer decision cycle—around four months—that spans as many as seven different channels, leading to multiple stages of the B2B buying process, in which you’re optimizing for multiple people. Because of this, conversion doesn’t happen in a single moment—it spans multiple milestones as different stakeholders evaluate products, approve them, and act.
If you’re optimizing the product page for an HVAC system, for example, you might need to ease the concerns of a buyer’s procurement team with clear pricing, compliance certifications, and warranty information. But you’d satisfy the actual user (e.g., a facility manager) with installation guides, performance specs, and maintenance instructions. B2B CRO succeeds when these needs are aligned across the experience, supported by data and approval workflows operating behind the scenes.
DTC CRO tracks conversions at the individual user level—you test how design, copy, or pricing impacts a single shopper’s likelihood to buy. But in B2B, conversions happen at the account level, where the company—not the individual—is the unit of optimization.
Multiple people from the same company might visit your site, attend webinars, or read case studies before a deal closes. You’ll optimize for account engagement (how many people from one company are active, how often they return, what roles they represent) rather than user-level clicks, like how many website visitors pressed a callito-action (CTA) button.
This shift requires you to connect interactions across multiple sessions, devices, and stakeholders—so engagement signals roll up to a single account over time.
B2B deals are larger than DTC sales as business buyers purchase items in bulk at a lower cost. They’re also more likely to be recurring, as wholesalers rely on stable relationships with their vendors.
Because of these two factors, B2B CRO focuses on long-term business outcomes—such as repeat purchases, average order value (AOV), and sales velocity—rather than one-off purchases. This is where B2B CRO starts to matter for growth—helping teams close deals faster, recover customer acquisition costs (CAC) sooner, and increase repeat orders. The goal is to acquire buyers with long term value and move them through the funnel faster with less manual intervention.
The average conversion rate for Shopify stores is around 1.4%. However, B2B conversion rates can differ depending on the lead source and the action you’re measuring.
Ruler Analytics’ data shows different lead sources convert at the following rates:
These benchmarks are directional—not diagnostic. In B2B, “conversion” can mean different actions at different stages, such as account creation, a quote request, or a completed order. Understanding which conversion you’re measuring matters as much as the rate itself.
To improve results, you need visibility into how accounts move through your funnel.
Tip: Shopify Analytics benchmarks key metrics—including conversion rate and net sales—against other stores with comparable businesses, so you can see how your CRO metrics stack up.
Because B2B sales cycles are much more complex than DTC purchases, conversion rate doesn’t always show account-level engagement that signals a buyer’s progression through the funnel.
Other north star metrics to prioritize in B2B CRO include:
Each of these metrics helps answer common CRO questions—such as how long it takes an account to place its first order, how often buyers return, or whether optimization efforts are improving order value and repeat purchasing over time.
Checklist: How to pick the right B2B ecommerce platform for your business
Run through a short checklist and see if your ecommerce platform is ready for B2B.
A customer journey map shows how buyers progress through the sales funnel, so you can see where deals typically drop off and spot points of friction that prevent buyers from progressing. Since you can’t optimize what you can’t see, journey mapping connects high-level benchmarks with the specific optimizations that move buyers forward.
Here’s a brief summary of this map:
Anonymous → Known account → Approved buyer → Order
Each stage represents a distinct conversion milestone—from initial interest, to account identification, to buying access, to revenue—rather than a single checkout event.
To build a B2B customer journey map, start with your buyer personas. What challenges are they trying to solve? How did they research potential vendors? Answers to these questions let you spot trends in how buyers initially become aware of your B2B products.
Combine this with a data warehouse that sources from the following platforms as buyers move towards becoming a known account. The goal isn’t adding more tools—it’s consistently tracking the same account and conversion milestones across systems.
Tip: A customer data platform (CDP) unifies touchpoints from all sources, so you get a complete end-to-end timeline for each account. Shopify merchants get this by default within the unified commerce platform. Any first-party data collected through a native Shopify feature or integrated app compiles into a single customer view.
Once you have a customer journey map, add data to provide extra context into how many people progress or drop off at each stage. In B2B, friction can come from the experience itself, how pricing and terms are handled, or how long internal steps take to complete.
Signs of friction in the B2B sales funnel include:
Dive deeper with conversion rate optimization tools—such as heatmaps, session recordings, and onsite surveys—to uncover why these friction points exist.
If you’re optimizing a landing page attached to an influx of support tickets, for example, you might learn that buyers are confused by pricing. An easy fix would be to create a B2B customer portal that displays pricing information behind account login. You’d reduce the burden on your team while simultaneously encouraging leads to progress.
Similarly, if a particular landing page has a high drop-off rate and a long delay between the next step, evaluate metrics like time to first quote. Delays on your side could be the culprit for friction, which is a relatively easy fix: use automation and train your team to spot high volume leads that are higher priority for nurturing. Addressing these issues earlier in the funnel often has an outsized impact on downstream conversion and revenue.
“Too many businesses spend too much money trying to fill their leaky bucket,” says Josh Garofalo, founder of Sway Copy. “Right now, they get sales because they’re driving traffic to their online store. So, the best path to more sales must be more traffic, right?
“Maybe, but not always. If there are holes deeper in your funnel, it will pay to fix those first, and then drive a bunch of traffic into your funnel (or do both simultaneously).”
In B2B, revenue-focused CRO isn’t about individual page optimizations. It’s about removing friction across the buying journey so accounts can move faster—from first interaction to repeat order.
The vast majority of B2B buyers are millennials or Gen Z—demographics that have grown up in the digital era. They’ve become accustomed to buying items and engaging with brands online for individual purchases; those same expectations naturally fall into B2B.
Studies show that 73% of B2B buyers want DTC-style experiences from their vendors. This doesn’t mean copying DTC tactics outright—it means delivering familiar, intuitive experiences on top of account-specific pricing, permissions, and workflows. Apply this to your B2B CRO strategy by optimizing your storefront:
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Legacy B2B transactions had heavy involvement from sales reps. The tides have turned: per Gartner, some 61% of buyers prefer a rep-free experience. This is why ecommerce now accounts for roughly a third of revenue for brands that offer it, with businesses willing to spend upwards of $500,000 in self-serve transactions. For B2B CRO, self-serve buying is where optimization shifts from individual interactions to scalable growth across accounts.
But there’s more to self-serve portals than simply offering the option to buy independently. B2B CRO strategies to move buyers through the self-serve sales funnel include:
Take it from luxury fragrance brand WHO IS ELIJAH, who previously used Salesforce Commerce Cloud to sell wholesale. They switched to Shopify to unify B2B and DTC operations. The result: 50% year-over-year B2B international growth.
“One of the reasons we needed custom pricing for our wholesale customers was that many of them fall into different B2B categories; some have hard margins, and some we can control,” says technical leader Brylee Lonesborough.
“The custom catalog capabilities in B2B on Shopify meant we could set individual pricing categories and attach them to the various types of B2B customers we have so they get a more personalized experience.”
📚Learn: Optimize B2B Self-Serve Buying with Customer Account Extensions
Filtrous is a B2B supplier of laboratory products and equipment. Their previous wholesale platform lacked flexibility and was cumbersome to maintain, so they migrated to Shopify—a process that took just 63 days—to roll out features that improved the B2B buying experience and reduced operational overhead, including:
This new portal allowed Filtrous’s buyers to self-serve more easily. They could place their own orders, view pricing, and pay invoices without support—a move that increased organic B2B conversion rates by 27%.
Filtrous also built automated workflows with Shopify Flow, like sending notifications for wholesale account requests and emailing invoices upon request. Removing manual steps from the buying and fulfillment process, combined with the optimized self-serve functionality, gave their customer support team roughly 10 hours a week to spend on higher impact activities.
Future Glass’s original business model focused on selling DTC. But as the opportunity to sell wholesale became too great to ignore, they expanded into wholesale—defaulting to a legacy platform to enable these B2B transactions. However, the platform struggled to support complex, custom orders.
The old B2B buying process required customized quotes from handwritten notes, manual interpretation of drawings, spreadsheets, and lots of back‑and‑forth. Moving to a self‑serve CPQ system with Shopify streamlined the entire process. “Because of this new efficiency, we’re getting 90% of our orders out the same day,” says content manager Parker Vitek.
With Shopify, Future Glass also deployed custom catalogs for each customer so each buyer sees a personalized price list. Now, buyers can input their own specifications, see options, add to cart, and proceed without waiting for a salesperson to stitch things together.
This led to:
Dermalogica Canada sells both DTC and B2B, but they previously relied on a custom-built platform to handle B2B operations.
“The platform didn’t yield well to make a conversion,” says associate ecommerce manager Nicholas Lachhman. “It kind of blocked you at every step.” That’s when they turned to Shopify.
The new storefront made it easier for business customers to browse, find products, and place orders online rather than call in. Plus, because Shopify’s unified data model acted as one central repository for product information across B2B and DTC sales, Dermalogica could pull information from their Shopify-powered B2B storefront they were already using to sell DTC.
Not only did buyers order more frequently as a result, but they also converted more often. Dermalogica’s B2B conversion rates increased by 23% after the migration. Three-quarters of buyers rate their experience as a 4 out of 5 stars or higher.
“Customers used to be so frustrated by our platform that they’d rather call us on the phone to place orders,” says Nicholas. “Now we’re seeing customers be so comfortable with the experience that they’re placing orders for thousands of dollars worth of product from their mobile phones.”
CRO becomes easier when you know which behaviors are leading indicators of pipeline creation, what qualified accounts are doing before they convert, and where friction happens. That visibility depends on having the right systems in place—not just running more tests. But because B2B sales cycles are long and multi-stakeholder, you need a robust flow of data from every touchpoint into a centralized system.
Build a data pipeline where data from the following sources feeds back to a customer data platform:
To maintain data quality as your source pool expands, use the same definitions for each metric. For example, “conversion rate” might only apply to purchases, not other desired actions (for example, completing a form).
Conversion rate optimization relies on experimentation. But it can be difficult to know which hypotheses are worth prioritizing first, and the order in which you tackle them.
An experiment backlog documents your ideas and ranks them in order of importance. Use a prioritization framework—such as impact, confidence, and effort (ICE)—to rank your backlog. Each one should have a hypothesis, KPI, and goal attached.
“Don’t let the ideas you’re most excited about (or most biased towards) take over,” advises Johnathan Dane, CEO of KlientBoost. “Instead, use a prioritization method to decide what to do first.”
Work through your backlog and define the following who’s responsible for the experiment with the RAC framework:
Clear ownership and approval processes help teams move faster, not slower—especially when CRO changes affect revenue-critical flows.
B2B experiments often touch sensitive account data—pricing, contract terms, and company details. Configure user permissions to ensure this data doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.
Similarly, implement a formal workflow for releasing experiments that affect pricing, product content, or user flows. This ensures that no unwanted changes are made to your B2B storefront accidentally. Audit trails can also track who ran the test, when, and what changes were made to maintain compliance with data protection regulations.
Explore how to run and grow your B2B business on Shopify
Shopify comes with built-in B2B features that help you sell wholesale and direct to consumers from the same website. Tailor the shopping experience for each buyer with customized product and pricing publishing, quantity rules, payment terms, and more.
A good B2B conversion rate is around 2%. Calculate yours using this formula: (Number of conversions / Total visitors) x 100.
When the sales cycle is months long, focus CRO tests on early and midfunnel touchpoints that predict future conversions, such as quote requests, brochure downloads, or account creation. You can also run account-based experiments by segmenting target accounts and tracking engagement over time rather than waiting for full deal closure.
Important B2B checkout features that impact conversion rates include:
In B2B lead gen, metrics like MQL to SQL conversion, demo request rate, and account creation matter more than volume. In B2B ecommerce, benchmarks focus on revenue, such as checkout conversion rate, average order value, and repeat purchase rate.
Conversion rate aside, important metrics to measure CRO include:
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Aug 29, 2023
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