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There’s an enormous opportunity to be seized in manufacturing B2B e-commerce, yet only a tiny percentage of manufacturers are reaping the benefits to date. To stay ahead of the curve, manufacturers must ensure their order and inventory management systems are ready for the challenge.
Let’s examine some of the numbers behind the e-commerce boom and how manufacturers are adjusting to the shift.
The Opportunity
- Reflective of the industry as a whole, Amazon’s e-commerce sales increased from $8.5 billion in 2005 to $239 billion in 2018.
- Millennials prefer e-commerce: 73% of B2B sales transactions now involve millennial decision-makers.
- 74% of B2B buyers research at least half of their transactions online.
Few Manufacturers Have Embraced B2B E-Commerce
- Manufacturing B2B e-commerce sales jumped from $255 billion in 2016 to $356 billion in 2018.
- Yet for 57% of U.S. manufacturers, e-commerce only accounted for 1.1% to 2% of total sales in 2018.
- B2B e-commerce sales accounted for 6% of all sales from manufacturers in 2018 but are expected to climb to 27% of total manufacturing trade by 2020.
- Key challenges faced by manufacturers in getting their B2B business online are visibility (33.5%), updating legacy systems (32.1%), data interchange (32.1%), and inventory management (26.9%).
Inventory Management Challenges:
- 70% of online shoppers will search for an item elsewhere if it is unavailable.
- If a delivery is likely to take longer than one week, 38% of people shopping online will abandon their order, while 24% will abandon their order if no delivery date is provided.
- 43% of small businesses in the U.S. don’t track inventory or use a manual system to do so.
- 43% of retailers ranked inventory management as their biggest day-to-day challenge.
- 34% of businesses ship late because they sell products that are not actually in stock.
- In 46% of warehouses, human error is the top issue with goods-in.
How Top Manufacturers Are Handling the Shift
Image Credit: Image courtesy of Jirapong Manustrong / Shutterstock
