B2B Websites… bad thing?
Tuesday, November 28th, 2006According to Jakob Nielsen, “Many business-to-business (B2B) sites are stuck in the 1990s in their attitude toward the user experience. Most B2B sites emphasize internally focused design, fail to answer customers’ main questions or concerns, and block prospects’ paths as they search for companies to place on their shortlists. These sites haven’t realized that the Web has reversed the company-customer relationship. Most online interactions are demand-driven: you either give people what they want or watch as they abandon your site for the competition’s.
The result of poor design on B2B sites? In our user testing, B2B sites earned a mere 58% success rate (measured as the percentage of time users accomplished their tasks on a site). In contrast, mainstream websites have a substantially higher success rate of 66%.
Considering that there’s immensely more money at stake for B2B than for business-to-consumer (B2C), it’s astounding that B2B sites offer a much worse user experience.”
But, what exactly is a B2B Website? A B2B website is a website of a company that mainly deal with other businesses and not with the end users or the final consumer. Most of the time, it is only a company presentation website and no direct e-commerce is involved (like ordering directly through the website and paying with a card).
Yes, some of the B2B websites are poor in content and sometimes the presented information is not enough to generate a business contact. So, if you are running a B2B website, it is advised to get in details and lead your visitor to the desired task. This can be an “additional info request”, an “order” (prices and volume discounts are a must here), a “survey”, etc.
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