A customer has found your business. Now, can they figure out what to do next?
In the first article of this series, we explored discoverability: whether buyers, search engines, and AI systems can find and understand your products. But being found does not guarantee progress.
A buyer may reach the right product page and still be unsure whether they can purchase online, need an account, should contact sales, or must order through a distributor. They may encounter an inaccessible form, a dead end after selecting a product, or an experience that works on one device but not another.
These obstacles are more common than they may appear. Gartner reported in 2026 that 57% of B2B buyers encountered multiple moments that stalled their buying journey and unnecessarily delayed a purchase. The problem is not always a lack of interest. Sometimes, the experience makes the next step too difficult.
Once customers arrive, the next challenge is delivering a clear, intuitive, and accessible experience that helps them move forward with confidence.
This series is organized around three over-arching questions:
Can customers find you?
Can you deliver the experience they expect?
Can you see what is working and keep improving it?
Article one answered the first.
Fundamentals four through six will answer the second.
In partnership with:
In B2B e-commerce, a conversion often means more than just clicking “Buy now.”
Depending on the business, the next step can be creating an account, requesting a quote, submitting an inquiry, finding a distributor, arranging a consultation, or placing an order under negotiated terms.
The problem begins when that next step is unclear.
A buyer may be ready to move forward but find that the purchasing journey does not reflect how their organization operates. If account access and internal purchasing requirements are not clearly supported, even an interested customer can struggle to complete the process.
This is where practical questions matter:
Does the customer’s negotiated price appear without requiring a phone call?
Can they reorder from their purchase history?
Can they turn an approved quote into an order?
Does the approval workflow reflect how their company actually approves purchases?
A strong path to purchase makes these options visible when they matter. It relies on account hierarchies, customer roles, approval workflows, inventory, pricing, payment terms, tax, shipping, and connections to ERP, CRM, PIM, and order management systems.
The goal is to make the correct next step obvious and ensure the process behind it works as expected.
This is also where the Intershop playbook’s “Elevate your experience” guidance becomes especially relevant. It focuses on understanding where customers encounter friction and strengthening the capabilities that help them complete complex purchasing tasks independently.
Self-service does not remove the need for sales expertise. It makes that expertise available at the right point, rather than requiring customers to ask for help simply to understand how to proceed.
Not every B2B organization sells through one channel, and not every customer should follow the same route.
Some buyers purchase directly through an e-commerce site. Others work through distributors, dealers, branches, representatives, or local service partners. A manufacturer may support online ordering for existing accounts while directing new prospects to sales. The most appropriate route may depend on the customer and the circumstances of the purchase.
Hokodo’s 2025 B2B Commerce Buyer Expectations Report found that 84% of B2B buyers want suppliers to offer several different sales channels, including e-commerce websites, marketplaces, telesales representatives, and physical stores. The challenge is therefore not simply offering several ways to buy. It is making those channels work together.
Yet, some buyers may never want to visit the website at all. Punchout catalogs can bring negotiated products and pricing directly into a customer’s procurement system, while electronic data interchange, or EDI, can support high-volume ordering and document exchange between businesses.
These are also customer journeys, even when the storefront is never visible.
For customers who do visit the site, every route must work as promised. Whether they are looking for a distributor or contacting sales, the experience should provide accurate information and connect them to the right destination with the necessary context. When online purchasing is unavailable, the alternative should be immediately clear.
This extends the idea of relevance from the first article. Relevance is more than showing the right products, pricing, and information. It is about presenting the right route to purchase or support.
The strongest experiences connect digital and human channels rather than treating them as separate systems. Customers should not need to understand how your organization is structured in order to do business with you. Instead, the experience should translate that complexity into a clear next step.
Helping clients create that clarity begins with discovery. Data Realm works closely with each organization to understand how its customers buy, how its teams operate, and how its systems support each sales channel. That foundation helps us identify friction early and make implementation decisions that connect immediate customer experience with the business’s longer-term goals.
A clear journey only works if customers can actually use it.
B2B buyers may visit from a desktop in an office, a tablet on a warehouse floor, or a phone at a job site. They may navigate with a keyboard, use assistive technology, enlarge text, or work in conditions where a crowded interface and unclear instructions become immediate barriers.
Accessibility is therefore not a finishing touch. It affects whether customers can understand product information, complete forms, navigate account tools, and place orders without unnecessary assistance.
Those barriers remain widespread. WebAIM’s 2026 analysis of one million home pages found detectable WCAG failures on 95.9% of them, with an average of 56.1 accessibility errors per page. Automated testing cannot identify every barrier, but these findings show how easily accessibility problems can remain embedded in otherwise functional websites.
Clear labels, readable content, keyboard navigation, useful error messages, responsive layouts, and forms that preserve progress all reduce friction. A feature has limited value if customers cannot locate, understand, or operate it.
Performance also shapes that experience, but it deserves closer attention of its own.
In the final article, we will look at speed and reliability alongside the measurement needed to improve the customer journey over time.
Start with the moments where customer intent is strongest.
Select a small number of important purchasing journeys and follow each one from the customer’s perspective. Look for the point where the experience becomes unclear, inaccessible, or disconnected from the systems supporting it.
Does the customer know how to proceed?
Does the process reflect how they actually purchase?
Do the systems behind the experience deliver what the interface promises?
Finding these barriers requires looking beyond individual screens to the systems and processes supporting the entire journey. Data Realm helps B2B organizations trace points of friction back to their underlying causes. In one recent assessment, prospective customers had no clear registration path, while distributor inquiries led to broken handoffs at the moment buyers were ready to act. We translated those findings into a prioritized plan focused on repairing the most consequential journeys first.
The goal is not to redesign every screen at once. It is to identify the friction preventing customers from moving forward and determine which improvements can have the greatest effect.
If your customers are encountering similar obstacles, visit Data Realm to learn how we can help create a clearer, more connected path to purchase.
Being found is only the beginning. The real test is whether buyers can actually buy from you.
What is to come
These are fundamentals four through six of the 9 fundamentals shaping B2B digital commerce.
In the final article, we move from customer experience to performance and measurement:
(7) Build a fast, reliable website
(8) Establish a reliable measurement foundation
(9) Turn data into actionable improvements
Once customers can find the right products and complete the right journey, the next challenge is understanding how well that experience performs and where it should improve.
References
Gartner. (2026, May 19). Gartner CSO & Sales Leader Conference: Day 1 highlights. Gartner.
Hokodo. (2025). 2025 B2B Commerce Buyer Expectations Report. Survey of 300 B2B buyers across the UK and Europe.
WebAIM. (2026). The WebAIM Million: The 2026 report on the accessibility of the top 1,000,000 home pages. Utah State University.