A heating engineer opens a boiler and finds the part he expected is not the part fitted. He is in a customer's house, the heating is off, and he needs the right item today.
He gets out a phone with one hand. The supplier's site wants him to log in, the login screen does not remember him, the password reset goes to an email he cannot open easily, and the search returns forty results he cannot filter on a small screen.
He rings a competitor's trade counter instead. They confirm stock in ninety seconds and put it behind the counter with his name on it. That is the whole story of why one supplier grows and the other does not.
The first failure: the site assumes a desk
Multi column layouts, small controls, long forms and tables that do not fit. Built by people sitting down, for people who are not, and the gap is visible within ten seconds of picking up a phone.
The second failure: the login defeats everybody
Trade pricing sits behind an account, the session expires, the password is forgotten and the reset arrives in an inbox nobody can reach with cold hands on a site. Every step here loses a share of buyers.
The third failure: search does not work the way trade thinks
Buyers search by part number, by what it does, or by what it fits. A search built around marketing category names returns nothing useful for any of those.
The fourth failure: stock is not shown clearly
The whole question is whether the item exists and where. A site that shows availability after three clicks has already lost to a telephone call, which is the ground in stock and lead time questions on trade ecommerce sites.
The fifth failure: collection is not offered
A buyer who needs something today wants to know which counter has it and whether it can be held. Delivery tomorrow is not an answer to the question being asked.
The sixth failure: reordering is not simple
Most trade buying is repeat buying. Order history, saved lists and a one action repeat remove most of the friction entirely, which is covered in reordering and order history questions on trade stores.
The seventh failure: the enquiry arrives before the counter opens
Trade starts early. An enquiry at half past six is a real order, and a site whose support begins at nine has already missed the busiest decision hour of the day.
The eighth failure: nobody can just ask a question
Sometimes the buyer does not know the part number and needs to describe the problem. No form handles that, and the alternative is a telephone call that may not be answered.
The ninth failure: the account questions block the order
Credit position, purchase order reference and whether this branch can bill the account. All unanswerable from a phone and all capable of stopping the transaction.
The tenth failure: photographs are not usable
A buyer holding a broken part wants to send a picture and ask what it is. This is the single most natural trade interaction and almost no B2B site supports it.
The eleventh failure: the same pattern appears everywhere
Any business whose customers are working while they order has this problem, which is described in corporate lunch orders that arrive after the office closes.
The twelfth failure: nobody measures mobile separately
Suppliers look at overall conversion and never see that the phone experience is where their best customers are losing patience.
The fix: answer in ninety seconds on a phone
An assistant that identifies a part from a description or a photograph, confirms stock at the nearest counter, states the account price, holds the item and takes the purchase order reference gives an engineer standing in a cold house exactly what the competitor's counter gave him. The mobile side of it is covered in how to add a chatbot to your mobile site. Start at try, see features, and the sector view sits under wholesale distribution.