Transforming Invoice Payments: Improving Accounts Receivable with BigCommerce

In B2B commerce, efficient payment processes are crucial for maintaining healthy cash flow and fostering strong customer relationships — especially in today’s fast-changing B2B selling space. As more brands move their catalogs online and begin offering a self-service option to their customers, it’s more important than ever for brands to offer a fast, easy, and efficient checkout experience. 

In a recent BigCommerce B2B Buyer Report, we found that 8% of respondents said they stopped purchases from a supplier when their preferred payment method was not available, while 15% of respondents said that they would abandon their cart if the checkout process was too complicated.

While payments for direct-to-consumer (DTC) sales are rather cut and dry, B2B payments are about more than just closing out a transaction. They are about enabling customers to pay using the flexible terms they expect, and accommodating the various payment methods they have approved internally. Let’s take a look at how B2B payments work online, in addition to some of the best practices your business can follow for creating a customer-centric payment experience. 

How do B2Bs currently process payments online? 

B2B transactions often operate on payment terms, requiring systems that can handle invoicing, credit management, and reconciliation seamlessly. Moreover, the ability to accept diverse payment options — from credit cards to bank transfers and digital wallets — ensures that businesses can meet their customers’ preferences, streamline operations, and reduce friction in the purchasing process. This flexibility is essential for driving customer satisfaction, loyalty, and ultimately, business growth.

In recent years, B2B sellers have been moving away from offline invoice payments, and instead switching to online payments built into the B2B buyer workflow. Moving an organization's traditional offline invoicing process to an online portal offers numerous benefits, including: 

• Faster payment times and improved cashflow: Online invoicing accelerates the payment process, boosting cash flow.

• Enhanced tracking and reporting: Real-time insights into credit availability, large order placement, and outstanding balances enable informed decision-making.

• Improved buyer experiences: Our data show that B2B buyers want to, and prefer to, transact online, with over 50% of B2B buyers making online purchases multiple times per week. By bringing invoices online, sellers can vastly improve loyalty and customer satisfaction.

Best practices for B2B payment processing

While many businesses know that selling and invoicing online would be good for business, putting this into practice takes careful planning and execution. Businesses must take a few key details into consideration along the way. 

Choose the right payment gateway. 

What is the right payment gateway for your business? This can depend on many factors: the preferred partner for your sector, the best available rates, or the payment integration for your ERP, just to name a few. 

We work with some of the largest payment gateways in the industry, like Adyen, PayPal, Stripe, and more, allowing your business to choose the right gateway for your business. 

Create a fantastic user experience. 

Transacting online should be easy. It should be a process that is seamlessly built into your online shopping experience. But creating this experience is easier said than done. A modern B2B buyer experience needs to have a few key elements to ensure its success. But first and foremost, your site needs to be functional. 

Get basic functionality right.

B2B sellers need to get the basics of a website right before moving on to bigger and better functionality. While there are some specific features that B2B buyers expect from their purchasing experience, many of these basic functions come from their experiences in the DTC space: accurate product and shipping information, a quick-loading website, and quality customer support, just to name a few. 

Look for potential technology partners that may be able to help alleviate some of these stresses. Customer service, for example, could benefit from implementing a live chat function, allowing buyers to speak directly to a representative from the site. Merchants could also explore utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) to help reduce the burden on customer support. 

Offer robust product information to help buyers make decisions.

Whether you are selling B2B or DTC, product information — such as technical specifications, high-quality imagery, customer reviews, and real-time inventory — is vital for ecommerce success. B2B buyers across regions value and reward robust and accurate product information, especially as purchasing frequency decreases. 

In order to manage product information for larger catalogs, merchants may benefit from investing in a product inventory management (PIM) system to help manage large quantities of product data.

Integrate and reconcile with your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software. 

Once your business has the basic website functionality set, it’s time to turn to more robust functionality, like ERP integrations. Whether you’re using QuickBooks, NetSuite, Acumatica, Microsoft Dynamics, or any other ERP, easy reconciliation is key. Don’t have an in-house development team ready to take on the integration? That’s why it’s important to work with an ecommerce platform that has an extensive network of technology and agency partners that know the platform inside and out. 

BigCommerce works with thousands of agency and technology partners that specialize in integrating SaaS or custom solutions with our platform. It’s important to remember, however, that in-house and external teams both come with their own set of pros and cons. Evaluate your technical needs and choose the solution that works best for you. 

BigCommerce success story: Ballard Industrial

A great example of B2B payment success is industrial distributor Ballard Industrial. They transitioned from a physical catalog and manual order entry to an online self-service ordering system using BigCommerce. Leveraging BigCommerce’s advanced B2B functionality, they were able to assign membership roles to each B2B customer account, providing a personalized self-service experience, all integrated back into their ERP system.

Since switching to BigCommerce and implementing a modern, online payment processing system, Ballard Industrial has seen an 83% increase in users, a 79% increase in sessions, and a 45% increase in page views. 

The final word

The world of B2B commerce is changing. While offline interactions still provide value for buyers and sellers alike, the vast majority of transactions are moving online. That’s why it’s vital for B2B sellers to have a high-quality, frictionless purchasing experience on their site. 

One of the most important steps in that experience is checkout. B2B buyers are used to paying with unique terms — sometimes vastly different than those used by DTC buyers. Finding an ecommerce platform that allows your business to operate with invoices and other B2B-specific payment options is vital for online success. 

With over 1,000 B2B Edition projects completed, BigCommerce offers cost-effective integrations supported by various payment processors, easing the transition to online B2B ordering and payments. 

Ready to take the next step? Contact the BigCommerce team to schedule a consultation and learn how leading B2B manufacturers, distributors, and wholesalers have transformed their buying experience with more efficient order placement and payment acceptance.

Want to see how BigCommerce is helping propel B2B commerce into the future? Learn more about BigCommerce B2B edition here.