b2b online ordering, b2b ecommerce for distributors, trade accounts, customer adoption, phone orders
Will your trade customers really order online, or keep calling?
November 2, 2026
Some trade customers will order online and some never will. A straight split of who moves, what the surveys show, and a two-week call count to decide.
Executive summary
B2B online ordering wins some of your trade customers and never wins others, so plan for both. In surveys, 67% of B2B buyers prefer rep-free buying, yet distributors estimate only 13.5% of revenue comes online. Move the customers who already want it, keep the phone, and let the remaining calls be the ones that need a person.
I sell online ordering to distributors, so you would expect me to say every customer will switch. They will not. A contractor yard owner told me nearly everyone would still phone, and I believe that owner.
A typical vendor adoption guide treats this as a rollout problem: a launch campaign, onboarding, a first-order incentive, then re-engaging the holdouts. That assumes the holdout is a customer you failed to convince. Plenty of them just have a phone that works.
My position fits on one line. You are moving orders, not people.
If your customers just phone, you may be right about most of them. The question worth an afternoon is which of those calls should never have been calls.
How many customers actually order online?
Fewer than the headlines imply, and the number drops each time you move from what buyers say to what distributors book. Gartner found 67% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free experience. Distribution Strategy Group's 2025 survey, answered mostly by distributors, puts ecommerce at 13.5% of revenue.
These are different surveys of different people (McKinsey counts all digital channels across B2B, Distribution Strategy Group counts ecommerce at mostly distributors), so read them as a direction and not a funnel. The mechanism behind the drop is still plain. A preference counts a person. A revenue share counts dollars, and someone who likes websites can still phone in the big order.
A buyer who buys online is also not necessarily buying online from you. In a Channel Marketing Group and BigCommerce survey of 345 industrial supplies buyers and contractors, 58% of purchases happened outside traditional distributor relationships. BigCommerce sells ecommerce software, so read that as a vendor's claim. Even so, its own summary says "more than 60%" buy online, which leaves roughly a third or more with no online purchase, and the report says that when the tools fall short buyers "fall back on phone calls, texts, or in-person visits."
Be careful with the forecast that gets passed around. A 2024 piece sponsored by Motivate on Digital Commerce 360 repeats Gartner's line that 80% of B2B sales interactions would happen online by 2025. An interaction can be a page view. An invoice cannot.
At this pace, half of revenue online is about 2044
Straight-line math puts half of revenue online around 2044. Distribution Strategy Group's series runs 9.7% in 2023, 11.6% in 2024 and 13.5% in 2025, a gain of 1.9 points a year. Reaching 30% takes 16.5 / 1.9 = 8.7 more years, so about 2034. Reaching 50% takes 36.5 / 1.9 = 19.2 years, so about 2044.
That is my arithmetic, not their forecast. Three years is a thin line, the published summary gives no sample size, and the slope could bend. I still find it useful, because a plan that needs most orders online by next year fails on any slope near this one. My bet: the same survey reports an average under 25% in 2029. The straight line says about 21%.
The average hides huge differences between trades. In the same survey, 50% of JanSan respondents get more than 30% of revenue online, against 33% in Safety and 30% in Electronics. Gas and Welding, where ecommerce was uncommon a few years ago, now has more than 40% of respondents selling online. Building Materials, "heavy and bulky", sits among the least mature. An LED supplier told me most of its trade customers are already online.
Trade does not settle it, though. A janitorial supplier told me most orders arrive by WhatsApp or text, in the very category the survey calls most mature. Your customers are a better sample than your trade.
Owning a phone was never the barrier either. In a 2017 L.E.K. paper, 80% of UK tradesmen surveyed owned a smartphone, while "a large proportion" did not transact online. L.E.K.'s reasons: they collect and pay for heavy items on the way to a job site, they are conservative buyers, and merchants lacked effective sites. The survey is from 2016, British and limited to building products, and L.E.K. itself wrote "change is coming" right after those reasons, so take the reasons and not the percentages.
Who switches, and who never will
The customers who switch are the ones who wanted to all along, and how they already reach you usually gives them away. The table is my split, from sales calls I sit in and the surveys above. It carries no percentages because I do not have honest ones.
The surprise is the small new customer. At one dealer, online orders were mostly small orders from new customers, not existing accounts. That cuts against the pitch. If you bought a store to free up your counter, that result is a miss. If you wanted accounts you did not have, it is a hit.
Then there is the customer who wants off the phone and has no interest in your portal. A dealer's customers asked why they could not just send a picture of the two by four. The CMG and BigCommerce numbers leave room for that: 62.3% order on websites, 39% from apps, and 24.4% by text.
Liked is not the same as used. An industrial supplier built a quote app that customers liked and nobody used. Quotes still come by phone and email, and some of those customers drift to a marketplace's business arm anyway.
Installed is not used either. One hardware dealer's app passed 500 installs on its first day. That is a very good first day, and an install is not an order. I would not quote that number to you as adoption.
Why the phone gets better when they leave it
Every reorder that leaves the phone frees the line for a call that needs a person. That is the whole mechanism, and it works with no change in how you treat the customer who stays.
Distribution Strategy Group's write-up of the Gartner survey has reps "shifting toward consultative roles" on complex products, technical support and strategic accounts. At a supply house, that means the person who knows which fitting substitutes for the backordered one gets to spend the morning on that, instead of reading back part numbers.
One condition, and it decides everything. A portal only adds work if orders sit in a queue for someone to re-key. Then you have built a second phone that does not ring. Ask any vendor, me included, whether the order reaches your ERP without a person typing it.
Will the customers who leave the phone buy less? Rudy Abitbol, who writes a B2B eCommerce newsletter, argues the reverse: "The phone doesn't cross-sell." He reports that a $25B distributor analyzed over 100,000 accounts and found that customers on its B2B platform grew 20% faster. The company is unnamed, so I cannot check it, and growing accounts may simply be likelier to adopt. Treat it as a reason not to fear the move, and do not build a budget on it.
When going online will not help
Going online will not help a yard where the owner knows everyone by name and the customers are older. For that business a portal may change little for years, and "not yet" is the correct answer. I would rather lose that sale than have you pay for a website your customers politely ignore.
The same goes when most of your revenue is negotiated quotes. A quote app did nothing for the industrial supplier above, and customers liked that app.
Return is the other warning. In the Distribution Strategy Group survey, only 22% of respondents are very or highly satisfied with their ecommerce ROI, down from 23% a year earlier. The most satisfied group had ecommerce at 27% of revenue, against under 14% for all respondents. The summary does not say which came first. It does show the satisfied group sitting far from the average company.
"Not yet" has a shelf life. Forrester says Millennials and Gen Z were 64% of B2B buyers in 2022 and 71% a year later. That is cross-industry, with no survey base stated, so it does not describe your trade. It does tell you when to ask again: the day the person who buys at a big account changes.
Count two weeks of calls before you decide
Let your own inbound decide, because no survey has met your customers. For two weeks, whoever answers the phone, the email and the text marks each inbound in one of three piles, along with the account's name.
- Pile A: a repeat order for items the customer already knows.
- Pile B: a question your system already holds the answer to, such as order status, balance or an invoice copy.
- Pile C: something that needs a person, such as a spec, a substitute, a price negotiation or a problem on a job.
Then read the biggest pile against the table below. Note how it arrived, too. If A and B come mostly by text or WhatsApp, a portal answers the wrong question.
Neither a login nor a shared inbox does anything for Pile C.
Start small even when the tally says go. Take the accounts with the most Pile A marks, ask them whether they want it, and move only the ones who say yes.
What to tell the customer who keeps calling
Nothing. Take the order.
Mention the online option once to anyone reordering the same items, then drop it. A rewards program that pays extra for self-placed orders is a fair nudge. A phone line you stop answering is how you hand the account to someone who will answer.
Some of your customers will keep calling until one of you retires. Pick up.
Where ToolSwift fits
ToolSwift does not ask you to move everyone. Customers who want to serve themselves get one account with their orders, quotes, invoices and credit. Customers who text or use WhatsApp keep doing that, into one shared inbox on your company number. Customers who call keep calling: your team enters those orders in the same place as website and app orders, and they sync to the ERP you already run. If your tally comes back mostly Pile C, it will change little and "not yet" still stands; if it comes back A or B, book a demo.
FAQ
How do I get customers to use a B2B online ordering portal?
Start with the accounts that already reorder the same items by phone or email, and ask them first. Show them their own pricing and history, keep the phone open, and do not chase the rest until they ask or their buyer changes.
Will an app get more customers ordering than a website?
An app alone will not settle it. In the CMG and BigCommerce survey, 62.3% of buyers ordered on websites and 39% from apps, and some use more than one. That survey covers 345 industrial supplies buyers and contractors, and it comes from a vendor. Count orders, because an install is not an order.
Related in ToolSwift
Accounts your customers run themselves
Pricing, orders, invoices and credit in one login, on desktop and in the app.