Most B2B sellers put real work into their eCommerce storefront: customer-specific catalogs, negotiated pricing, approval workflows, a buying experience built around how their customers actually order. Then a large account comes back with a simple request: can you connect to our procurement system?
For a lot of sellers, the answer is still no.
In our recent webinar, Katy Dunne, Director of Partnerships at TradeCentric, and Lance Owide, VP of B2B at BigCommerce, dug into why that answer is so costly, and what it takes to change it with PunchOut, PO automation, and invoice automation. Here’s what they covered.
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The request is coming from customers you already have
Enterprise buyers often can’t shop your site directly, even when they’d like to. Their purchasing runs through systems like Coupa, SAP Ariba, and Jaggaer, and governance rules require them to buy from inside those systems. As Lance put it, “It’s not that they don’t necessarily want to, it’s that they can’t.”
A joint BigCommerce and TradeCentric survey of B2B sellers put numbers to the problem: 60.9% of B2B sellers can fulfill none of the eProcurement integration requests they receive today. And more than half of respondents said 80% or more of those requests come from existing customers.
That second number matters. These aren’t cold prospects. They’re accounts already buying from you, asking you to make it easier to keep buying. When you can’t, that account’s growth goes to a competitor who can. Over time, that shows up as slower growth, lost preferred supplier status, and churn.
“It’s not just a technical feature request sitting in a backlog,” Katy said. “It’s actual growth and retention that you’re losing.”
Where it breaks down
When a storefront can’t talk to a buyer’s purchasing system, orders may stop, or they just go around the storefront. They get emailed, faxed, or rekeyed by hand. That introduces errors, slows down cash flow, and undoes the efficiency you built your eCommerce site to deliver in the first place.
Some teams try to build these connections themselves. Lance has seen how that goes: every procurement system connection is different, each one needs monitoring, and upgrades break things. What starts as a one-off for a single buyer turns into an ongoing maintenance load that grows with every new account. Meanwhile, a competitor that already has these integrations in place can say yes right away.
How BigCommerce and TradeCentric split the work
The good news: solving this doesn’t mean re-platforming. Your BigCommerce setup stays as it is. Products, pricing, custom catalogs, and customer accounts all live in BigCommerce. TradeCentric connects to that data and handles the integration into your buyers’ procurement systems.
When a buyer working in Coupa needs to place an order, they punch out to your BigCommerce catalog, build a cart, and bring it back into their own system for approval. Purchase orders and invoices then flow automatically between both sides.
And because buyers are punching into your storefront, it’s still your experience. You keep control of merchandising, pricing, and the catalog you’ve curated, instead of being reduced to a static list of items inside someone else’s system.
What sellers get out of it
Katy walked through four areas where sellers see the impact:
- Operational efficiency. Orders run through one tracked, automated flow instead of manual workarounds.
- Revenue growth. When buying from you is easy inside the buyer’s own system, order volume and repeat business go up.
- A better buying experience. Meeting buyers inside their workflow strengthens the relationship instead of straining it.
- Cost reduction. Less time spent fixing errors and chasing down what went wrong.
Independent research backs this up. Hobson & Company studied companies using TradeCentric and found:
- 60% reduction in time spent setting up and managing integrations
- 80% reduction in time spent on PO management
- 20% increase in eCommerce revenue from existing customers
- 30% reduction in days sales outstanding (DSO)
As Lance summed it up: the CRO is happy because revenue is up, the COO is happy because operations are cleaner, and the CFO is happy because cash comes in faster.
A real example: Office Relief
Office Relief, a joint BigCommerce and TradeCentric customer, was running on on-premise systems. Every order was manually rekeyed, older servers were expensive to maintain, and the setup couldn’t meet buyers’ integration requirements.
They migrated to BigCommerce, then turned on TradeCentric to automate PunchOut, POs, and invoices on top of it. Customer-specific catalogs and pricing now live in the storefront, and orders and invoices flow directly to each buyer’s system. The manual rekeying went away.
The result: orders move in seconds, there are fewer errors, and turnaround is faster. Just as important, Office Relief is stickier with its customers. When you’re sitting right inside a buyer’s procurement system, you’re the easy choice every time they reorder.
Lance also stressed a point worth repeating: this wasn’t two migrations. Office Relief moved once, to BigCommerce. TradeCentric is a pre-built integration that gets turned on, not a second project.
How to build the business case
If eProcurement is new to your team, Lance’s advice is to start with the people closest to customers:
- Ask your sales team if prospects are asking you to connect to their procurement systems, and whether any deals have stalled because you couldn’t.
- Ask your customer support team how often these requests come in from existing accounts.
- Pull that data together with the numbers above, and bring it to leadership as the case for investment.
In Lance’s experience, nine times out of ten, sales already has a list of accounts they couldn’t close for this exact reason.
Watch the full webinar on demand
The procurement gap is solvable, and you don’t have to rebuild your storefront to close it. If you missed the live session, the full conversation with Katy and Lance is available to watch anytime, including the complete survey findings, the Hobson & Company ROI breakdown, and the Office Relief story.
Watch the on-demand recording →
Ready to talk about your own procurement integration needs? Reach out to the TradeCentric team. We’re happy to walk through what it would look like for your business, and even help you pull together the numbers for that board deck.