What a manufacturer or distributor website needs

Say you manufacture stainless steel pipe fittings. You sell through a few dozen distributors and directly to a handful of contractors. This story is invented to show the problem.

An engineer at a contractor has a drawing that calls for a 2-inch threaded elbow in a specific grade. She types the size and material into a search engine and reaches your site. The home page has a photo of the factory floor and a paragraph about your history. The catalog is an 80-page PDF. She opens it on her phone, pinches and scrolls through tables for a few minutes, and cannot tell whether your elbow carries the pressure rating she needs.

She closes the tab and opens a competitor's. Her purchasing colleague never hears your name.

Nothing about that site was ugly or wrong. It was built to introduce a company, and she needed to check a product. Those are different jobs, and the second one decides who gets the quote.

Each row is covered in more depth below.

Trade buyers rarely browse. They arrive with a part number, a size and material, a standard they must meet, or a problem to solve. The site has to meet them at that level.

• Part numbers and model codes search exactly. Site search should return the right product when someone types a code, including your competitors' codes if you publish a cross-reference.
• Filters come from the buyer's specification, not your org chart. Size, rating, material, connection type and standard are filters. "Division A products" is not.
• Every filter should match something the buyer can see in the list. Baymard Institute, which runs large-scale ecommerce usability research, reports, in a 2019 benchmark, that 38% of the sites it benchmarked do not offer filters for all the information they display on each list item. If a product card shows size and connection, the buyer expects to filter by size and connection.

Filters cost money to build and maintain. Nielsen Norman Group points out that faceted navigation, meaning one filter per aspect of the content, is "significantly more expensive to create and maintain" than simple filtering, and advises checking that users genuinely need it before investing. For a catalog of a few dozen products, good categories and a table may be enough. For hundreds, filters are what the buyer came for. How to structure that catalog is the subject of putting a B2B product catalog online.

On the product page, the specification table is the main content, not a footnote.

Baymard tested sites selling electronic components and machinery and recommends showing product listings as tables on desktop, so engineers can scan and compare many attributes at once. For phones it recommends a list view, because tables force too much scrolling there. That affects design decisions: the same product data has to appear two ways.

For the table itself, Baymard's guidance on spec sheets is practical:

• Group specifications under descriptive headings instead of one long list.
• Put the most important specifications in a short summary at the top, and repeat them in the full list. Baymard found only 3% of the sites it benchmarked did this.
• Use alternating row shading or similar styling so the eye can follow a label to its value.
• Keep one column of specifications, because multiple columns look like a comparison feature.

Nielsen Norman Group's research on B2B sites adds what buyers look for beyond the numbers: integrations, standards compliance and physical connection requirements. If your product has to fit something the buyer already owns, say what it fits, on the page.

Technical buyers need files: datasheets, drawings, certificates, installation manuals. Attach each file to the product it describes, show its date or revision, and remove superseded versions. An old datasheet in circulation is a risk to you as well as to the buyer.

Also write the key figures on the page itself. Google can index PDF files, so a PDF is not invisible to search. But a buyer on a phone, and anyone trying to link or quote a figure, is better served by text on the page than by a file they must open, so treat the PDF as the formal record and the page as the answer.

Nielsen Norman Group's guidance for B2B sites is to show pricing where you can, and where prices vary, to present prices in "common scenarios" so buyers can judge whether a quote is worth requesting. Hiding every price behind a form is a choice with a cost: the buyer who cannot tell whether you are in their range may leave without asking.

Many manufacturers cannot publish prices, and for good reasons: price depends on quantity, grade, freight or account terms. That does not mean the site should have a general "Contact us" form. It should have a request path built for buying: add products and quantities as you browse, send one request, and arrive at the right person with everything needed to quote. That path is a topic of its own: see request-a-quote forms that get answered.

If you sell through distributors, decide and say plainly where a buyer should go. Some manufacturers take direct orders above a certain size and send the rest to a distributor. A "where to buy" page or a distributor finder is a legitimate answer. Silence is not.

Even on a well-built catalog, some questions need a human. Nielsen Norman Group recommends offering several ways to contact a B2B organization, and says an email address and phone number are the minimum. Do not replace both with a form.

Behind the scenes, decide who receives what. A request about a product line should reach whoever owns that line. A distributor enquiry should reach whoever manages distributors. A site with one inbox for everything makes every buyer wait for someone to forward their message.

Three kinds of visitor share your site, and Nielsen Norman Group describes the underlying split as "choosers" and "users": people who decide and people who will use the product.

• Engineers and technical staff want specifications, drawings, compatibility and standards.
• Purchasing managers want terms, minimum quantities, lead times where you can keep them true, and the documents needed to approve a supplier.
• Distributors and resellers want to know how to stock your range and where to find information they can reuse.

You do not need three sites. You need navigation that lets each find their pages quickly, and product pages that put the technical data first and the commercial details beside it.

• A full shopping cart, if your prices are negotiated. A cart implies a fixed price. A quote list tells the truth.
• Stock levels or lead times your systems cannot keep accurate. A figure that was right last month and is wrong today costs more trust than no figure.
• A news section with nothing to say. An empty or stale news page tells a buyer the company is quiet. Publish when you have product information, application guidance or certifications to add.
• Features that are slower than the buyer's own habit. If a login, a configurator or a comparison tool takes longer than a phone call or the buyer's own spreadsheet, they will keep using the phone and the spreadsheet.

A website will not repair messy product data. If your sizes are written three different ways across your records, the filters will show it. It will not replace the sales relationship with large accounts, who will still call. And it will not make an unclear offer clear: if your range, your regions and your minimums are not decided, the site cannot decide them for you.

We drew an illustrative B2B catalog as an original concept to show how we work. It is not a client project, its products and stock are invented, and no results are claimed for it. Its decisions line up with the five jobs: the specification filter stays fixed at the left of every catalog view, size and connection appear on every product card, every product has an "Add to quote list" button, and success is defined as quote lists sent, not visits. Figure 12 shows them. Our B2B websites page explains how we plan this kind of site.

For how we plan catalog and quote sites, see our B2B and manufacturer websites page. The guide on putting a B2B product catalog online covers the catalog structure in detail, and SEO for manufacturers and industrial suppliers covers how buyers find you. When you want to talk about your own site, you can discuss your project.

Nielsen Norman Group, B2B vs. B2C Websites: Key UX Differences (a usability researcher, May 29, 2016): https://www.nngroup.com/articles/b2b-vs-b2c/

Nielsen Norman Group, What B2B Designers Can Learn from B2C About Building Trust (a usability researcher, September 1, 2019): https://www.nngroup.com/articles/b2b-trust-from-b2c/

Nielsen Norman Group, Filters vs. Facets: Definitions (a usability researcher, March 16, 2014): https://www.nngroup.com/articles/filters-vs-facets/

Baymard Institute, B2B Electronics: Use Product Tables to Display Product Listings on Desktop: https://baymard.com/blog/use-product-tables-for-desktop-product-listings

Baymard Institute, Product Spec Sheets: 4 Ways to Make Spec Sheets More Scannable: https://baymard.com/blog/spec-sheet-scannability

Baymard Institute, E-Commerce Product List Usability: Report and Benchmark (filters for all displayed list item information): https://baymard.com/blog/ecommerce-product-lists-report-and-benchmark

Google Search Central, File types Google can index: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/indexable-file-types