By SBFS Team
Most manufacturers did not choose their sales model; they inherited it. Reps, distributors, dealers, trade shows — a structure built for a buyer who wanted to be sold to. That buyer is retiring. The one replacing them researches alone, compares online, and expects to configure and price your product the way they buy everything else. This article looks at what the market data says about B2B digital buying, why configurable products are the hard case, and how manufacturers are adding a direct digital channel without burning the dealer network that built the business.
The size and trajectory of B2B e-commerce surprises executives who still picture it as a consumer phenomenon:
A quarter of all B2B sales flowing through e-commerce is not a trend to monitor; it is a channel your competitors are building while your product sits behind a "request a quote" form.
The demographic turnover inside purchasing departments explains the behavior shift. LinkedIn's 2025 B2B research, as reported by Digital Commerce 360, puts millennials at 73% of all B2B buyers and 44% of final purchasing decision-makers; the same report cites Salesforce research that buyers complete up to 70% of the buying process online before ever engaging a supplier.
Gartner's buying-journey research quantifies how little room is left for traditional selling: buying groups spend only about 17% of the purchase journey meeting potential suppliers — and roughly 27% researching independently online — leaving any single sales rep perhaps 5-6% of the buyer's total attention. And in Gartner's 2025 sales survey, 67% of B2B buyers said they prefer a rep-free experience outright.
The implication for a manufacturer is uncomfortable but clear: most of your selling now happens on your website, before you know the opportunity exists. If the website cannot configure, price, and quote your product, the research phase happens on a competitor's site that can.
Simple products moved online first because a SKU with a price fits a shopping cart. Configurable products — where every order is a combination of dimensions, materials, and options — stayed behind the quote form because a cart cannot represent them. That is an interface problem, not a product problem, and it is exactly what 3D product configurators solve: the buyer assembles a valid product, sees it, prices it, and submits either an order or a quote request that arrives complete.
The manufacturers who solve it collect a double dividend: they open the self-serve channel two-thirds of buyers prefer, and they eliminate the quoting bottleneck internally — the same rules that power the configurator produce the quote and the manufacturing BOM without engineering review. The e-commerce project and the operations project turn out to be the same project.
The standard objection — "our dealers will revolt" — assumes direct digital means bypassing the channel. In practice, manufacturers deploy the same platform in three coexisting modes:
What all three modes share is the requirement underneath: one platform that can represent your configurable catalog, apply per-audience pricing, and route orders — with organizations, roles, and permissions — rather than a consumer webshop with a price list.
A manufacturer's direct channel earns its keep when it can do five things: represent the full configurable catalog with real validity rules; show audience-correct pricing (list, customer-specific, dealer tiers); convert a configuration into an order, quote, or proposal without re-entry; give B2B accounts organizational structure — multiple users, roles, order history, saved configurations; and hand production exactly the data it needs. Evaluate platforms against those five, in that order — the visual layer is the easiest part to buy and the least decisive, as we argue in the buyer's guide.
Increasingly yes, but "direct" spans a spectrum: open e-commerce, dealer portals, and configure-then-refer models all count. The non-negotiable part is owning the digital experience where buyers now do most of their research; who fulfills the order is a channel-strategy decision you can make per product line and territory.
In the US: $2.1 trillion in 2023 (Digital Commerce 360), projected by Forrester to reach $3 trillion and roughly a quarter of all B2B sales by 2027. Growth has consistently outpaced overall B2B sales.
Yes — with a configurator rather than a cart. The configurator enforces buildability and pricing rules, so what reaches you is always valid and quotable. High-consideration purchases often still end in a human conversation; the difference is the buyer arrives with a complete, priced specification instead of a napkin sketch.
Not if the platform is built for coexistence: dealer portals with partner pricing, lead routing to territory dealers, and clear rules about which lines sell open. Dealers lose more to a competitor whose products are easier to specify than to a manufacturer who digitized the specification process for everyone, including them.
SBFS builds direct-channel platforms for manufacturers of configurable products — 3D configurators, B2B accounts and dealer portals, quotes, orders, and production management in one system. See what we do.
SBFS builds end-to-end commerce platforms for manufacturers of configurable products: 3D configurators, automatic BOM generation, and production management.