Setting up a B2B e-commerce website can be a lucrative aspect of your business. It can also be an unmitigated disaster if you don’t set up the site correctly. All too often, companies make mistakes that make their websites unnecessarily cumbersome or not useful to their audience. As a result, they waste time and money, and miss out on valuable marketing potential and brand-building potential.

By avoiding the most common and destructive mistakes, though, your B2B website can be useful to potential partners and customers. If you are in the process of developing a new site for your small business, or your existing site isn’t performing to your expectations, consider whether any of these issues could be the culprit.

Inadequate Hosting

If you are spending money on Web design and development, why would you cut corners on hosting? Yet so many businesses do, settling for hosting service that doesn’t present their business in the best light. The foundation of an effective website is hosting with an e-commerce solution that understands the unique demands of an e-commerce site and doesn’t suffer from slow loading times, outages, and other issues that can plague hosting services.

If nothing else, keep in mind that “free” or low-cost services often keep their rates low through advertising — and you may not always have control over the advertisements that appear on your site. The damage that inappropriate or misaligned advertising can do to your brand cannot be understated.

Poor Navigation

Visitors to your site want to know who you are and what you do right away — studies show that users expect to see that information within 10 seconds of landing on your site. If they can’t find it easily, they are likely to get frustrated and leave. Navigation needs to be intuitive, requiring no more than two to three clicks for users to find what they are looking for.

Advanced search capability is also a must. Research shows that customers who use your on-site search capabilities and find what they need are three times more likely to convert than customers who don’t, so invest some time in developing more advanced search capabilities to ensure that every visitor can find what they need.

It’s Hard to Make a Sale

If a potential customer wants to talk with someone about your products or service, do they know how to reach you? Just as a cumbersome checkout process increases cart abandonments, not having adequate, easy-to-locate contact information can reduce your conversions. In addition to your forms, emails, and live chat functions, every page should include a phone number that prospects can call to talk with an actual person before making a purchase decision.

Not Offering Premium Content

B2B marketing is all about building relationships and making sales. Capturing visitor contact details is a key part of creating those relationships, but many people are reluctant to share their information. Offering premium content in exchange for an email address (or other contact information) is a growing strategy among B2B marketers. By offering certain content, such as case studies, whitepapers, and features that augment blog posts and other articles on your site, you give visitors a reason to share their information. Just be sure to offer valuable “free” content as well, so visitors will be excited about signing up.

Being Boring

Too many B2B marketers equate “serious” and “business” with “boring.” Instead of telling a compelling story using bold visuals, clear value propositions, and actionable content, too many businesses use stock photos and boring product descriptions. Research shows sites that use stock, manufacturer descriptions for products perform poorly in terms of SEO and customer retention, so spend some time building your brand story. Let your customers speak for you, and incorporate elements like video, infographics, and storytelling throughout every page. Think in terms of headlines and bullet points, not jargon and specs. Focus on get leads to call you — you can get into the specifics then.

Effective B2B e-commerce sites require a different approach than typical B2C websites. Still, many of the elements that attract customers to a shopping site apply to B2B: Make information easy to find, make it interesting, and make sure that everything works the way that it should. When you focus on these important aspects, your traffic will increase — along with your leads and conversions.