The B2B digital market delivered more of the same in 2023, meaning manufacturers and distributors combined put up another year of strong sales online, according to data and analysis from the recently published 2024 B2B Market & Customer Experience Report from Digital Commerce 360.
B2B ecommerce is now a significant mainstream sales channel with the digital sales taking place on ecommerce sites, password-protected sites and apps growing 17% to about $2.1 billion from $1.95 billion in 2022.
All in, B2B ecommerce grew multiple times faster than total U.S. business sales.
B2B market to thaw after 2023 freeze
The overall business market for manufacturing and distribution ended the year in a deep freeze. In 2023, the combined sales of U.S. manufacturers and distribution companies were flat at $14.87 trillion. That is in sharp contrast to how buyers and sellers ended 2022, when total B2B sales grew 15%.
But high interest rates, nervous consumers and businesses tightening spending based on a prediction of a hard (or soft) recession, along with other factors such as lingering supply chain issues, put the brakes on business growth in 2023.
Manufacturing sales grew just 3%, totaling $6.82 trillion in the last 12 months compared with $6.59 trillion in the prior year. In comparison, distributors fared even worse, with combined sales that declined by about 3% to $8.04 trillion from $8.26 trillion in 2022.
The market for B2B products and services is expected to rebound in 2024, with many economists forecasting the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) to grow between 1.6% and 2%.
But regardless of how the overall American business economy performs in the year ahead, there are a couple of certainties: The continued growth in B2B digital commerce will drive — or at least highly impact — the expansion of business sales overall in 2024.
Business buyers today use anywhere between three and 10 channels to research, negotiate and purchase goods and services from sellers. Those channels can include online, such as ecommerce sites and apps, B2B marketplaces and e-procurement, and offline, including branches and manual orders entered by sales reps.
More Charts & Data Stories
Check back soon for more Charts & Data Stories, like our weekly B2B infographics. Here’s last week’s. We add new content regularly.
Sign up
Sign up for a complimentary subscription to Digital Commerce 360 B2B News, published 4x/week. It covers technology and business trends in the growing B2B ecommerce industry. Contact Mark Brohan, senior vice president of B2B and Market Research, at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @markbrohan. Follow us on LinkedIn and be the first to know when we publish Digital Commerce 360 B2B News content.