Why B2B Businesses Should Stop Using B2C E-commerce Templates

B2C e-commerce templates are seductive. They’re quick to launch, relatively inexpensive and look polished straight out of the box. For B2B businesses under pressure to “get online” or modernise quickly, they can feel like a sensible shortcut. In practice, they’re one of the most common reasons B2B platforms fail to deliver commercially.

The issue isn’t quality, it’s fit.

B2B buying behaviour is fundamentally different

Consumer sites are designed around impulse, emotion and simplicity. B2B buying is the opposite. It’s deliberate, repeat-driven and tied to commercial relationships that exist beyond the website.

B2B buyers expect to log in and see their pricing, their products and their terms. They need to reorder quickly, manage multiple users, download documentation and sometimes route purchases through approvals. These aren’t edge cases. They’re core requirements.

Most B2C templates don’t support this natively. They can be customised, but those customisations quickly pile up and start working against the framework they’re built on.

Templates push cost into the future

One of the biggest misconceptions about templates is that they save money. They often do initially. Over time, however, the cost shifts from build to maintenance.

As business needs grow, teams bolt on plugins, workarounds and patches to compensate for missing functionality. Each addition increases complexity and technical debt. Changes take longer, updates become risky, and performance starts to suffer.

From a leadership perspective, this is where frustration sets in. Investment continues, but the platform feels increasingly fragile and resistant to change.

Marketing and sales pay the price

Templates also constrain how effectively marketing and sales teams can work. When content structures are rigid and product data models are shallow, campaigns struggle to land cleanly. Landing pages are harder to tailor, account-based experiences are limited, and personalisation becomes superficial.

Sales teams feel this too. If the platform can’t reflect negotiated pricing or customer-specific catalogues, they have to remain heavily involved in transactions that should be self-service. Instead of reducing workload, the site adds another layer of complexity.

This undermines one of the main reasons businesses invest in e-commerce in the first place.

Custom doesn’t mean over-engineered

Rejecting templates doesn’t mean building everything from scratch. It means designing around real buying processes rather than forcing the business to adapt to a pre-defined structure.

Well-designed B2B platforms balance flexibility with control. They support complex pricing and catalogue rules while remaining manageable and scalable. Importantly, they’re built to evolve as the business grows, not just to meet today’s requirements.

This approach also makes ongoing optimisation easier. Changes align with how the platform was intended to work, rather than fighting against it.

Shortcuts rarely survive contact with growth

Templates can work for simple, early-stage use cases. The problems usually appear once volume, complexity or ambition increases. At that point, the “quick win” becomes a constraint that’s difficult and expensive to escape.

For businesses serious about using digital channels to drive revenue, the question isn’t how quickly a site can be launched. It’s whether the platform can support the way customers actually buy, now and in the future.

Choosing the right foundation early avoids painful compromises later and allows e-commerce to become an asset rather than a limitation.