Do Your B2B eCommerce Payment Methods Meet Millennial Buyer Demands?

No longer avocado-toast-munching college students, millennials now account for 35% of the overall workforce. In fact, 73% of B2B Millennials have a stake in technology purchases for their businesses, and a third are key decisionmakers. Accustomed to the ease of buying on Amazon in their personal lives, B2B purchase options are a notable sore point with the newest generation of B2B buyers. This friction results in pushback against sellers who don’t make it easy to complete – and pay – for orders. 

Allowing online purchasing is a good start for B2B sellers, but it’s just a start. Many business to business eCommerce sites today offer limited payment options, namely, credit cards. Swiping a card at checkout sounds easy enough, but 30 days later it’s time to reconcile purchases and the problems begin.  

When it comes to reconciling credit card purchases, millennials are staring down a proverbial hamster wheel of time-commitment each month. This painstaking exercise requires tracking down receipts, assigning GL codes, ensuring purchases are debited against the right business unit and checking for billing errors.  The process is ripe for human error and often results in a days-long back and forth with accounts payable teams to clarify purchases, given the lack of detail received on credit card statements.  

Of course, the monthly reconciling process isn’t the only reason millennials prefer to pay by invoice for B2B purchases. While navigating a worldwide economy on the limitless web, they’re discovering that their card can’t keep up.  

Many procurement cards have credit limits that make large purchases a nightmare to navigate. For these digital natives, picking up the phone to call a salesperson to place an order isn’t likely. Instead, they’ll search for a competitor whose online checkout experience offers payment terms. 

In addition to insufficient credit limits, corporate credit cards often have strict fraud controls that inhibit purchases on legitimate websites. Not only will credit card purchases on foreign eCommerce sites be blocked, but the action may also freeze the card entirely, preventing domestic purchases as well.   

Enabling credit card purchases is easy, but it might as well come with a ball and chain for your buyers. Between complicated, time consuming reconciling of credit card payments, issues with credit limits and an inability to make cross-border purchases, B2B purchasing with a credit card is anything but simple.  

What can B2B sellers do to meet the needs of the newest generation of B2B buyers? Add electronic invoicing at eCommerce checkout.  

TreviPay allows B2B buyers to pay by invoice and request Net 30 terms for online purchases. With easy integrations into eCommerce platforms, ERP, POS and CRM systems, leading B2B eCommerce players can provide for payment terms online in a few weeks.   

 The TreviPay plug-in delivers automated credit decisions within 30 seconds on credit lines up to $250,000, enabling credit application approvals and purchases in the same session. See how it works by watching our on-demand demo.