Forty-two percent of UK B2B businesses have no ecommerce tech stack in place. That figure comes from The Inevitable Shift report, produced by Commerce with YouGov and PayPal, and it describes a straightforward commercial problem: businesses that cannot sell online are losing orders to competitors who can. What makes it worse is that 44% of UK B2B firms plan no technology investment at all in 2026, which means the gap is not closing of its own accord. For the businesses on the wrong side of it, every month of inaction is another month of orders going to whoever built their digital sales capability earlier.
Some sectors are in a particularly exposed position. In hospitality and leisure, 80% of businesses lack an ecommerce stack and 61% have no plans to invest in technology this year — a combination that leaves a significant share of an entire sector watching from the sidelines whilst a smaller group of early movers consolidates its position. Those early movers are already reporting measurable results: among IT and telecoms businesses that integrated AI with ERP and payment systems, 43% say it has improved commercial performance, and that advantage compounds with time.
If you are a B2B director who has delayed building an ecommerce presence, the question worth asking is what your current absence from that channel is costing you in orders you are not seeing, from buyers who have already moved their purchasing behaviour online and are placing those orders with someone else. Online B2B sales are growing. The only open question is whether your business is part of that growth.
Payment flexibility is where 60% of large B2B firms are losing ground right now
Sixty-five percent of large B2B organisations with 250 or more employees say payment flexibility is important to them. Yet 60% still rely on traditional bank transfers as their primary payment method, buy now, pay later is used by just 8% of B2B firms, and trade credit — the standard mechanism for managing cash flow in commercial purchasing — is in place at only 16%. That gap between what buyers say they want and what sellers are actually offering is a direct friction point in the sales process, and it is costing sales.
This is where the choice of ecommerce platform matters practically. WooCommerce, built on WordPress, supports trade credit and BNPL payment options through plugins that connect directly to the checkout. The B2B for WooCommerce plugin allows you to set customer-specific payment terms, enabling net-30 or net-60 invoicing directly within the checkout flow. For BNPL, payment gateway plugins supporting Klarna or Hokodo (which is built specifically for B2B transactions) can be added to a WooCommerce store and configured under WooCommerce > Settings > Payments. These are standard plugin installations, not complex integrations. The technical barrier to offering flexible payment terms is low; the commercial cost of not offering them — losing an order to a competitor whose checkout supports the payment method your buyer prefers — is real and ongoing.
Why WooCommerce is a practical foundation for B2B firms building from scratch
For a B2B business with no ecommerce stack at all, the decision about where to start is as important as the decision to start. A bespoke build is expensive and slow. A hosted SaaS platform locks you into someone else’s pricing structure and limits what you can configure. WooCommerce, running on WordPress, gives you a self-hosted platform you own and control, with a plugin architecture that supports B2B-specific requirements: customer group pricing, minimum order quantities, quote requests, account-based purchasing, and the payment flexibility the data shows buyers want.
For businesses already running a WordPress site, the path to a functioning B2B store is shorter than most directors assume. WooCommerce installs as a plugin, and the core B2B functionality — restricted catalogue access, trade pricing, account registration with manual approval — can be configured without custom development, using plugins such as B2B for WooCommerce or WholesaleX, alongside an existing marketing site and without disruption to current operations. The cost comparison with enterprise platforms reinforces the case: a properly configured WooCommerce B2B build costs a fraction of what a Salesforce Commerce Cloud or SAP implementation demands, with none of the annual licensing fees. For a business that has been delaying investment because the perceived cost felt prohibitive, that removes the main objection.
There is one consequence of continued delay that does not appear in the headline statistics but is worth naming directly. B2B buyer behaviour is being shaped right now by the platforms buyers are already using. When a procurement manager at one of your customers places an order with a competitor through a clean, account-based online portal, that experience becomes their reference point, and your phone-and-email ordering process starts to feel unreliable rather than merely slower. Changing a buyer’s established habits is harder than meeting them before those habits form. The firms building now are setting the standard their buyers will expect from everyone else.
If your business has no ecommerce stack and you want to understand what a WooCommerce B2B build would actually involve for your specific situation, including the payment configuration options that the data shows most firms are missing, get in touch with me at The WordPress Guy for a scoping conversation. With 44% of UK B2B firms planning no investment this year, the window to build before your sector consolidates around a smaller group of digitally capable competitors is measurably shorter than it was twelve months ago.
