47% of Businesses Say the Pandemic Has Affected Their Payment Acceptance Capabilities

Companies of all types have had to adjust quickly to pandemic-driven changes in how businesses and individuals shop and pay. Business-to-business (B2B) companies that have yet to implement the digital payment tools their clients and partners have come to expect must work quickly to do so or risk losing business.

About 47% of B2B companies say the pandemic has affected their payment acceptance capabilities, according to the Global B2B Payments Playbook, a PYMNTS and Worldpay B2B Payments collaboration. An additional 42% of B2B companies report that pandemic has also impacted invoice delivery.

Get the report: Global B2B Payments Playbook

“The pandemic has provided a clear focus on improvement of workflows and technologies that process B2B payments, driving a move toward more diverse methods and channels of B2B payments — especially real-time payments,” Eric Bushman, vice president of solutions engineering at Worldpay B2B Payments, told PYMNTS.

Accelerating the Adoption of B2B eCommerce Tools 

The Jan. 6 announcement of the launch of a B2B eCommerce platform serving the fastening products industry is a recent example of industries’ moves to online communication and transactions.

Read more: B2B Marketplace Aims to Simplify Nuts-and-Bolts Procurement Processes

A recent study found that B2B firm representatives now view the ability to make sales over digital channels to be more important than they did prior to the pandemic. Forty-eight percent of those surveyed before the crisis stated that enabling digital sales for their customers was more important than doing so for traditional sales compared to the 66% who said the same after the pandemic hit.

While the pandemic appears to have accelerated the adoption of B2B eCommerce tools for firms, there are still several challenges companies must address if they want to compete in this evolving environment, including tying all aspects of the order-to-cash (O2C) process together on one holistic, digital platform. Firms building up their virtual sales abilities or moving to online marketplaces must also consider how factors such as payments must be innovated to keep up with this move.

Companies looking to digitize their B2B payments must also be sure that these solutions can integrate with the other parts of their payments flows, allowing them to seamlessly send all the necessary data as well. Allowing any disconnection can lead to costly errors and frustrations that can slow down invoices or payments, eliminating the speed and transparency granted by digital solutions. Connecting the eCommerce platform with other systems in the ordering process is critical for businesses taking the next step into the eCommerce world.

Meeting the Changing Expectations of Clients 

Part of the next set of challenges B2B firms face is that the expectations among their clients and customers are changing. B2B partners and vendors are shifting their standards for how quickly they expect transactions to finalize or payments to arrive. The funds from online B2B sales need to move even more quickly, as business clientele seek the same seamless interactions that have typified business-to-consumer (B2C) eCommerce for years.

Meeting these rising expectations will require more than simply listing one’s services or inventory on online marketplaces. B2B companies looking to keep pace within the global B2B eCommerce space must also implement payments tools or technologies such as instant payment networks or automation to reduce friction attached to invoices. Firms could also consider how self-service invoicing solutions or services that use automation for faster reconciliation could provide key benefits.

Companies must therefore consider what payment methods or features could prove most beneficial to their specific clients in this new environment and how they can best be applied.