Product data rarely comes up in board meetings or campaign planning. It is still one of the most common reasons a B2B store underperforms.
When sales from the site stall or customers drift back to ordering by phone, the cause is often confidence rather than demand. Buyers are ordering parts that have to fit, comply and arrive on time. If the information on the page does not hold up, they will check somewhere else before they commit.
What it looks like from the buyer's side
A specification that disagrees with the data sheet. A compatibility note that is missing. An image of a different model. Once a buyer spots one error, they start doubting the rest of the page. If the spec is wrong, is the stock figure right? Is that really their price?
They rarely abandon the basket in a way you can see. They phone sales, email support, or save the order and never come back. In the reporting it looks like normal behaviour, while sales and support absorb the cost of answering questions the site should have answered.
Why search and filters stop working
Plenty of B2B stores have search and filters that look fine and still fail buyers. The logic is usually not the problem. The data underneath it is. One supplier calls it "length", another "L", a third puts it in the description. Units vary, and near-duplicate products arrive from different feeds.
So filters remove too much or too little, search returns a long list of half matches, and buyers give up narrowing things down. A new design will not help, because a filter can only be as good as the attributes behind it.
Category structures often cause the same problem from another direction. They follow the supplier list, the warehouse layout or a category model from ten years ago. That makes sense internally and means very little to a buyer comparing two options. Navigation should follow how customers choose between products.
Why distributors feel it most
Distribution makes all of this harder. Catalogues are large, suppliers update constantly, and prices vary by region and account. Teams adapt with spreadsheets. An update gets made in one place and missed in another, and the knowledge of which source is right lives in someone's head.
Over time the site drifts away from being a reliable source of truth, and growth starts to be limited by how reliable the information is rather than how much demand there is. Each new supplier adds inconsistency, so search gets worse as the range gets bigger, which is the opposite of what the business wants from growth.
Rules matter more than effort
Many businesses try to fix data by working harder at it. Without one managed source of truth and agreed rules for each attribute, the problem comes back as fast as people tidy it.
What works is deciding which system owns each piece of product information, normalising supplier feeds on the way in, and agreeing the attributes each product type must have before it goes live. Whether that needs a PIM or can be done with what you already have depends on the catalogue. The tool matters less than the rules.
The same data feeds the ERP, marketplaces, procurement punchouts and email. Getting it right in one governed place makes those integrations steadier as well, instead of each one needing its own corrections.
Where to start
If buyers struggle to find products you know you stock, look underneath the design. Pick one busy category, compare its attributes across suppliers, and count how many filter values mean the same thing. It is usually a quick way to see how big the job is.
It is not glamorous work, but it is one of the most cost-effective improvements a B2B store can make. Product data is one of the things our Adobe Commerce audit covers, and if the fix involves your ERP or PIM, see integrations.
