Analytics in B2B e-commerce: 6 steps to collecting and analyzing data effectively

B2B analytics runs on different rules than B2C. Customers usually have accounts (guest checkout is rare), but one company often means several linked accounts and decisions that play out over a much longer time. Michał Zabielski proposes a six-step method for building analytics from the ground up.

Six steps

1. Customer lifecycle analysis - the full journey from first contact to the end of the relationship, with the key business events along the way.
2. Main business process analysis - back-office events (order fulfilment, returns, logistics) that customers often never see, but that need measuring alongside their journey. 3-4. Target audience and decision process - which customer traits actually drive the company’s business decisions.
3. Technology ecosystem review - taking stock of what’s already in place before picking another analytics tool.
4. Creative data collection methods - because data is value, and you need to offer something in return for it.

How to get data customers don’t have to give you

Zabielski lists concrete techniques: promotions that require creating an account, loyalty and referral programmes, personalisation (his example: a cosmetics brand that tailors product composition to a customer’s profile), closed VIP communities, and surveys built into the newsletter. Even without consent to track an individual user, cohort analysis and aggregated data still work.

Quality over precision

The closing recommendation: the trend matters more than any single measurement, analytics tools are never perfectly accurate anyway. Compare data over consistent periods (month over month, year over year), keep it standardised, factor in market context, and change one variable at a time to know what actually moved the result. Where possible, keep the data in-house to control its quality.

The episode also references episode 11 on personalization in B2B e-commerce.

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Want to build analytics that actually support decisions in your B2B company, not just produce charts? Get in touch with Endora, and we’ll start with your customer’s lifecycle.