Companies are responding to customer demands – and the growing threat from wholesaler sites.
The numbers are eye-popping: Forrester Research estimates B-to-B e-commerce sales will hit $889 billion this year, grow 7.3 percent annually for each of the next three years, then jump another 7.9 percent in 2021 to hit $1.184 trillion. During that same period of time, e-commerce's share of total B-to-B sales is projected to grow from its current level of about 11 percent to more than 13 percent.
One factor behind that rapid growth is that, because B-to-B marketers were slower out of the e-commerce...