9 KPIs Every B2B eCommerce Leader Should Be Tracking

In today’s digital-first world, B2B eCommerce isn’t just about getting online—it’s about growing smarter. To scale successfully, you need more than just traffic and transactions. You need actionable insights that tie directly to business outcomes. That’s where KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) come in. When tracked consistently, these metrics can reveal exactly what’s driving growth—and what’s holding you back. Below are nine game-changing KPIs every B2B eCommerce leader must track to build momentum, maximize ROI, and stay ahead of the competition.

1. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

   Customer Lifetime Value measures the total revenue a business can expect from a single customer over the life of their relationship. Because B2B deals often involve long sales cycles and high repeat potential, CLV is one of the best indicators of long-term profitability. Boosting CLV means investing in loyalty programs, tailored experiences, and cross-sell strategies that deepen customer engagement and increase relevance over time.

    

2. Average Order Value (AOV)

   AOV helps you understand how much customers are spending per transaction. For B2B eCommerce, increasing AOV often involves strategies like product bundling, tiered pricing, or volume discounts. Monitoring this metric helps you identify opportunities to increase revenue without acquiring more customers, often the most efficient path to growth.

    

3. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

   CAC reveals how much it costs to win a new customer. It includes marketing, sales, and onboarding expenses. In the B2B space, where deals can take months to close, controlling CAC is essential to maintaining profitability. When paired with CLV, this metric helps determine the health of your go-to-market strategy and where you may be overspending.

    

4. Conversion Rate

   This KPI measures how many of your customers return to make another purchase. A high repeat purchase rate is a sign of strong product-market fit, customer satisfaction, and operational reliability. In B2B, tools like contract pricing, reorder templates, and saved product lists reduce buyer effort and foster long-term loyalty.

    

5. Repeat Purchase Rate

   AOV helps you understand how much customers are spending per transaction. For B2B eCommerce, increasing AOV often involves strategies like product bundling, tiered pricing, or volume discounts. Monitoring this metric helps you identify opportunities to increase revenue without acquiring more customers, often the most efficient path to growth.

    

6. Sales Velocity

   Sales velocity tells you how quickly deals move through your pipeline. It reflects lead quality, sales enablement, and how well your digital experience supports buyer needs. A slowdown here might point to gaps in your self-service features, poor search usability, or too much manual intervention.

    

7. Churn Rate

   Churn rate measures the percentage of customers who stop buying from you during a given period. In B2B, high churn is especially costly given the investment to acquire and onboard accounts. To reduce churn, focus on visibility into customer behavior, proactive service, and personalized onboarding experiences that keep users engaged from day one.

    

8. Cart Abandonment Rate

   Cart abandonment is when users add items to a cart but don’t complete checkout. In B2B, this can be triggered by missing pricing details, login requirements, or confusing account restrictions. Reducing abandonment means simplifying the path to purchase—whether that’s through guest access, saved carts, or clearer purchasing workflows.

    

9. Search Effectiveness Rate (SER)

   Search is often the first interaction a buyer has with your site. The Search Effectiveness Rate (SER) measures how often users find and engage with relevant results. It’s calculated as:

    

   Search Effectiveness Rate =
   (Number of Searches Leading to Engagement / Total Number of Searches) x 100
   
   

   A high SER means your site is surfacing what buyers are looking for—critical in B2B, where catalogs are complex and terminology varies by customer. Supporting metrics like zero-result queries, search-to-conversion rate, and query refinement frequency give additional insight into where your search experience may be falling short.

    

Final Thoughts

B2B eCommerce success isn’t just about launching a digital storefront—it’s about understanding what drives performance. By tracking these nine KPIs, you can uncover what’s working, fix what’s broken, and fuel smarter growth. And while dashboards are a start, real impact comes from translating these numbers into action.

Tools like Product Workbench help teams get behind the metrics, diagnosing gaps in product data, pricing accuracy, and site performance that directly affect key KPIs. And if you're focused on improving search-related KPIs like SER and conversion rate, Search Fitness Program offers a structured way to test, measure, and optimize how buyers find what they need. Because in the end, what you measure only matters if you use it to get better.

Growth KPIs is the sixth of Layer One's 

See the other 13 Focus Points for Manufacturers and Distributors here!