You spent serious money on e-commerce. Now you’re staring at a cart revenue number that makes the investment look like a mistake.
Your sales team isn’t surprised.
“Our customers don’t buy online.”
They may be right about where customers place the order. They may be wrong about what started it.
Your shopping cart shows you the orders your website finishes. It doesn’t show you all the orders your website starts.
Your Customers Use Your Website. They May Not Buy There.
Consider a buyer looking for a replacement component.
They search online, land on your product page, review the dimensions and specifications, and decide the product looks right.
But they still need to confirm availability, customer-specific pricing, compatibility, or an acceptable substitute.
So they call their salesperson. The salesperson answers the question and receives the purchase order by email.
What does the shopping cart report?
Nothing.
The website helped the buyer find the product, evaluate it, and move toward the order. But because the transaction ended in an inbox instead of the cart, the site gets no credit.
That’s normal in distribution. Shopping and buying aren’t always the same activity.
Shopping is how your customer figures out what they need. Buying is how they complete the transaction. One may happen on your website while the other happens through email, a branch, customer service, or a salesperson.
Distribution Strategy Group’s customer research confirms that pattern. Kristen Thom, then director of product management at White Cup, made the same practical point: the sale doesn’t always happen on the e-commerce site.
That matters because the way you measure e-commerce affects how much you’re willing to invest in it.
As Ian Heller of Distribution Strategy Group has reasoned, distributors can underinvest in digital because they give too much weight to shopping-cart revenue and too little credit to the sales the website helped create.
Your e-commerce site has two revenue jobs:
- Complete straightforward transactions online.
- Feed valuable sales and service conversations when the order benefits from your team’s involvement.
Keep improving the first job. Make checkout easy. Support online ordering and reordering. Get pricing, availability, product data, and account information right.
But don’t stop there.
The bigger question is whether your website is built to create the second path
Key takeaway
Your shopping cart shows you the orders your website finishes. It doesn’t show you all the orders your website starts.
Give Interested Buyers a Direct Path to Your Team
The second job isn’t catching buyers who failed at checkout.
It’s connecting interested buyers with the expertise that makes your company worth buying from.
DSG’s customer research found that professional sales representatives, customer service, and technical expertise were the leading drivers of improved satisfaction. Your website is essential, but your people often deliver the value customers remember.
Your e-commerce site should feed those conversations, not try to replace them.
Yet many product pages still give buyers two practical choices:
- Add the product to the cart
- Figure out what to do next
A phone number in the header isn’t enough. Neither is a generic Contact Us form that strips away everything the buyer was just doing.
Every important product page should answer three questions:
- Can I buy this now?
- Can I reach the right person if I need help?
- What will happen after I ask?
The exact answer depends on what you sell.
A straightforward commodity may need little more than Add to Cart and Check Availability. A configured, high-value, or application-dependent product may need a direct path to a quote or conversation.
A buyer viewing a specific product may need to request a quote, ask a technical question, confirm lead time, request a callback, upload a bill of materials, or save a product list to review with a salesperson.
The button is the easy part. The handoff is what matters.
When the buyer asks for help, the product context should travel with the request. At minimum, that may include:
- Product name and SKU
- Quantity and selected options
- Source page
- Saved product list or uploaded bill of materials
- The buyer’s question
- Account or territory information when available
Don’t make the customer explain the entire situation again. And don’t make your salesperson start from scratch.
The request should also go to the person who can actually move it forward. That might be the account owner, a branch, a product specialist, customer service, or an applications engineer.
A form that drops every request into the same shared inbox isn’t a meaningful handoff. It’s just a better-looking version of Contact Us.
The buyer also needs to know what happens next.
“A product specialist will contact you within one business day” sets a useful expectation. “Thank you for your submission” tells them nothing.
This is where the website, product information, account ownership, and sales process have to work together. If one breaks, the second revenue path breaks with it.
And stop using forms as tollbooths.
Don’t require buyers to surrender their contact information for routine specifications, drawings, safety documents, or essential product information. Those materials help them decide whether the product fits. Hiding basic information behind a form makes your website less useful.
The goal isn’t more form submissions.
The goal is a direct path from product interest to the expertise that helps complete the sale.
Track the Orders Your Website Starts
You can’t measure a second revenue path you never built.
Once that path exists, connect it to the sale.
You don’t need a perfect measurement system to begin. You need a process your team will actually use.
- Preserve the context. Keep the product, SKU, quantity, selected options, saved list, and source page attached to the inquiry.
- Route the request. Send it to the salesperson, customer-service representative, branch, or technical expert who can move it forward.
- Record the opportunity. Put the inquiry into your CRM or established sales process instead of leaving it buried in an inbox.
- Close the loop. When the request becomes a quote or order, connect the result when reasonably possible.
- Review both paths. Look at direct online revenue and sales tied to website inquiries.
You won’t capture every sale the website influenced. That’s fine. Useful evidence is better than pretending the cart tells the whole story.
But don’t use undercounted website influence as an excuse for weak e-commerce performance.
If customers can’t find products, trust the specifications, see the right pricing, confirm availability, or use the site easily, fix those problems.
If salespeople discourage customers from using the site, you have an adoption problem.
If useful inquiries disappear into shared inboxes, you have a process problem.
Low cart revenue can point to four different issues:
- A weak e-commerce experience
- No direct path to sales, service, or technical expertise
- Poor customer or salesperson adoption
- Incomplete measurement
You may have more than one.
Stop asking only, “How much revenue went through the cart?”
Ask whether the website helps customers make a decision, connects them with the people they value, and gives you a reasonable way to recognize the resulting business.
That’s how you determine whether your e-commerce investment is failing or whether it was built and measured to do only half the job.
Is Your E-Commerce Site Built for Both Revenue Jobs?
We’ll help you determine whether the problem is the customer experience, the path to your team, the sales handoff, the measurement, or some combination of them.
Book a Strategy Call to identify the problems that matter most and determine what to fix first.
Meet Bob DeStefano
Bob DeStefano is the President of SVM Industrial Marketing. For more than 30 years, he has helped manufacturers and distributors get found, trusted, and chosen by the right buyers.
- 30+ years helping manufacturers and distributors
- University of Innovative Distribution faculty member
- Author of The Hidden Pipeline
