03 — B2B trade suppliers
Where the conversion is an approved account, not a checkout
Trade accounts, gated pricing and quote requests on WooCommerce. The revenue is real and almost none of it is the transaction the ad platforms are watching.
Written audit back in 48 hours. No obligation, no pitch deck.
01
The problem
What makes this sector different.
A trade supplier’s website is not really a shop. It is an application form for a trading relationship, wrapped in a catalogue. The valuable outcome is an approved account or a quote that turns into an order — often days later, often by phone, and often for far more than the basket would have been.
Every ad platform, meanwhile, is optimising towards an online purchase that mostly does not happen. Left alone, the bidding learns from the wrong signal and quietly buys you the visitors least likely to become accounts.
02
What usually goes wrong
The four we find most often.
None of these are unusual, and none of them announce themselves. That is precisely why they persist.
The tracked conversion is the wrong one
Optimising to online transactions in a business where most orders arrive by phone or quote teaches the algorithm to find consumers rather than trade buyers. The account looks poor on paper while the sales team is busy, and nobody reconciles the two.
The pricing gate gives no reason to register
"Log in to see trade prices" asks for effort and promises nothing. Your highest-value visitor is the most likely to leave, because they have three other suppliers open and one of them shows a number.
Account approval is slow and manual
An application that sits unreviewed for two working days is competing with a supplier who answered in an hour. The marketing did its job and the funnel leaked after the form.
WooCommerce measurement has gaps nobody filled
Quote forms not recorded as conversions, no value attached to an account application, and phone calls invisible entirely. Bidding cannot optimise towards outcomes it has never been shown.
03
How we handle it
What we do instead.
In this order. Each one is harder to get right if the one before it was skipped.
- 01
Define the conversion as the business defines it
Account applications and quote requests tracked as conversions with values derived from what an account is actually worth over its first year, and call tracking where the phone genuinely carries the revenue.
- 02
Give the gate something to offer
State the trade terms, the discount structure, the delivery commitment and the approval time before the form, not after it. A gate that explains itself is a qualification step; one that does not is a wall.
- 03
Feed the real outcome back into bidding
Approved accounts and won quotes imported back as offline conversions, so the platforms optimise towards buyers who were accepted and ordered — not towards whoever fills in forms most readily.
- 04
Build the reorder lifecycle
In trade supply the second order matters more than the first. Replenishment timing, quote follow-up and a reorder path that does not require a phone call are usually the cheapest revenue on the table.
04
What this needs
The work that moves this sector.
Listed in the order they usually matter here, which is not the order they are listed anywhere else.
- 01
Paid Media
Google Ads, Performance Max, Shopping and Meta for growing Shopify and WooCommerce brands. The person building the campaigns is the person on your call, and the account stays yours throughout.
- 02
SEO & Content
Technical fixes, category structure and content built for commercial intent. Rankings are a means to revenue here, not the number the report is written around.
- 03
Web Design & Development
Shopify and WooCommerce builds, migrations and theme speed work. Built on a maintained theme rather than a bespoke framework, so your next developer can pick it up without a rewrite.
- 05
Email & Lifecycle
Klaviyo flows, segmentation and campaigns for growing e-commerce brands. The channel you own outright, run properly, which is what makes the acquisition maths work at all.
05
Questions
Questions we get from this sector.
Answered here rather than held back for a sales call.
Can a quote request really be tracked as a conversion?
Yes, and it should be. The form submission is recorded as a conversion, and the outcome — quoted, won, value — is imported back afterwards so the bidding learns which enquiries were worth having rather than only how many arrived.
Do you need access to our CRM or ERP?
Only enough to get outcomes back out: which applications were approved and which quotes converted. That can be a scheduled export rather than a live integration, and it does not need to include customer personal data.
Does WooCommerce handle trade pricing properly?
With the right extensions, yes — role-based pricing, gated catalogues and account approval are all well-trodden. The usual cost is performance, because those extensions are rarely light, which is why the speed work and the marketing tend to be the same conversation here.
Is Google Ads worth it for B2B trade?
Where buyers search for products by specification or part number, yes — the intent is unusually clear and the competition is often weaker than in consumer categories. Where the sector buys entirely through established relationships, we will say so rather than take the budget.
What about LinkedIn?
Rarely first. For most trade suppliers, search intent and reorder lifecycle are cheaper and more certain, and LinkedIn only earns its cost once those are working and the account values are high enough to justify the click prices.
Find out what is actually wrong.
Send us the URL and tell us what is not working. You get a written audit back within 48 hours: what we found, what we would fix first, and what we would expect it to do. If it turns out you do not need us, we will tell you that too.