How Indian B2B buyers actually behave online

Most advice about business websites is written for a buyer sitting at a desk in a country with reliable broadband. That buyer exists in India too. They are not the majority of the people deciding whether to contact you.

Five patterns turn up repeatedly, and each one has a practical consequence.

One: the phone is the primary device, not the secondary one

The buyer is on a factory floor, in a market, in a car, between meetings. Not at a desk. Google has ranked using the mobile version of sites for years now, which aligns search with what was already true of behaviour.

The consequence is that desktop-first design fails twice, once with the buyer and once with the ranking. A site that scores well on PageSpeed Insights for desktop and badly for mobile is a site with a problem, and the desktop number is a distraction. Detail in how to check whether your site works on a phone.

Two: the connection is worse than the label suggests

Nominal 4G is not 4G throughput. We build to six megabits per second because that is a realistic figure in a tier two city, and at that speed an eight megabyte home page takes about eleven seconds.

Published benchmark research puts mobile abandonment above half once a page passes three seconds, and the rest of the figures we work to are on the benchmarks page. Eleven seconds is not a slow page, it is an empty one. The arithmetic is in eleven seconds on 4G and you can run your own numbers on the calculators.

Three: search is geographic almost by reflex

Buyers add a city because they want somebody who can deliver and who they could visit if it goes wrong. Cotton yarn 30s count Coimbatore. MS pipe supplier Ahmedabad. HT panel manufacturer Vadodara.

The consequence is blunt. If the city never appears as text on your site, you cannot appear for the search. Not because of any algorithm subtlety, but because the words are not there. We break this down per cluster on the locations pages.

Four: buyers are actively checking whether you still exist

This one surprises people. A large share of the checking behaviour on a supplier website is not about capability at all. It is about whether the company is still operating and still answering.

Which is why a copyright line four years out of date does disproportionate damage, and why a news section whose last item is from 2017 is worse than having no news section. A partner list naming somebody who left three years ago tells a buyer something you did not intend to say.

The fix is unglamorous maintenance, and it costs about an hour a month. Somebody inside the business has to own that hour, which is the subject of somebody has to own this.

Five: the decision is made across several tabs at once

Nobody evaluates one supplier in isolation. Three sites are open. The comparison is happening whether or not you designed for it.

That is why specifics beat adjectives so heavily here. Two sites say state of the art quality. The third publishes grade, tolerance, capacity, minimum order and lead time. The third one gets the enquiry, and it is not close.

It is also why certifications need numbers rather than logos. In a three tab comparison, a verifiable number is a differentiator and a logo is wallpaper. Whether that is a BIS standard, NABL accreditation or GOTS certification, publish the specifics.

What follows from all five

• Build for a mid range phone on a mediocre connection first. Everything else is easier from there.
• Put the answer above the fold. A buyer standing in a market gives you seconds.
• Name your geography in text. Cities, states, the lanes you cover.
• Show the site is alive. Current dates, current people, current certifications.
• Publish numbers your competitors have not. That is the entire comparison, decided.

The channel question

None of this argues against the channels that already work. WhatsApp closes deals well and IndiaMART produces real enquiries. What neither does is introduce you to a buyer who has never heard of you, because nobody discovers a supplier by searching inside a chat app.

The sequence that plays to each channel’s strength is discovery on search, qualification on your own site, then conversation on WhatsApp. We argue both sides of that in the WhatsApp piece and the IndiaMART piece.

Written by Sameer Gaikwad, founder of Buildgin. Thirty three years in electrical power systems across global MNCs, now applying the same condition monitoring habit to websites.