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Our friends over at SparkLayer have put together a handy guide to the 5 key metrics you need to be tracking as a hybrid or B2B business in 2025.
As a leading B2B eCommerce platform, SparkLayer support over 2,000 brands, providing in-demand features and expert guidance to wholesalers globally. We partner with SparkLayer to offer a holistic approach to success for Shopify brands, ranging from Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) audits to customer-led B2B functionality.
What metrics should your B2B business be tracking?
Whether you’re a hybrid or pure-play B2B brand, your approach to CRO should focus on different metrics than a typical B2C store. That’s because your customers aren’t one-time buyers - they’re long-term business relationships. With that in mind, here are 5 key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter in 2025:
1. Lifetime Value (LTV)
What is it?
Lifetime value (LTV) essentially refers to how much revenue a customer brings your business during their whole buying lifetime with you - pretty obvious, we know, but it’s often overlooked!
Why it matters:
In B2B, repeat purchasing is the norm. Tracking lifetime value helps you understand the long-term revenue potential of each customer and allows you to segment and prioritise your most valuable accounts.
Acquiring new customers is highly likely to be much more expensive for you than retaining existing ones, making LTV a key metric to track for overall revenue increase and reduced marketing or onboarding costs.
How to improve it:
Focus on building long-term relationships through account-based pricing, quick-reorder tools, and value-added services like personalised quoting. SparkLayer's built-in customer order history and quick reorder features can help increase LTV with minimal friction.
Look to replicate intuitive B2C functionality to keep your buyers engaged with a familiar interface and process. Consider offering loyalty incentives like VIP discounts, free products when buyers purchase from you a certain number of times, and early access or pre-order options for your most valuable customers.
2. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
What is it?
This metric tracks how much you’re spending on acquiring new customers based on the channel used - for example, how much you spent on your Instagram advertising divided by how many new customers you obtain through those ads.
Why it matters:
Knowing how much it costs to acquire each new B2B customer is essential to scaling profitably. In wholesale, acquisition costs are often higher than B2C, so your returns need to be proportionately greater.
Being able to monitor both the number of new customers per channel and how much you’re paying for each of them allows you to invest money in the channels that cost the least and deliver the most!
How to improve it:
Keep track of where you’re spending on acquisition, remove the channels that aren’t converting or have a high CAC, and double down on channels that are most cost-effective.
Work on reducing friction in onboarding and shortening the sales cycle by offering self-service tools like SparkLayer. Investing in CRO-focused campaigns can also lower CAC by increasing on-site conversion from qualified leads.
3. Average Order Value (AOV)
What is it?
Another straightforward metric, AOV refers to the value of your average order. Take your total order value (add up how much you make from all your orders) and divide it by how many orders there are. Super simple!
Why it matters:
The higher your AOV, the higher your overall revenue, essentially. This metric allows you to understand how effectively you’re generating revenue from each of your buyers and their respective orders.
You can also link this to your CAC (above) to understand how much money you make from customers per channel.
How to improve it:
Consider using volume-based pricing tiers, tailored recommendations of frequently bought-together products, and minimum order quantities to increase your B2B AOV. By adding parameters to pre-qualify orders before checkout, you gain a level of control over how your customers order from you and how much they spend.
Boosting AOV shouldn’t become too much of a salesy experience for your buyers - remember that they’re different for B2C buyers in that impulse buying is way less likely. Instead, offer value-add upsells based on their browsing and buying history, like one-click repeat orders or incentives to remain loyal to your business.
4. Contribution Margins
What is it?
Contribution margins within wholesale work the same way as they do within B2C sales - they’re how much money you’ve made from a sale after removing the related costs. It demonstrates the profitability of products by showing you exactly how much you make on an item once you’ve factored in variable costs.
Why it matters:
Tracking your contribution margins at a product level helps you see which products are most (and least) profitable after accounting for costs like production, shipping, and handling.
This metric goes deeper than revenue alone and is crucial for long-term financial health.
How to improve it:
Start by conducting a deep dive into each of your products (or collections). This will allow you to identify which products cost you the least and deliver the most revenue. From there, you can review and optimise your pricing strategy…
Got a mug that costs next to nothing to make and consistently sells well? Consider selling it for a higher price to increase the revenue. For products that have a lower profit margin (eg you don’t make much money off), look into reducing your overheads - or, use a reporting tool to identify the smallest and biggest margins and consider removing some products from your catalogue or reserving them solely for your B2C offering.
5. Conversion Rate by Customer Type
What is it?
As with most of these B2B success metrics, this one is pretty self-explanatory! By segmenting your customers by a range of variables (contact source, industry, job title, location, number of orders, AOV etc), you’re able to better track what type of buyer is most likely to spend money with you.
Why it matters:
Not all wholesale buyers behave the same way. Different people purchase in different ways - sales cycles vary, budgets fluctuate, and UX expectations are different. Each of these differences can be categorised into customer segments.
Tracking conversion rates by customer segment (eg new vs returning) helps you pinpoint where your UX, functionality, and even marketing is working (or not working) for specific types of customers.
How to improve it:
For the segments that aren’t converting, you can update processes within the journeys they typically take. For the types of customers who are likely to convert, invest more in acquiring them and create enhanced nurture flows based on how they interact with your brand.
CRO testing (like adjusting form fields or onboarding flows) for specific customer segments can reveal hidden barriers to conversion. Find the drop-off points for low-converting customers, analyse the behaviours of high-converting customers, and keep testing and optimising as you go!
What tools can I use for B2B eCommerce reporting?
Well, we’d naturally recommend something like SparkLayer Analytics, our native tool for measuring and monitoring essential B2B metrics. We’re not just saying that because it’s ours, we promise! We’ve partnered with reporting experts, Conjura, to build out a dashboard dedicated to wholesale success.
Gain real-time visibility into customer lifetime value, acquisition costs, contribution margins, and order volumes. What makes this tool especially useful is the actionable intelligence: the platform highlights inefficiencies and suggests optimisations you can make (like adjusting pricing tiers or reallocating spend from underperforming marketing campaigns) to boost your metrics directly.
All this means you’re not just capturing data, you’re turning it into smarter, targeted decisions that improve LTV, CAC, AOV, margins, and even conversion rates by customer type.
Find out more about SparkLayer, their native B2B analytics tool, and how to grow your wholesale business.
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