Having participated on several B2B e-Commerce projects, I have sat in meetings where people refer to companies like Amazon.com when building specifications for their websites. Not much time is devoted to figuring out the actual end users who are actually going to use their site, and who they're actually selling to.

When you think of your B2B site who is your end user? Who are you selling to? It's not the mom and pop across the street who is using Amazon.com to buy shampoo, a stereo, or a book. In most cases with B2B it's another company who is using your products to build their products, or maybe distribute your products to the ultimate end user. You need to build a buyer persona to identify who these people are, and what motivates them. Analytics is going to help you out here if you have an existing site, you need to analyze the patterns of what these folks do with your site. Remember more often than not, if you're in B2B what you're selling to them in addition to your products may be tools to enable them to sell your products to the end customer. This is especially so in a distributor relationship. For a B2B end user who is incorporating your products into their own, then providing content that eases the process like technical documents may be your most important selling tool.

B2B is much different than B2C as you can tell, in B2C it's pretty straight forward, you're selling your products directly to the end user, and in most cases the most important factor is price. B2B may not be as clear, it's more of the value add you provide in addition to your products that may drive the sale.

Some tools you can use to gain insight into your B2B users:

Personas - As I mentioned building a persona to understand your buyer is something you might want to consider. In true UX sense, it can be a complex exercise of building an actual personality with a name, login, profiles, etc. It's becoming the user of your site, true empathy. You may not want to go that deep down the UX hole, but as a minimum you should consult with your business team, i.e. sales, marketing, product development, etc, to gain insight into who they think the customer is, and what they need.

Focus Groups - During the development phase, you may want to consider letting some trusted customers in the process by having focus groups to gauge their needs and wants for your site.

Analytics - Evaluating your current site, and new site post launch, analytics will help. Although it will require some insight into what's going on your user's head in order to understand the traffic patterns. Some traffic patterns may appear to show one thing, but that traffic is happening due to difficulty elsewhere in your site. Get some folks from the business and provide them with the numbers for review and see what they have to say.

Surveys and Feedback Forms - A good tool during the development and launch phase and should be done throughout the life of the site. One thing to note, you should provide a way to quantify the feedback. For example if you have a survey asking them if they like the navigation, they provide a comment, have a rating to say "strongly like" between "strongly dislike". Having the rating can provide how strong the user feels about the comments they're providing and may affect the criticality of your response.

Most B2B projects are no where near being compared to a B2C project, so don't try producing the next Amazon.com. Granted there are some generally accepted standards for an e-Commerce experience, but B2B also adds in that specific relationship and business rules  you have built with your partners make sure they're planned for.