B2B eCommerce Challenges Food Distributors Face in 2025 

The food and beverage industry moves fast. Yet, for many distributors, the way orders are handled feels stuck in the past. If you are still relying on late-night voicemails, blurry photos of handwritten lists, or endless Excel sheets, you already know the pain.

It’s not just about inconvenience anymore. It’s about growth.

We speak to distributors every day, and we hear the same frustrations over and over. “We have customers who call at night and leave a voicemail,” one distributor told us. “Sometimes the connection breaks down, or we can’t understand what they’re saying, and we lose the order.”

As we look toward 2025, the gap between distributors who adapt and those who don’t is widening. Here are the five biggest challenges facing B2B eCommerce in our industry today—and how to fix them.

1. Rising Expectations for a “Chef-Friendly” Experience

Your customers—chefs, procurement managers, store owners—use apps like Uber Eats or Amazon in their personal lives. They expect the same speed and simplicity when ordering ingredients for their business.

If your current portal is difficult to navigate, they simply won’t use it. We often hear: “Our e-shop is slow and clunky, and only a few customers use it.”

The Fix: You need a platform that is mobile-first and intuitive. It shouldn’t require a manual to learn. If a chef can’t place a repeat order in seconds from their smartphone while standing in the walk-in fridge, your eCommerce solution isn’t working hard enough.

2. The “Hidden Catalog” Problem

When customers order manually, they tend to stick to what they know. They order the same tomatoes, the same flour, the same oil week after week. They often don’t even know what else you carry.

One of our customers put it perfectly: “Our customers don’t know our entire catalog and end up purchasing the same items. We want to show them other items and promote new products.”

The Fix: A modern B2B platform acts as a silent salesperson. It should automatically suggest relevant products, highlight promotions, and make your full catalog searchable. This turns order-taking into order-making, increasing basket sizes without extra effort from your sales team.

3. Integration Chaos and Manual Errors

We’re asking our customers to send us an Excel file with the orders to reduce errors.

If you find yourself saying this, you are stuck in the integration trap. When your web orders don’t talk to your ERP, your team has to manually re-key data. This is where mistakes happen. A wrong SKU entered or a missed quantity adjustment can ruin a customer’s day.

“Mistakes cost us a lot of time and money,” another distributor shared. “We ship the product, and then the customer realizes it’s not what they wanted. We must take full responsibility.”

The Fix: Sync everything. Your eCommerce platform must connect directly to your ERP. Prices, inventory, and customer data should flow automatically in real-time. No manual entry means no manual errors.

4. Lack of Sales Team Visibility

Your sales reps are your greatest asset, but they often fly blind. They spend too much time chasing administrative tasks rather than building relationships.

“We want our sales team to have visibility into our customers’ orders over time,” is a common request we hear. Without data, your reps don’t know who stopped ordering, whose volume dropped, or who might be ready to try a new premium product.

The Fix: Your B2B platform should double as a CRM. It needs to give your sales team actionable trends and live dashboards so they know exactly who to call and what to say.

5. Technical Debt and Maintenance

Building a custom web shop sounds like a good idea until you have to maintain it. Security updates, server costs, and bug fixes can quickly eat into your margins. If you are spending more time fixing your website than serving your customers, you have a problem.

The Fix: Stop trying to be a software company. Choose a purpose-built platform designed specifically for food and beverage distribution. This allows you to focus on what you do best—sourcing and delivering great products—while the technology scales with you.

Ready to Stop Chasing Orders?

The challenges of 2025 are real, but they are solvable. You don’t need to accept broken orders or wasted hours as “part of the business.”

At Bomdiu, we built a platform that unites your team and your customers. We cut out the administrative waste so you can focus on profitable, sustainable growth.

Book a demo today and see how we can help you turn order chaos into a competitive advantage.