B2B.

B2B2B. B2B2B2B2B2B2B.

Sounds like Porky Pig, doesn’t it? And just as Porky’s stuttering means nothing until the actual words come along, it doesn’t matter how many B2Bs you have — none of them create any value at all until a B2C happens. B2Bs are all in the middle of a value chain; the end is always B2C — customers consume the goods and provide the money that powers all the rest of it.

The term B2C created a huge potential for “ignorant expertise.” The newness of the term gave some pundits the misguided impression that there’s something fundamentally new about B2C itself, which in turn meant their general-purpose new-economy theories gave them something useful to say about the subject.

The only thing new about B2C, though, is the term. There’s nothing at all new about business-to-consumer transactions. Until about two years ago it was called “retailing”. Those who are experts in the field still call it that.

No matter how hard your business is, retailing is harder. Bank on it.

For example:

If you think your manufacturing company has an elaborate bill of materials, go visit a big-box retailer, and think about its inventory management. For “soft lines” (apparel and such), every SKU (“Stock Keeping Unit”) comes in multiple sizes and colors. A knit shirt, for example, may come in 6 sizes and 8 colors. That one shirt represents 48 separate items to track. How many different shirts can you find in a Target Greatland store or WalMart?

And where B2B selling propositions are rooted in the value they create, what do you have in retail? Fashion. Status. Convenience. The customer’s mood. Not to mention the all-important factors of store design and merchandising. And, of course, price.

“e-Tailing” was going to transform the whole business of selling to consumers, through the magic of Internet B2C. Too bad so many e-tailing experts knew nothing about retailing, because if they did, they’d have known there’s no such thing as on-line retailing.

When you sell on-line, as a retailer friend of mine pointed out more than a year ago, the shopper’s psychology has nothing to do with entering a store and everything to do with buying from a catalog. Catalog shoppers care more about convenience, less about physically interacting with merchandise, and not at all about the immediate gratification of coming home with the goods — the exact opposite of in-store shoppers, who see, touch, and often try on merchandise, and can wear it, hang it on the walls, or fix a leaky sink with it as soon as they get home.

That’s why the market estimates for on-line retailing are completely wrong, and always have been. The e-tailing industry is pretty much bounded by the number of catalog shoppers — a far smaller segment than retailing. And while the boundary isn’t fixed, it isn’t all that elastic either.

An e-tailer’s business processes are those of a cataloger as well. Where a retailer’s warehouse is designed for logistics — as an intermediate distribution point, shipping crates and pallets to stores — a cataloger’s warehouse is designed for fulfillment, or what’s known as “pick, pack and ship”. It’s a very different discipline. Having a warehouse doesn’t make you ready to offer customers on-line shopping carts.

And then there’s the little matter of returns, or “reverse logistics” for the fully buzzword compliant. Awhile back I suggested that Amazon.com’s success would depend on its opening physical stores. Returns are just one reason, but it’s an important one. Why? Take book-buying. You mail books back to Amazon.com for a refund — a pain in the neck for both of you. If you bought it at barnesandnoble.com, you’d drive to their nearest store, where you’d probably leave with more books than you returned.

You work for a B2B company. What does this have to do with you?

B2B companies have plenty to learn from retail. A good place to start is Paco Underhill’s highly readable book, Why We Buy. As you read it, I expect you’ll find lots of notions you can use in your own business.

Among those notions will be many examples of how limited a role IT has to play when a business meets its customers.

That’s a subject we’ll explore in more detail next week. Until then … go shopping. The economy needs you.