# Ethan Giffin

Ethan Giffin advises manufacturers and distributors on improving B2B eCommerce, including making online buying and reordering easier for customers. Giffin's work also includes the book *Closing the Digital Revenue Gap* and one-on-one eCommerce consultations.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/ethan-giffin/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ethangiffin
- LinkedIn followers: 9,328
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXVXPP2EJN8MqXuU96qeyJg
- Topics: ecommerce
- Based on 12 dated posts, latest 2026-10-08

## Summary

Ethan Giffin is most useful for practical advice on fixing B2B buying friction for manufacturers and distributors.

- Best for: A B2B eCommerce platform hosting a practical webinar for mid-market manufacturers and distributors.
- Not for: A fixed-fee sponsorship package with guaranteed impressions, qualified leads, or exclusive product promotion.
- Check first: Ask for recent webinar results and audience data, and confirm event details and commercial terms.

### Takeaways

- Test your own buying process as a stranger, using a personal email and timing each step.
- Customer service heroics can hide a broken buying process, such as manual password resets.
- Self-service should take routine orders; sales reps should take complex growth conversations.

## Main ideas

- **Test your own buying process as a stranger**: Ethan Giffin argues that leaders sign off on processes and assume they work, but rarely try buying from their own company. Their check is a mystery shop: use a personal email, search for a part as a customer would, place a real order, and time every step. The key is the “wince”—friction that seemed reasonable internally but pushes buyers toward a competitor with a faster portal. They connect those moments to structural blind spots from 20 years in B2B eCommerce.
- **Customer service heroics can hide a broken buying process**: Ethan Giffin says praise for customer service can miss what the team is working around. Password resets, address changes, adding a user, and order-history lookups shouldn’t need a human. When skilled service people spend the day rescuing customers from avoidable friction, great service can be evidence that the buying process is hard to use. That friction spills into sales and makes it harder to buy from the company at all.
- **B2B buyers now judge manufacturers by consumer buying experiences**: Ethan Giffin argues that B2B manufacturing customers are people who order on Amazon from their phones at night without talking to anyone. When they reorder from a manufacturer, they face long order forms, email clarifications, and pricing delays. They call this gap the Amazon Effect and say it is quietly rewriting what buyers expect from manufacturers and distributors.
- **Self-service should take routine orders; reps should take complex growth**: Ethan Giffin cites a 60/40 split: 60% of B2B buyers prefer self-service over talking to a rep, while the other 40% need a person for harder work. Routine repeat orders and easy re-ups create friction when a human is in the loop. Complex deals, new relationships, and long-uncalled accounts are where sales reps belong. Yet many manufacturing sales teams spend their best hours on the routine 60%.
- **One site for retail and wholesale serves neither audience well**: Ethan Giffin argues that a shared website looks efficient but fails both buyer types. Retail buyers from search need product detail, abandoned-cart follow-ups, and a path to buy without creating an account. Wholesale buyers need login, customer-specific pricing and credit terms, and the ability to reorder from a saved list. They say a public retail store and a private B2B buyer portal can run on one eCommerce platform with a single ERP integration. They call this hybrid Stage 3 of the B2B eCommerce Maturity Model.

## Work to read

- [Mystery-shop your own buying process](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ethangiffin_half-the-marketing-leaders-i-sit-with-have-activity-7503079210857594882-Na9O)
- [One site for retail and wholesale serves nobody well](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ethangiffin_the-digital-maturity-trap-that-trips-up-mid-market-activity-7505600772517154817-mpYq)
- [Great customer service can hide a broken buying process](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ethangiffin_when-great-customer-service-is-actually-hidden-activity-7503803540923056128-RN-o)
- [Split routine reorders from complex sales](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ethangiffin_60-of-b2b-buyers-would-rather-avoid-your-activity-7508866159560105985-ObT-)
- [The Amazon Effect on B2B buyers](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ethangiffin_your-b2b-manufacturing-customers-are-people-activity-7507887456210321408-iQpl)

## Brand relationships

- **The B2B eCommerce Agency** (disclosed_partnership)

## Partnerships

Giffin’s posts describe no sponsorship packages, sponsor tiers, or rate card. They show a working relationship built around Giffin’s own offer: a complimentary copy of Closing the Digital Revenue Gap paired with a private one-on-one eCommerce consultation, plus an invitation to book a digital-maturity diagnostic through a B2B eCommerce agency. Giffin also announced and ran an educational LinkedIn Live session. For a platform company considering Giffin as a webinar subject-matter expert, this points to a presenter arrangement rather than a sponsorship. Giffin has a ready teaching topic—the Amazon Effect, B2B eCommerce maturity stages, and the friction a mystery shop exposes—an audience to invite, and a book and consultation offer promoted at the end of the posts. Expect them to include that offer in anything they publish, and agree in advance how your brand fits alongside it. The posts provide no partnership terms, exclusivity wording, pricing, or dedicated partnership inquiry channel. Negotiate commercial terms directly and confirm them in writing before planning.

## Alternatives

- Yaqub Hosseini: Choose Yaqub Hosseini when the session should focus on implementation rather than the buying experience. The posts argue that most wholesalers and distributors have a workflow problem, not a technology problem: the ordering process was never mapped before go-live, so customers, reps, and admins are never set up properly, and the team quietly returns to email and manual pricing fixes. That suits a webinar where the audience leaves with an implementation checklist. The second post offers a different angle: AI is shrinking the information advantage wholesalers held through supplier relationships and pricing knowledge, so they have to compete on ordering ease, delivery speed, transparency about availability, and being hard to replace. If the platform company wants the audience to rethink why customers stay, this is the closer match.
- Shane Anglade, MBA, MSA: Pick Shane Anglade when the webinar needs the money conversation instead of the buying-path conversation. The posts show a presenter who separates businesses by how their cash behaves, not by industry label: seasonal businesses tied to assortment bought months ahead, shelf businesses waiting on retailer payment terms, payback businesses where the first order rarely covers acquisition cost, and replenishment businesses where a discount works more like an ad than a sale. A second post explains why headline ROAS can be smoke and mirrors once cost of goods, returns, fulfilment, and processing fees come out, and why a skincare brand and a jewellery brand can read the same ad result completely differently. That gives the host a way to sort attendees by their own economics before recommending anything, which suits an invite list weighted toward DTC or omnichannel brands selling through their own site and marketplaces.
- Josh Shaw: Choose Josh Shaw when the session is specifically about the Amazon channel. The posts explain why authorised-distributor listings on Amazon create problems: several distributors fight for the buy box and undercut each other until one runs out of stock and the price snaps back, while supply-chain leakage adds sellers the brand never approved. The argument continues that selling B2B to distributors is easier than running Amazon in-house but leaves margin on the table, and that the same pallet could go straight into an Amazon fulfilment centre to capture retail margin and organic demand before ads are layered on top. That is the most direct alternative if the platform company sells to brands weighing a marketplace model against running their own channel.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/