# The B2B Commerce Trends and Opportunities Report | Content Cucumber

> The full B2B Commerce Trends and Opportunities Report, built from interviews with nine B2B commerce leaders across seven firms. How manufacturers, distributors, and regulated sellers modernize without breaking what works. Read it here or download the PDF.

*Source: [https://contentcucumber.com/research/b2b-commerce-trends/](https://contentcucumber.com/research/b2b-commerce-trends/)*

*By Brent Peterson, CEO, Content Cucumber. Updated June 2026*

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**Research report**

Where mid-market B2B commerce is heading, built from interviews with nine of the people running it. Presented by Shopware, researched and written by Content Cucumber. The full report is on this page, and the designed PDF is one click away with no form.

[Download the PDF](https://contentcucumber.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/b2b-commerce-trends.pdf)

## The New Era of B2B Commerce Complexity

For years, B2B ecommerce was often viewed as a delayed version of consumer commerce. Companies focused on launching online catalogs, digitizing ordering workflows, and replicating familiar B2C experiences for business buyers.
That era is ending.
Today, B2B organizations are confronting a much broader transformation, one that reaches far beyond storefront design or online ordering capabilities. Across manufacturing, industrial distribution, healthcare, regulated commerce, and enterprise procurement, companies are increasingly being forced to rethink the operational infrastructure underneath their businesses.
Partner Day North America.
The pressures driving that transformation are arriving from multiple directions at once.
Customers expect faster and more intuitive digital experiences. Legacy ERP systems are struggling to support modern workflows. Product catalogs continue growing more complex. Data remains fragmented across systems. AI is rapidly reshaping expectations around search, automation, and customer support. At the same time, private equity investment, supply chain volatility, and operational modernization initiatives are forcing companies to move faster than many organizations are comfortable with.
For many B2B businesses, the challenge is no longer whether digital transformation matters. The challenge is how to modernize without disrupting the operational realities that made the business successful in the first place.
That tension surfaced repeatedly throughout the conversations featured in this report.
Across interviews with system integrators, digital agencies, and technology providers, several themes emerged consistently:
operational complexity is increasing
flexibility matters more than rigid feature checklists
clean and structured data is becoming foundational
aligning systems to the business
In many industries, the buying experience itself is also changing.
Distributors and manufacturers are increasingly recognizing that their customers are not casually browsing products online. Contractors, technicians, procurement teams, and field-service workers are often trying to solve highly specific operational problems under time pressure. That reality is driving demand for more contextual, conversational, and task-oriented commerce experiences rather than traditional catalog-based ecommerce.
At the same time, AI is beginning to reshape how companies think about search, product discovery, automation, and operational efficiency. But despite the excitement surrounding AI, many organizations are discovering that modernization begins with much more foundational work:
cleaning and structuring product data
documenting operational workflows
integrating disconnected systems
translating institutional knowledge into scalable digital infrastructure
Several contributors also pointed to a major organizational shift happening across B2B industries.
Many long-established manufacturers and distributors are now entering generational transitions, with younger leadership teams pushing for modernization after decades of operational stability. In parallel, private equity investment is accelerating pressure around scalability, operational visibility, and platform flexibility.
The result is a B2B commerce landscape increasingly defined not by simple storefront launches, but by large-scale operational transformation.
This report brings together perspectives from agencies, consultants, and technology providers working directly inside those transitions. Across regulated healthcare environments, industrial distribution networks, enterprise modernization projects, and emerging AI-driven commerce experiences, these contributors offer a practical look at how B2B commerce is evolving and what organizations need to do to prepare for the next phase of digital transformation.
**Brent Insights.** The nine contributors in this report spend their days helping mid-market B2B operators bowl strikes. They run discoveries before replatforms. They evaluate platforms with the CFO in the room. They build the workflows that make a real B2B operation function on a platform that can carry the weight. Without that kind of work, the alternative is the gutter. If you are not developing your site for B2B in a systematic way, on a platform built for mid-market, you are just bowling for the gutter. You can roll the ball, you can hear the crash, but nothing is going down.
What is the mid-market in B2B?
Most reports define mid-market by GMV. Ten million to two hundred fifty million. That number is the easy answer. It is also the wrong answer.
In B2B the segment is defined by what the operator has to do, not what they sell. A mid-market B2B operator runs the catalog of a Fortune 500 with the engineering team of a small agency. The order routing of a national distributor with the accounting staff of a regional one. The data work of an enterprise with the marketing budget of a startup.
You have enterprise complexity but do not have an enterprise budget.
That is the squeeze. It is why the platform decision matters more here than anywhere else in commerce. The nine contributors in this report are the agencies and advisors who build commerce in that segment. The operators they serve sell to other businesses, in volume, with terms, against requirements that change by industry.
When the platform is built for a different job
The popular DTC SaaS platform did one thing very well and it did it for a generation of brands. It made it easy for a consumer brand to put up a beautiful storefront and take orders from individual shoppers. That is a real achievement, and it is not the achievement mid-market B2B needs.
How the buyer buys
The buying process is where consumer and B2B commerce split apart. A shopper adds to cart and pays. A B2B buyer works through pricing, approvals, and terms before anything ships. When you push a complex B2B operation onto a DTC-shaped platform, the cracks show up in predictable places.
**Custom pricing is not a footnote.** Every B2B account negotiates. Tiered pricing, contract pricing, customer-specific catalogs. On a DTC platform this is an add-on. In B2B it is the system. Get the pricing wrong and a person has to touch every order before it ships.
**Quotes and RFQs are part of the flow.** Buyers ask for a quote, send it for approval, change the spec, ask again. The DTC platform was built around a cart. The B2B operator needs a conversation. Lose that thread and the deal stalls in someone's inbox.
**Multi-buyer approvals.** One person on the buying team holds the budget. Another holds the spec. A third has to sign. A storefront built for the single shopper has nowhere to put any of that. The order waits until the right names sign, and the platform has no idea who they are.
**Payment terms.** Net 30, net 60, EFT, PO, credit applications. The DTC checkout assumes a card on file. The B2B buyer rarely uses one. Push the buyer to a card and you cap the size of the order.
**Account hierarchies.** Parent companies, subsidiaries, locations, individual buyers, all buying off the same contract. The DTC model has one customer per cart. Map it wrong and the wrong branch sees the wrong price.
How the business runs
None of this means the popular DTC SaaS platform is broken. It means it was built for a different job. Mid-market B2B is a different job.
**Catalogs at scale.** Four million SKUs, kitting, fitment, illustrated parts. The DTC platform performs beautifully at five thousand products and starts choking when the catalog has to tell the whole product story. Search slows, the data model bends, and every new product line becomes a fight.
**ERP-coupled order routing.** Orders split by branch, by warehouse, by serialized equipment ownership. The DTC platform pushes the order at the ERP. The B2B operator splits the order before it gets there. Get that wrong and the warehouse ships from the wrong place or not at all.
**Regulated workflows.** Healthcare, fintech, controlled materials. Specialized hosting, tokenization, segmented data ownership. The DTC platform offers a multi-tenant model. The regulated operator needs documented control. On a shared platform, the audit question has no good answer.
**The app marketplace tax.** Every gap above gets patched with a third-party app. Three years in, the operator is paying more for apps than for the platform. And every app is one more thing that breaks at the next upgrade.
**The cost trajectory does not match the operator.** The platform charges on GMV and on plan. A B2B operator has high GMV per buyer and a fraction of the consumer-style traffic. The economics were tuned for a different shape of business. Growth makes the bill worse, not better.

## Data Readiness and ERP Alignment

01
Chapter 1
Featuring Insights from Harris Digital
**Matt Harris**, Founder, Harris Digital. [linkedin.com/in/matthewrossharris](https://linkedin.com/in/matthewrossharris)
Matt Harris founded Harris Digital, originally Medium Well, in 2000 and rebuilt the firm around B2B commerce and ERP integration. He has spent more than two decades building digital commerce for manufacturers and distributors carrying decades of accumulated systems into modern channels.
**Harris Digital** [harrisdigital.io](https://harrisdigital.io). Harris DigitalHarris Digital builds B2B commerce platforms and connects them to the ERPs underneath. They work with manufacturers and distributors carrying decades of accumulated systems into modern commerce.harrisdigital.io
The Mid-Market B2B Reality
For many B2B organizations, the biggest obstacle to digital transformation is not the ecommerce platform itself. It is the condition of the data underneath it.
Manufacturers and distributors often operate across decades of accumulated systems, processes, spreadsheets, business rules, and institutional knowledge. Product information may exist across multiple ERPs, customer service teams may rely on undocumented workflows, and critical operational logic may live primarily inside employees’ heads rather than structured systems.
According to Matt Harris, Founder of Harris Digital, that fragmentation has become one of the defining challenges in modern B2B commerce.
“One of the biggest frictions right now, particularly for manufacturers and distributors, is that the data is not unified.”— Matt Harris
Harris Digital focuses heavily on B2B ecommerce integrations and ERP-connected commerce systems, particularly in mid-market manufacturing and distribution environments. Across those projects, Harris says data normalization and operational alignment consistently emerge as foundational requirements for successful transformation.
Normalization, in this context, refers to organizing and structuring data so products, specifications, attributes, and categorizations can be consistently understood across systems.
“One manufacturer’s products will line up with another manufacturer’s products,” Harris explained. “So on the user experience side, when you’re searching or looking for something, you can compare apples to apples.”
Without that normalization, even relatively modern ecommerce experiences can become difficult to navigate. Search quality degrades, filtering becomes inconsistent, product comparisons break down, and automation efforts become significantly more difficult to scale.
Increasingly, Harris sees clean and structured data as a prerequisite not only for ecommerce modernization, but also for emerging AI-driven commerce workflows.
“Good data, good clean data, good organized data, good normalized data is hurdle number one.”
That operational complexity is particularly common in B2B environments where companies have developed highly specialized business rules over decades of growth.
Manufacturers and distributors frequently operate with:
customer-specific pricing
purchase-order-based workflows
configurable products
approval processes
quote requests
tiered discounts
ERP-dependent operational logic
“Does your contract give you ownership of your data? If it doesn't, why are you working with that company?”
**Matt Harris Founder, Harris Digital**
According to Harris, many mainstream ecommerce systems struggle to accommodate that level of complexity without forcing businesses to fundamentally change how they operate.
“Normal ecommerce systems can’t really handle that kind of complexity,” he said. “Shopware can.”
One reason Harris Digital has gravitated toward more flexible commerce architectures is the ability to adapt platforms to existing business processes rather than forcing organizations into rigid operational models.
“It’s open source,” Harris explained. “You can build your own extensions and get it to do almost anything you want.”
That flexibility becomes increasingly important as organizations attempt to modernize while preserving years of operational nuance embedded within their businesses.
At the same time, Harris believes many organizations are underestimating the amount of discovery and planning required before transformation projects even begin.
“A company will decide we just need to go to an ecommerce platform,” he said. “And they don’t know that there’s a human being that’s actually doing all this manual effort.”
In many cases, critical workflows are being held together by institutional knowledge rather than documented systems. Customer service representatives may understand product relationships, substitution logic, or operational exceptions that are never formally captured in databases or automation workflows.
“The customer rep knows that,” Harris said, describing situations where product relationships exist only through employee experience. “But they don’t have all those specs in an organized database.”
For Harris Digital, that reality makes discovery one of the most important phases of any modernization effort.
The company typically begins projects with:
stakeholder analysis
current-state operational assessments
future-state mapping
gap analysis
data audits
business-rule documentation
Those exercises often uncover hidden operational dependencies, undocumented processes, and data quality problems long before implementation work begins.
At the same time, Harris sees growing pressure from business leaders eager to move quickly, particularly as AI dominates industry conversations.
Clients increasingly ask whether AI tools can accelerate implementation work or even replace portions of traditional development and integration processes. Harris believes AI will absolutely reshape commerce operations, but he also cautions against treating automation as a shortcut around planning and governance.
“You can’t just build it and let it go,” he said. “That is very risky.”
Instead, Harris believes organizations need stronger operational structures around, particularly as AI-generated workflows become more common:
documentation
governance
project planning
long-term maintainability
“There’s going to be stories that come out of successes,” he said, “and there’s going to be stories that come out of failures.”
Despite those challenges, Harris remains optimistic about the broader direction of B2B commerce modernization.
He points to significant opportunity across mid-market manufacturing and distribution, where many businesses still lack fully developed ecommerce capabilities despite decades of operational maturity.
According to Harris, many of these companies already possess the hardest parts of long-term business growth:
established customer bases
operational expertise
brand recognition
supplier relationships
industry credibility
The challenge now is modernization.
“Those older businesses have an advantage,” Harris said. “If they’re willing to retool, they’re going to have a head start over anybody trying to start from scratch.”
As AI, automation, and digital transformation continue reshaping B2B commerce, Harris believes the companies best positioned for the future may not necessarily be the newest businesses, but the established organizations willing to invest in modernizing the operational foundations underneath decades of accumulated experience.
Harris Digital Discovery Phases
PhasePurposeStakeholder analysisSurface who owns which workflowCurrent-state assessmentDocument how the business actually operates todayFuture-state mappingDefine the target operating modelGap analysisFind what the platform must closeData auditEstablish data quality and structureBusiness-rule documentationCapture logic that lives in people's headsQuestions for your team
Who in your company actually knows how to fulfill an order? If that knowledge lives in one person's head, what happens when they leave?
Have you done a real data assessment, or are you assuming the data is fine because customer service is making it work?
When you read your platform contract, can you walk away with your data and your business intelligence intact?
Solutions
Shopware Property Groups and Custom Fields
Shopware lets a merchant define their own Property Groups and Custom Fields directly in the admin. Property Groups drive product variants and the storefront filters buyers use to narrow a large catalog, while Custom Fields attach merchant-specific data to products, categories, customers, and orders without bolting on a plugin. The data normalization Matt is talking about can happen inside the platform itself, not in a separate PIM layered on top, which keeps one source of truth for the catalog.
docs.shopware.com/en/shopware-6-en/catalogues/products

## Legacy Systems, PE and the Pressure to Modernize

02
Chapter 2
Featuring Insights from Altus Nova
**Jason Parrish**, Co-Founder, Altus Nova. [linkedin.com/in/jasonmauriceparrish](https://linkedin.com/in/jasonmauriceparrish)
Jason Parrish helps leadership teams turn business strategy into measurable outcomes through disciplined discovery, clear roadmaps, and high-trust execution. Altus Nova is outcome-obsessed: aligning stakeholders, de-risking decisions, and ensuring tech investments translate into scalable operations, defensible strategy, and momentum.
**Altus Nova** [altusnova.com](https://altusnova.com). Altus NovaAltus Nova helps scale-ready businesses unlock AI-enabled growth by turning complexity into competitive advantage. Through disciplined discovery, rational roadmaps, and enterprise-grade execution, the firm helps organizations build operational maturity to accelerate and automate value creation. This seasoned team of meticulous analysts and engineers specializes in modernization projects where operational complexity, data architecture, and business logic matter more than platform feature comparisons.altusnova.com
For many B2B organizations, digital transformation is no longer driven primarily by innovation goals. Increasingly, it is being driven by operational pressure.
As private equity investment accelerates across manufacturing, distribution, industrial supply, and other operationally complex industries, many organizations are being forced to confront a difficult reality: the systems that helped them grow are often no longer capable of supporting what comes next.
“Private equity comes to the table with a very thorough financial model with very strong growth goals. And as they pour on the gas to accelerate the revenue of the business, the underlying tech platform just can’t scale.”— Jason Parrish
Altus Nova specializes in helping organizations navigate those transformation moments, particularly when successful but aging systems begin colliding with the operational demands of growth, consolidation, and modernization.
According to Parrish, many of these companies are not struggling businesses. In fact, the opposite is often true.
“It’s successful, it’s making money,” he explained. “But maybe it’s going to be merged into another system as part of a platform, or maybe it’s going to become the next generation platform.”
That transition creates pressure far beyond a simple ecommerce redesign.
Legacy systems may need to:
integrate newly acquired businesses
support larger transaction volumes
accommodate increasingly complex operational workflows
serve as the foundation for long-term platform consolidation strategies
In many cases, the technical debt runs deeper than stakeholders initially realize.
“Is your CFO part of your platform selection? Not for the budget. For the risk and liability.”
**Jason Parrish Co-Founder, Altus Nova**
Parrish noted that private equity firms often believe technical due diligence has already been completed before a transformation initiative begins. But operational realities frequently expose deeper architectural problems once growth accelerates.
“Maybe one in twenty times that due diligence was more topical than they expected,” Parrish said.
For organizations operating on highly customized or heavily fragmented legacy systems, modernization can become especially challenging.
One example Altus Nova highlighted is a common scenario for a B2B parts company: a large distributor with a highly specialized ecommerce infrastructure and millions of product relationships. Rather than migrating from a mainstream ecommerce platform, the company had built its own custom systems over decades of growth.
“It was truly a completely custom homegrown system,” Parrish explained. “No framework, no documentation.”
Over time, that internally developed infrastructure expanded beyond ecommerce itself into custom CRM, warehouse management, inventory control, and order management systems.
The scale and complexity of the resulting environment was substantial:
4.4 million physical SKUs
roughly 400,000 product categories
1.5 million illustrated parts lists
more than 50 million variants tied to parts relationships
At that scale, modernization is not simply about replatforming. It becomes an exercise in reverse engineering years of operational logic, undocumented workflows, and highly specialized business rules.
“If your background was migrating systems, taking a Shopify that’s been outgrown and moving it to Shopware, you just wouldn’t have the ability to reverse engineer the data scientists, the architects, the many, many nuances of a highly specialized business operating at this scale.”
Solutions
Shopware Sales Channels
A single Shopware admin can power multiple storefronts from one product catalog. A PE-backed roll-up with three brands and four geographies can run all of them from one installation, with each storefront tuned to its own customer base.
shopware.com/en/shopware-multichannel-connect
Those realities are changing how some organizations evaluate commerce platforms entirely.
According to Parrish, Altus Nova approaches platform selection through an engineering and business analysis process rather than beginning with a preferred technology vendor.
The company documents existing system capabilities, maps future operational requirements, evaluates technical constraints, and conducts vendor analysis before recommending a platform strategy.
“We don’t come to the table with a technology partner in mind,” Parrish said. “We think of the technology partner discussion at the very end of the process.”
That process led Altus Nova to evaluate platforms including Magento, BigCommerce, and Shopware during this initiative. According to Parrish, Shopware ultimately surfaced as a leading option based on both technical capability and broader operational considerations.
But notably, Parrish emphasized that feature parity alone is no longer enough when evaluating enterprise commerce infrastructure.
“The feature function checklist is critical,” he said, “but as critical is the ability to pick up the telephone and call someone and get a response.”
Operational flexibility, hosting models, long-term scalability, support responsiveness, and business alignment increasingly play major roles in platform selection decisions, especially for organizations making infrastructure decisions expected to last years into the future.
At the same time, modernization pressure is now colliding with another major industry shift, AI.
Parrish believes many organizations remain focused on the excitement surrounding AI without first addressing the operational foundations required to support it.
“You’ve got to take a breath and look inward at your systems and your data,” he said. “Data governance is no longer a check-the-box item on your insurance policy — it’s your absolutely mandatory step zero. Organizations rushing to apply AI are overlooking the real challenge of winning with AI: operational readiness.”
Without structured and reliable data, organizations may struggle to take advantage of emerging technologies like computer vision, conversational commerce, and AI-driven product discovery.
Parrish pointed to examples like photographing a broken mower part instead of manually navigating massive parts catalogs, or AI-assisted support workflows that help customer service agents identify products based on purchasing history and contextual data.
Taken together, those shifts point toward a broader transformation happening across B2B commerce.
Modernization is no longer simply about launching a better storefront. Increasingly, it is about building operational infrastructure capable of supporting scale, integration, automation, and future technological change, often under significant pressure to move quickly.
Brent’s Take
· Content Cucumber
PE money moves faster than tech debt. The smart operators do the data work before the term sheet, not after the board asks why the replatform slipped two quarters.
Questions for your team
Before the platform contract gets signed, who in your organization actually carries the financial risk if the replatform slips two quarters? Are they in the room?
If your catalog has millions of SKUs, has any candidate platform shown you a live system at that scale, or only a sales deck?
How much of your operating budget today goes to keeping the current platform running, and how much would be left to actually operate the business on a new one?

## Industry-Specific Commerce Solutions for Modern Distribution

03
Chapter 3
Featuring Insights from impaqX
**Bob Lewis**, Founder. [linkedin.com/in/robert-lewis-6973524](https://linkedin.com/in/robert-lewis-6973524)
Founder of impaqX, previously built Enterworks (PIM) and B2X Partners.
**Swamy Mahesh**, Chief Officer of AI and Technology. [linkedin.com/in/swamy-mahesh](https://linkedin.com/in/swamy-mahesh)
More than 20 years at the intersection of commerce, data, and AI; leads tech and global operations at impaqX.
**Sidney Gallaway**, Strategic Innovation Manager. [linkedin.com/in/sidneygallaway](https://linkedin.com/in/sidneygallaway)
Works at the intersection of strategy, partnerships, and delivery; makes sure great ideas actually get built.
**impaqX** [impaqX.com](https://impaqX.com). impaqXimpaqX implements B2B commerce for distributors and manufacturers with complex catalogs and legacy systems. They focus on product data, AI ordering workflows, and the operational reality of trade distribution.impaqX.com
For many distributors, digital transformation is no longer about simply launching an ecommerce website. The real challenge is translating highly specialized operational workflows into digital systems that actually help customers get their jobs done faster.
That distinction is becoming increasingly important across industrial distribution, HVAC, plumbing, electrical supply, and other trade-focused industries where online commerce is tightly connected to operational execution in the field.
According to the team at impaqX, many distributors are now reaching a point where standard out-of-the-box ecommerce functionality is no longer sufficient to support modern customer expectations.
“We really need the opportunity to expand beyond what’s out of the box. You need the ability to create custom functionality that is really speaking to that distributor’s customer base.”— Bob Lewis
impaqX focuses heavily on wholesale distribution and trade industries, working with industrial suppliers, HVAC distributors, plumbing distributors, and other operationally complex B2B organizations. Much of the company’s work centers on solving highly specific workflow problems that traditional ecommerce platforms often struggle to address.
Lewis explained that many distributors are increasingly focused on building experiences tailored specifically to contractors and technicians working in the field, rather than relying solely on generic ecommerce functionality.
In many of these industries, the customer is not casually browsing products online. They are attempting to solve a technical problem while actively working in the field.
“The customer that’s on the site is not shopping,” Lewis said. “They’re there to actually get something done.”
That operational mindset changes how successful B2B commerce experiences need to be designed.
Rather than emphasizing broad product discovery or traditional merchandising tactics, many industrial distributors are increasingly focused on reducing friction, accelerating transactions, and simplifying technically complex workflows.
For example, one impaqX project involved HVAC distributors managing consignment inventory directly on contractor job sites. Equipment technically remained owned by the distributor while contractors consumed inventory over time during installations.
To support that workflow digitally, impaqX built functionality capable of:
tracking serialized equipment
recording inventory withdrawals as ecommerce transactions
automatically feeding those transactions back into ERP systems for invoicing
“That’s not the kind of functionality that generally comes out of the box,” Lewis said.
“Are the customers on your site shopping, or are they working?”
**Bob Lewis Founder, impaqX**
Other projects focused on solving highly specific operational pain points for field technicians and distributors.
One customer servicing industrial ice machines relied heavily on printed repair manuals and parts diagrams. Technicians frequently struggled to identify and order the correct replacement parts, creating delays and ordering mistakes.
impaqX developed a system that used AI agents to scan parts diagrams, identify linked components, and allow technicians to order directly from interactive visual interfaces.
“Now on the webpage the technician can go look at that, click on that image on the part, and then directly order the part,” said Swamy Mahesh, Chief Officer of AI and Technology at impaqX.
In another example, the company automated quote and purchase-order processing workflows that previously relied on employees manually interpreting handwritten notes, PDFs, and emailed requests.
AI agents were used to:
extract order details
identify products
populate order fields
accelerate order-entry workflows that traditionally required significant manual effort
Solutions
Shopware Flow Builder
Shopware Flow Builder ships with more than eighty native event triggers and can call external webhooks. It chains conditions and actions in the admin to change an order or payment state, notify a customer, tag a record, or push data to an external system, all with no code. The branch-routing and consignment logic Bob describes can run inside the platform without a developer writing the glue every time the business changes.
shopware.com/en/products/ecommerce-automation/flow-builder
The common thread across many of these projects is operational complexity.
Distributors often operate on aging ERP systems with:
highly customized pricing structures
branch-specific inventory logic
customer-specific discounts
decades of accumulated business rules
In many cases, the ecommerce layer must compensate for operational limitations elsewhere in the technology stack.
One example described by the impaqX team involved distributors whose ERP systems could not properly process orders split across multiple branch locations. To support a seamless customer experience, the ecommerce platform handled order splitting behind the scenes before routing transactions back into the ERP.
“Simple things that you take for granted, they just don’t have an infrastructure that can support that,” Lewis said.
That need for flexibility was one reason impaqX became interested in Shopware as a platform.
As builders focused on custom functionality and industry-specific workflows, the company was drawn to the platform’s openness and extensibility.
“What attracted us to Shopware is just the openness of the platform and the ability for us to develop in it because we’re builders ourselves,” Lewis said.
According to the team, one early Shopware implementation involved dynamically generating configurable part numbers based on customer-selected product attributes. Instead of simply filtering products, the system assembled entirely new product identifiers and pricing structures in real time based on configuration choices.
As AI continues reshaping ecommerce workflows, the impaqX team believes industrial distribution may ultimately become one of the most impactful use cases for conversational and agent-driven commerce experiences.
Many distributors sell highly technical products where customers are less interested in browsing catalogs than solving practical operational problems.
One example discussed involved oil-rig technicians attempting to identify high-pressure hoses suitable for specific environmental conditions.
Rather than manually filtering through technical product catalogs, future buying experiences may increasingly revolve around conversational interfaces where users simply describe their requirements.
“Most of our customers sell very technical products,” Lewis said. “The customer is always really trying to figure out what’s the best one for my application.”
The impaqX team also emphasized the growing importance of structured product data as AI-powered commerce evolves.
“If you want to show up in agentic commerce, you’re going to have to have clean, structured data with all the details, videos, documents, all of that.”— Sidney Gallaway
That reflects a broader shift happening across B2B commerce.
As conversational interfaces, AI agents, and automation become more common, distributors are increasingly being forced to rethink not only how products are sold online, but how operational knowledge itself is structured, surfaced, and delivered digitally.
For industrial and trade-focused organizations, the future of ecommerce may depend less on replicating consumer shopping experiences and more on building systems that help customers solve complex operational problems as efficiently as possible.
impaqX solutions for common industry gaps
GapSolutionConsignment / serialized equipmentTrack equipment owned by distributor, consumed on job sitesERP cannot split orders across branchesOrder-splitting handled in commerce before routing to ERPParts identification from diagramsAI agents scan diagrams, enable direct orderingManual quote / PO processingAI extraction and order-entry automationBrent’s Take
· Content Cucumber
In trade distribution the website is not a catalog. It is a tool a tech uses with one hand on a job site. Design for the job, not the browse.
Questions for your team
When an order has to ship from multiple branches, does the split happen in your ERP or in your storefront? Where should it happen for the next ten years of growth?
Are your technicians ordering from a smartphone with dirty hands, or from a clean office desktop? Does your interface match how the order actually gets placed?
How much of your customer service team's day is spent looking up parts that the right interface could surface in seconds?

## The Challenge of Modernization in Regulated Commerce

04
Chapter 4
Featuring Insights from Codal
**Ryan Bloms**, Director of Partnerships, Codal. [linkedin.com/in/ryanbloms](https://linkedin.com/in/ryanbloms)
Ryan Bloms is Director of Partnerships at Codal in Chicago, where he oversees the firm's strategic alliances across enterprise commerce. He rose from Account Manager into the Director role and now leads partner programs across Codal's eCommerce, healthcare, and regulated industry engagements.
**Codal** [codal.com](https://codal.com). CodalCodal runs strategy, design, and engineering for regulated commerce. They serve healthcare, financial services, and manufacturing operators who need digital infrastructure that meets the compliance bar without slowing the business down.codal.com
For many organizations operating in regulated industries, digital transformation involves more than simply launching an ecommerce storefront. It requires balancing modernization with security, compliance, operational continuity, and strict data governance requirements.
Those constraints have historically slowed digital adoption across industries like healthcare, pharmaceuticals, financial services, and legal services, where sensitive customer information, compliance obligations, and complex operational workflows create additional layers of risk.
According to Ryan Bloms, Director of Partnerships at Codal, many companies in these sectors are only now beginning to embrace large-scale ecommerce modernization.
“A lot of regulated companies are slow adopters to technology.”
Codal works across both ecommerce and highly regulated industries including healthcare and fintech, combining enterprise software development experience with complex commerce implementation work. That broader technical background, Bloms says, has shaped the company’s approach to systems architecture and operational complexity.
“We do a lot of work outside of ecommerce as well,” he explained, including custom software development in healthcare and fintech environments.
That experience becomes especially valuable when organizations attempt to bring historically offline workflows into digital commerce systems for the first time.
“Have you mapped who owns each piece of customer data, and at what point in the process? Payments, platform, hosting, partners.”
**Ryan Bloms Director of Partnerships, Codal**
In pharmaceutical and healthcare environments, for example, modernization efforts often involve far more than catalog management and online ordering. Organizations may need to manage protected patient data, prescription workflows, regulatory requirements, and secure infrastructure simultaneously.
“Anytime you're selling prescription drugs to a consumer, there’s regulated data, there’s patient health information, there’s protected data,” Bloms explained.
Those realities create architectural constraints that many traditional SaaS commerce platforms struggle to accommodate.
“In a modern ecommerce platform that's just traditional SaaS, it's not a protected environment for the data,” Bloms said.
Instead, regulated organizations often require:
controlled hosting environments
specialized cloud configurations
explicit data ownership structures
tokenized workflows
legal compliance agreements
carefully segmented operational responsibilities
According to Bloms, one advantage of more flexible commerce architectures is the ability to host systems within controlled cloud environments while integrating the commerce functionality organizations need.
“Shopware, you can host it on your own cloud,” he said, allowing organizations to work with providers capable of supporting healthcare and compliance-related requirements.
That flexibility becomes especially important for businesses attempting to modernize long-standing operational processes without completely rebuilding how the organization functions internally.
Many regulated organizations operate on deeply embedded workflows developed over decades. Pricing logic, approval systems, ERP relationships, and customer-specific operational rules are often tightly connected to the way the business already operates.
According to Bloms, forcing those businesses to radically change their operational structure simply to accommodate software limitations can create unnecessary disruption.
Solutions
Shopware flexible hosting deployments
Shopware can be self-hosted. The open-source codebase deploys on your own infrastructure under your own compliance regime, which is the answer to Ryan's question about who owns the data when it leaves the platform.
shopware.com/en/partner/hosting
“Other platforms maybe have to limit that or restructure it,” he said. “Versus Shopware really able to just kind of plug in, meet them where they’re at, and hit the ground running.”
That operational flexibility is becoming increasingly valuable as more B2B organizations begin modernizing under pressure from changing buyer expectations, private equity investment, and broader digital transformation initiatives.
Bloms says many of the organizations Codal works with are now building their first true online buying portals after years of relying primarily on traditional sales channels.
“They are traditionally just doing B2B sales door to door, in person,” he explained. “So they’re not doing as much online.”
In many cases, adoption challenges are not purely technical. Organizational hesitation can be just as significant.
Sales teams and operational stakeholders may initially view ecommerce modernization or AI-enabled workflows as threats to existing processes. But Bloms says that perspective often changes once organizations begin seeing how digital tools can support rather than replace employees.
“They know that maybe AI or this new online commerce, it’s not going to actually take my job,” Bloms said. “It’s going to help me do my job better.”
That broader shift in mindset is occurring across many established B2B industries.
According to Bloms, younger leadership teams, digital-native stakeholders, and private equity investors are increasingly driving modernization initiatives within historically conservative sectors.
“We’ve seen it a lot with private equity groups coming in and buying these businesses and wanting to modernize them,” he said.
In many cases, those organizations already possess valuable operational assets: long-standing customer relationships, specialized expertise, industry reputation, and extensive transactional history.
The challenge is unlocking that value digitally.
“Many B2B businesses have data hidden somewhere in the ERP,” Bloms said.
Modern commerce systems, analytics tools, and AI platforms increasingly allow organizations to surface operational insights that were previously inaccessible or trapped inside disconnected systems.
At the same time, regulated environments require particularly careful governance around how data flows across platforms and partners.
Bloms pointed to the importance of clearly defining:
who owns customer data
where sensitive information is stored
how payment and healthcare information is segmented
which parties are responsible for each layer of the transaction process
“Clearly defining who owns each process de-risks everything,” he said.
For regulated organizations modernizing complex operational environments, that balance between flexibility, compliance, and digital transformation may become one of the defining challenges of the next generation of B2B commerce.
Brent’s Take · Content CucumberCompliance is not the blocker people think it is. The blocker is no one will say out loud who owns the data. Name the owner and most of the risk evaporates.Regulated commerce requirements, by hosting modelRequirementSaaSOn-PremWhyControlled hosting environments✗✓Multi-tenant SaaS runs on shared infrastructure; self-hosting controls the environment. Bloms: traditional SaaS is “not a protected environment for the data.”Specialized cloud configurations✗✓Self-hosting on your own cloud lets you choose providers that meet healthcare and compliance requirements.Explicit data ownership structures✓✓Set by contract and DPA in either model; the real blocker is defining who owns what, not the platform.Tokenized workflows✓✓Both can tokenize sensitive data; tokenization is standard for payments and protected information.Legal compliance agreements✓✓SaaS vendors offer BAAs and DPAs; self-hosting gives direct control of the agreement.Segmented operational responsibilities✓✓An organizational design choice, not a platform limitation.Questions for your team
When customer data moves between your platform, your payment processor, your fulfillment partner, and your CRM, who is contractually responsible for the breach if it happens at a handoff?
Is your hosting environment audited against the compliance standard your industry regulator actually uses, or just a generic SOC 2?
Have you mapped every data flow out of your platform to third-party apps and partners, and can you stop any of those flows on demand if regulation changes?

## AI and Agentic Commerce

05
Chapter 5
Featuring Insights from Acro Commerce
**Shae Inglis**, CEO, Acro Commerce. [linkedin.com/in/shae-inglis-6b3b472](https://linkedin.com/in/shae-inglis-6b3b472)
Shae Inglis is CEO of Acro Commerce, the B2B commerce firm he co-founded in 1998. He works with manufacturers and complex B2B businesses on ERP-integrated commerce across the Acumatica, Cin7, and Shopware ecosystems, and he argues the platform decision should come after the business logic is understood, not before.
**Acro Commerce** [acrocommerce.com](https://acrocommerce.com). Acro CommerceAcro Commerce is a strategy, architecture, integration, and delivery partner for mid-market manufacturers, wholesalers, and distributors whose operations are too complex for off-the-shelf ecommerce. The firm builds ERP-connected buying experiences across Acumatica, Cin7, and Shopware, and Celeste focuses on the buyer-side data hygiene that makes AI agents reliable rather than confidently wrong.acrocommerce.comAcumatica–Shopware connector: [acrocommerce.com/acumatica-shopware-connector](https://acrocommerce.com/acumatica-shopware-connector)Shopware accelerator: [acrocommerce.com/shopware](https://acrocommerce.com/shopware)
For many B2B organizations, AI has quickly shifted from an experimental technology to a strategic business conversation. But while interest in AI and agentic commerce continues accelerating across the industry, many companies are still trying to determine what meaningful implementation actually looks like in practice.
According to Shae Inglis, Acro Commerce has been approaching that challenge through the lens of operational complexity rather than hype. As a strategy, architecture, integration, and delivery partner, Acro starts with how a business actually sells, prices, and fulfills before recommending any platform, so its AI work reads as an extension of that method rather than a feature bolted on at the end.
“We really focus on what we like to call the messy middle.”— Shae Inglis
The messy middle is the operational gap between a polished storefront and the ERP, pricing, and workflow systems that actually run the business.
Acro Commerce specializes in manufacturing, wholesale, and distribution environments where businesses often rely on deeply customized operational workflows. Much of the company’s work focuses on solving problems that standard platform integrations and traditional SaaS architectures struggle to accommodate.
Over time, that focus naturally evolved into experimentation with AI-driven and conversational commerce experiences.
Rather than treating AI as a standalone feature layered on top of existing ecommerce systems, Acro began exploring how conversational interfaces could fundamentally reshape the way customers navigate complex purchasing decisions. Acro has packaged this thinking into Celeste, a set of tools aimed at the data readiness and conversational experiences that agentic commerce depends on.
“We really wanted to take the conversational element of what people are loving about AI,” Inglis said, “and combine that browsing experience in terms of literal conversation to produce pages that would match what that user is looking for.”
One example Acro described involved configurable sauna systems, the kind of made-to-spec, multi-option product that mirrors how many manufacturers and distributors sell configured equipment.
Rather than requiring buyers to manually navigate categories, filters, and technical specifications, the experience allows customers to describe the room they are building, their material preferences, heating preferences, and other contextual details conversationally.
“So if I’ve got a room downstairs in my basement that’s nine by eight foot ceilings,” Inglis explained, “I could literally go in there, put my specs in there of exactly what I want, and have that agentic kind of experience in which I could get the ideal solution for that specific room.”
That type of interaction represents a major shift from traditional ecommerce navigation.
Instead of static catalogs and faceted filtering systems, conversational commerce experiences increasingly focus on understanding intent, use cases, and customer-specific requirements dynamically.
For B2B organizations selling configurable, technical, or operationally complex products, that shift could significantly reduce friction throughout the buying process.
At the same time, Inglis believes many organizations are dramatically underestimating the operational requirements necessary to make AI systems function effectively.
“How much of your most valuable information is locked behind a login that AI cannot see?”
**Shae Inglis CEO, Acro Commerce**
“I think this idea of just being able to slap AI on top of any data set and expect it to be able to produce the answers that you want is a misconception,” he said.
According to Inglis, AI systems are only as effective as the structure and context of the underlying data feeding them.
Organizations that attempt to combine fragmented ERP data, Slack conversations, internal documentation, spreadsheets, and disconnected operational systems into a single AI layer often discover that the outputs quickly become unreliable.
“You can’t just attach all your different data sources together in one big heap and expect to pull good answers from it,” Inglis explained.
That challenge is becoming increasingly important as businesses begin optimizing not only for traditional search engines, but also for large language models and AI-driven discovery systems.
Acro highlighted the growing importance of what many organizations now describe as:
LLM optimization
generative engine optimization (GEO)
answer engine optimization (AEO)
As customers increasingly use AI systems to research products and vendors, companies must determine how much information to expose publicly while still protecting proprietary pricing strategies, operational processes, and intellectual property.
“There’s a balancing act there that we’re all trying to figure out right now,” Inglis said. “How much to give away to the LLMs.”
The opportunity, however, is substantial.
Inglis compared the current AI landscape to the early years of search engine optimization, where companies that established strong visibility early gained major competitive advantages.
“If you’re there first, you’re going to have a leg up on the competition,” he said.
At the same time, Acro sees growing risks as large AI platforms increasingly absorb more of the discovery and decision-making process directly into their own interfaces.
“The more and more capabilities that they build in,” Inglis said, “just means less and less competitive advantage for the different companies that are building these things.”
That concern reflects a broader uncertainty currently shaping the ecommerce industry.
As conversational interfaces become more capable, businesses may need to rethink:
branding
customer ownership
pricing transparency
product discovery
the role of the storefront itself
Solutions
Shopware Open Store API and open-source codebase
Shopware ships with an open Store API and an open-source codebase. LLMs and AI agents can actually read the storefront's structure, which is exactly the AI-readability problem Shae raises about most modern SaaS platforms.
shopware.com/en/api-integrations
Inglis believes the future of AI-driven commerce may become increasingly specialized rather than universally centralized.
“We’re going to see things begin to niche again,” he said.
Instead of a single AI system doing everything equally well, Inglis expects businesses to develop highly specialized AI agents trained around specific operational tasks, workflows, and commerce use cases.
Acro built [Celeste](https://runceleste.com), an AI-driven presales diagnostic, to help Acumatica and Cin7 resellers and integration partners determine whether standard commerce integrations will actually support a customer’s operational requirements.
Celeste evaluates architecture needs, platform fit, workflow complexity, and integration risks before projects begin.
The goal is to reduce failed implementations and identify situations where additional customization or middleware will be required.
That operational focus reflects Acro’s broader view of AI adoption: the real value is not simply automation, but improving decision-making around increasingly complex commerce environments.
At the same time, Inglis believes the rapid growth of AI-generated content and automation may ultimately increase the value of human relationships in B2B commerce rather than eliminate them.
“We’re working with one another. We’re not working with robots,” he said. “There has to be an element of trust.”
As AI-generated content becomes more widespread, Inglis believes businesses will increasingly differentiate themselves through expertise, relationships, operational understanding, and the ability to solve highly specific business problems.
For B2B organizations navigating AI adoption, that balance may become one of the defining challenges of the next generation of commerce: using automation and intelligent systems to reduce friction and simplify complexity, while still preserving the human trust and operational expertise that complex B2B relationships depend on.
The three optimization frontiers
TermWhat it optimizes forLLM optimizationBeing usable by large language modelsGenerative engine optimization (GEO)Visibility inside generative answersAnswer engine optimization (AEO)Being the cited answer to a questionQuestions for your team
If you pointed an LLM at your own data sources today, would it make things up because the context across systems doesn't line up? What would the first cleanup look like?
How much of your most valuable product information is sitting behind a login that no AI can read? Is that protecting your IP or hiding your story?
Brent’s Take
· Content Cucumber
Everyone wants the agent. Almost no one wants the data hygiene that makes the agent not lie. Do the boring part first or do not bother.

## Manufacturing and Distribution Transformation

06
Chapter 6
Featuring Insights from Americaneagle.com
**Brendan Cameron**, Head of Manufacturing & Distribution, Americaneagle.com. [linkedin.com/in/brendan-cameron](https://linkedin.com/in/brendan-cameron)
Brendan Cameron is Head of Manufacturing and Distribution at Americaneagle.com, where he has been part of the team since 2010. He works with operators ranging from small business to international enterprise organizations on strategic planning, five-year roadmaps, and ROI models for commerce platform decisions.
**Americaneagle.com** [Americaneagle.com](https://Americaneagle.com). Americaneagle.comAmericaneagle.com is a global digital agency dedicated to providing B2B and B2C operators across industries with best-in-class web design, development, hosting, AI, and digital marketing services for over 30 years.Americaneagle.com
Manufacturing and distribution have always been complex sectors. As digital commerce moves to the center of how these companies operate, that complexity is harder to contain inside legacy systems, manual workflows, and disconnected portals.
For Brendan Cameron, Head of Manufacturing and Distribution at Americaneagle.com, that is exactly why the sector requires specialized digital expertise.
“Manufacturing and distribution is a very specialized market, mainly with the idea that nothing is easy.”
Americaneagle.com is a global digital agency founded more than 30 years ago, with a dedicated manufacturing and distribution practice. The work is rarely standard, Cameron said, because these businesses — dealing in components, building materials, replacement parts, and MRO products — rarely operate in standard ways.
“Our work has to deal with a lot more of the webbing and complexity,” Cameron said.
That complexity can include:
tax implications
shipping requirements
territory restrictions
supplier agreements
customer-specific pricing
regulated products
dealer portals
sales workflows
internal approval processes
For many manufacturers and distributors, those requirements are not operational preferences. They carry legal, financial, and business risk. Tax compliance alone can involve exemption certificates, resale documentation, agricultural exemptions, and industry-specific rules that go well beyond a standard retail checkout.
“Why do you do it that way? If the only answer is because we've always done it that way, that is probably not good enough.”
**Brendan Cameron Head of Manufacturing & Distribution, Americaneagle.com**
Legacy systems create another major challenge. Many manufacturers and distributors have spent years layering custom functionality onto old platforms until those systems become fragile and difficult to maintain, where even a small update can create problems elsewhere.
“You end up with a QA nightmare,” he said. “You just have a lot of code that looks like spaghetti.”
That technical debt is often what pushes organizations to evaluate a modern platform like Shopware. For Americaneagle.com, that evaluation begins with business requirements and operational processes, not the technology.
“The last thing we want to do is try to strong arm a customer into saying, you need to change how your business operates to fit within this,” he said.
That does not mean every existing process should remain untouched — if the only reason for a workflow is “because we’ve always done it that way,” there may be room for improvement. But when a process has been refined around real business needs, the technology should be flexible enough to support it.
“I think that’s where Shopware really comes to show its strength,” Cameron said. “We’re not forcing people to change the way they do business, we’re able to extend how the platform works to fit within their needs.”
Customer expectations are also changing. Manufacturers and distributors increasingly recognize that ecommerce is no longer a side channel. Cameron pointed to industrial leaders like Grainger and Zoro as proof of how serious digital commerce has become.
Solutions
Shopware Rule Builder and Flow Builder
Rule Builder and Flow Builder are both native to Shopware and both no-code. The credit application that requires manual review, then status routing, then approval workflow Brendan describes can be modeled in the admin without a developer involved every time the policy changes.
shopware.com/en/products/rule-builder
“The web is not some niche for one or two products or some gimmick for SEO and recognition,” he said. “It is a full wing within these companies today.”
That shift is changing how companies think about dealer portals. Historically locked behind logins, many are now exposing installation guides, warranty documentation, and specifications publicly to support product discovery and new-customer acquisition. Once a buyer authenticates, the dealer portal becomes an additional layer on the same experience rather than a separate destination.
“It’s no longer you’re jumping to multiple places to do business,” Cameron said. “Everything’s in one.”
Even so, Cameron emphasized that manufacturing and distribution remain deeply human industries. He sees change management as one of the most overlooked challenges in the sector, and many products — complex machinery, programmable logic controllers, regulated materials — still require engineers, solutions teams, and salespeople in the buying process.
“This is a human-in-the-loop industry,” Cameron said. Ecommerce, in his view, should help those teams work more efficiently rather than replace them.
The same applies to workflows like registration and checkout, where companies have highly specific processes for approving customers, running credit checks, submitting tax exemption forms, or routing purchases through senior buyers. On many platforms, those requirements mean heavy custom development. Cameron sees Shopware’s rules engine and flow tools as a way to manage them with less.
“You’re able to put in events by a business admin, then you’re able to route and triage each of the operations individually,” he said.
That flexibility matters most in the complex segments of B2B, which often need deeper workflow support than general B2B use cases. The risk with simpler platforms is that they force businesses to adjust operations to fit the platform, recreating the same long-term technical debt they were trying to escape, much like the plugin-heavy websites of the early 2000s.
“When you get down to the more complex subcategories of B2B, 100%, there’s nonstarters right off the bat,” Cameron said. “If you do feel that there are some complexities in there, that is where I think Shopware starts to shine.”
Looking ahead, Cameron sees several categories with strong transformation opportunities. Chemical distribution needs systems that manage complex validation, fulfillment, and shipping. A product like hydrogen peroxide may be unrestricted at one concentration and heavily regulated at another. Heavy equipment is another. Cameron does not expect companies to sell $600,000 excavators online without human involvement, but ecommerce can still complete much of the journey before a salesperson steps in.
“You can get seven out of the ten steps,” he said, checking availability, reviewing specifications, requesting a quote, submitting information, and starting a credit application. In that model, ecommerce becomes a lead-qualification and sales-enablement engine, not just a transactional storefront. Aerospace, with its government contracts, GSA procedures, and aviation regulations, is a third area he is watching.
Cameron also believes manufacturers and distributors should treat websites as more than revenue-generating stores. Many offer services central to their value, from on-site commissioning to inventory management and regional expertise.
“Customers don’t just buy parts and products. They buy expertise, service, and support, and your digital experience should reflect that,” Cameron said.
For manufacturers and distributors, the future of digital commerce may not be defined by replacing human sales teams or forcing every transaction into a standard checkout. It may be defined by how well companies use digital platforms to support complex operations, surface expertise, qualify opportunities, and make it easier for customers to do business with them.
Steps that can be automated in the sales process
1
Check availability
→
2
Review technical specifications
→
3
Request a quote
→
4
Submit customer information
→
5
Start a credit application
→
6
Connect with a salesperson
High-opportunity industries
SegmentsWhy it is hardChemical distributionValidation, fulfillment and shipping of regulated materialsHeavy equipmentHigh-value, human-in-the-loop final saleAerospaceGovernment contracts, GSA, DoD, aviation regulationQuestions for your team
When you launch a new platform, who inside your company is the champion and who is the detractor? Have you named them yet?
How much of your website's value comes from direct ecommerce revenue and how much comes from supporting your service team and qualifying leads? Is your ROI math counting both?
Of the resources sitting behind a dealer login today (manuals, specs, warranty docs), which ones could be public and would actually help discovery? Which ones must stay locked?
Brent’s Take
· Content Cucumber
Nobody buys a 600,000 dollar excavator in a cart. But seven of the ten steps can happen online, and that is the whole game in heavy equipment.

## The Future of B2B Buying Experiences

07
Chapter 7
Featuring Insights from Dopple
**Justin Scott**, Co-Founder & CEO, Dopple. [linkedin.com/in/justinkscott](https://linkedin.com/in/justinkscott)
Justin Scott is Co-Founder and CEO of Dopple, the product intelligence and 3D configuration platform for B2B brands. He previously held senior revenue and brand leadership roles at FiscalNote, Tumblr, and Zillow before founding Dopple in 2021.
**Dopple** [dopple.io](https://dopple.io). DoppleDopple is a 3D visualization and configuration platform for ecommerce brands. They serve manufacturers in marine, outdoor recreation, and heavy machinery where buyers need to see the product before they commit.dopple.ioShopware integration: [shopware.com/en/integrations/dopple](https://shopware.com/en/integrations/dopple)
As B2B commerce grows more complex behind the scenes, many companies are realizing that the buying experience itself has not kept pace.
Manufacturers, distributors, and industrial suppliers increasingly sell products with hundreds of configurable options, technical specifications, compatibility requirements, and operational considerations. Yet many ecommerce experiences still rely on static product pages, spreadsheets, PDFs, and traditional catalog structures that place the burden of interpretation on the buyer.
For businesses selling highly configurable or high-value products, that gap creates friction quickly.
“Is your buyer purchasing for themselves, or are they buying for consensus? Does your interface help them present it to their stakeholders?”
**Justin Scott Co-Founder & CEO, Dopple**
“Sellers want to be able to sell complex products. It’s really hard to convey that context through images. So 3D allows for a simplified way to communicate your product offering to your buyer.”— Justin Scott
Dopple specializes in visual product configuration experiences for complex B2B and industrial products. The company works heavily in industries like marine, heavy machinery, and outdoor recreation, where purchases are often expensive, technically detailed, and infrequent.
In these environments, the challenge is rarely just presenting a product. The challenge is helping buyers understand what they actually need.
Traditional ecommerce interfaces often struggle with that level of complexity. Static product grids and dropdown menus can quickly become overwhelming when buyers are evaluating dozens of variants, optional components, or solution-specific configurations.
Scott describes this challenge as a “cognitive load” problem.
Increasingly, B2B organizations are looking for ways to simplify decision-making without oversimplifying the products themselves. That is driving interest in more immersive and contextual buying experiences, including 3D visualization, guided configuration, and conversational interfaces.
Dopple’s approach centers on a conversational Sales Agent that helps buyers narrow complex decisions into more intuitive ones. Instead of forcing users to manually sort through every technical option, the Sales Agent guides them through configuration conversationally, based on what they are actually trying to accomplish.
Solutions
Shopware Custom Products with step-by-step guide
Shopware Custom Products supports a step-by-step guided mode where buyers are walked through configuration options one at a time, instead of confronted with a wall of variants. That is structurally what Justin describes as the missing interface for complex B2B products.
docs.shopware.com/en/shopware-6-en/extensions/customproducts
“So if you said, ‘Hey, I am looking for a tractor because I am building a road for my new hundred acres,’” Scott explained, “it’s going to ask you what you’re trying to do and it will down select into that configured object.”
That contextual layer is becoming increasingly important in B2B commerce, particularly as more organizations attempt to digitize highly consultative sales processes.
In many industrial and enterprise environments, purchases are not made by a single individual. Buyers often need to justify purchases internally, coordinate across teams, or evaluate multiple product configurations against operational requirements.
“You might even be buying that for consensus,” Scott said, referring to the need to present configurations to internal stakeholders before purchasing decisions are finalized.
To support those workflows, visual configuration tools are increasingly being paired with features like build sheets, order summaries, and collaborative configuration outputs that help bridge the gap between ecommerce and traditional consultative sales processes.
At the same time, technologies like AI and conversational commerce are beginning to reshape how users interact with complex product catalogs.
Like many companies in the ecommerce ecosystem, Dopple is actively evaluating how AI can improve both internal operations and customer-facing experiences. But Scott takes a notably pragmatic view of the current AI landscape.
“We don’t think that one master AI LLM is going to rule them all,” he said. “We think it’s going to be a slow, steady progress, especially in B2B.”
That perspective reflects a broader trend across enterprise commerce. While AI has become one of the dominant themes across the industry, many B2B organizations remain focused on practical implementation, operational value, and human oversight rather than fully autonomous systems.
“B2B still wants to understand at the human level how that technology is going to be implemented into their stack by their vendor partner,” Scott said.
Rather than replacing human expertise, many organizations are exploring how AI can reduce friction, automate repetitive processes, and improve product discovery while still maintaining trust and transparency throughout the buying journey.
For B2B organizations navigating increasingly complex product catalogs and customer expectations, that balance may define the next evolution of digital commerce experiences: systems sophisticated enough to manage operational complexity behind the scenes, while presenting buyers with interfaces that feel simpler, more intuitive, and easier to navigate.
Brent’s Take · Content CucumberB2B is not slow because buyers are slow. It is slow because the interface makes one person guess on behalf of a committee. Fix the interface, shorten the cycle.Why static catalogs fail complex productsStatic catalogGuided / visual configurationDozens of variants in a gridNarrowed by what the buyer is trying to doBuyer interprets specs aloneContext-driven down-selectionNo artifact for internal sign-offBuild sheets and summaries for consensusConclusion
What the Next Generation of B2B Commerce Looks Like
Across every conversation featured in this report, one theme surfaced repeatedly: modern B2B commerce is no longer just an ecommerce problem.
It is an operational infrastructure problem.
For years, many organizations approached digital commerce primarily as a storefront initiative, a way to publish catalogs online, digitize ordering workflows, or modernize customer experiences. But as B2B organizations have matured digitally, the limitations of that approach have become increasingly clear.
Today, the real challenges often sit deeper inside the business:
fragmented data
aging ERP systems
undocumented workflows
operational silos
inconsistent product structures
decades of institutional knowledge that were never designed to scale digitally
At the same time, customer expectations continue evolving rapidly.
Field technicians, procurement teams, contractors, healthcare buyers, and enterprise purchasing groups increasingly expect digital experiences that are:
faster
more contextual
easier to navigate
tightly integrated with the operational realities of their work
That shift is forcing B2B organizations to rethink not only how products are sold online, but how operational knowledge itself is organized and delivered digitally.
Several contributors emphasized that flexibility is becoming one of the most important characteristics of modern commerce infrastructure.
For industrial distributors, that may mean supporting highly customized pricing structures, branch-specific fulfillment logic, or complex ERP integrations. In regulated industries, it may involve balancing digital convenience with strict governance and compliance requirements. For organizations modernizing under private equity ownership, it may require rearchitecting systems capable of supporting future acquisitions, scalability, and operational visibility.
Increasingly, businesses are recognizing that rigid platforms and one-size-fits-all workflows rarely align with the realities of complex B2B operations.
At the same time, AI is rapidly accelerating pressure across the industry.
Conversational commerce, computer vision, intelligent search, workflow automation, and AI-assisted procurement are no longer hypothetical concepts. Many organizations are already experimenting with practical implementations that simplify complex workflows and reduce operational friction.
But the interviews in this report also revealed a more grounded perspective on AI adoption.
The companies best positioned to take advantage of emerging technologies are often not the organizations chasing the most aggressive AI headlines. They are the organizations doing the foundational work first:
cleaning and structuring data
documenting workflows
modernizing infrastructure
building systems flexible enough to evolve over time
Without that operational foundation, even the most advanced AI tools struggle to deliver meaningful business value.
Another clear trend is the growing convergence between ecommerce, operational systems, and customer enablement.
In many industries, commerce experiences are becoming less about browsing products and more about helping customers complete highly specific tasks:
identifying the correct replacement part
configuring technical equipment
processing field orders
navigating regulated purchasing requirements
or simplifying complex procurement workflows
The future of B2B commerce may ultimately look less like traditional online shopping and more like operational problem-solving delivered through intelligent digital systems.
For many organizations, that transformation is only beginning.
But one thing is becoming increasingly clear: the next generation of B2B commerce will not be defined solely by storefront design, AI features, or platform comparisons. It will be defined by how effectively businesses connect their operational infrastructure, customer experiences, and digital systems into something scalable, adaptable, and capable of supporting the realities of modern commerce.
We are here to help. Contact us to schedule a free business consultation and connect with the report contributors.
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B2B Commerce Trends & Opportunities Report · 2026 Edition · Content Cucumber

## About the authors and contributors

The Authors
About this report
The Authors
This report was produced by
Content Cucumber
for
Shopware
. It features insights from nine leaders across seven firms. These contributors represent agencies, consultancies, and technology providers working directly with mid-market B2B organizations across distribution, manufacturing, regulated commerce, and emerging AI experiences.
Written and analyzed by
Brent Peterson
Analyst & CEO, Content Cucumber
Brent Peterson is the analyst behind this report and CEO of Content Cucumber, a company that employs humans to write content for humans. He is also the founder of Content Basis, RequestDesk, and Talk Commerce, and host of the Talk Commerce podcast.
Isaac Morey
Co-Founder & Chief Editor, Content Cucumber
Isaac Morey is Co-Founder and Chief Editor of Content Cucumber, which recently merged with Content Basis. He leads a team of pro writers and creatives producing blogs, email newsletters, and product content that grows traffic, engages audiences, and builds brands.
Featuring insights from
The Contributors
The industry leaders interviewed for this report. Each chapter ahead opens with one of them.
FirmContributorFocus AreaCh**Harris Digital** harrisdigital.io**Matt Harris** linkedin.com/in/matthewrossharrisData readiness & ERP-connected commerce1**Altus Nova** altusnova.com**Jason Parrish** linkedin.com/in/jasonmauriceparrishPE-driven modernization & legacy systems2**impaqX** impaqX.com**Bob Lewis** linkedin.com/in/robert-lewis-6973524Industry-specific commerce & modern distribution3**Swamy Mahesh** linkedin.com/in/swamy-maheshIndustry-specific commerce & modern distribution3**Sidney Gallaway** linkedin.com/in/sidneygallawayIndustry-specific commerce & modern distribution3**Codal** codal.com**Ryan Bloms** linkedin.com/in/ryanblomsRegulated commerce (healthcare, fintech)4**Acro Commerce** acrocommerce.com**Shae Inglis** linkedin.com/in/shae-inglis-6b3b472AI & agentic commerce5**Americaneagle.com** Americaneagle.com**Brendan Cameron** linkedin.com/in/brendan-cameronManufacturing & distribution transformation6**Dopple** dopple.io**Justin Scott** linkedin.com/in/justinkscottVisual configuration & the future of B2B buying7

## Questions about this document

### What is this report and who made it?

A research report built from original interviews with nine B2B commerce leaders across seven firms. It was presented by Shopware and researched and written by Content Cucumber. It is not a product brochure.

### Is the full report on this page?

Yes. Every chapter is here as readable text, including the contributor quotes and the closing section on what the next generation of B2B commerce looks like. The PDF button gives you the designed version of the same content.

### Do I need to fill out a form to download the PDF?

No. The download button links straight to the PDF. If you would rather have it emailed to you, the original report page still offers that.

### Who is it written for?

Leaders at B2B manufacturers, distributors, and regulated sellers, plus the agencies and integrators who serve them. If you are making a platform, data, or AI decision in the next year, it is written for you.

### What does mid-market mean in this report?

The contributors define it by what the operator has to do rather than by revenue. A mid-market B2B operator runs the catalog of a Fortune 500 with the engineering team of a small agency, which is why the report spends so much time on data readiness and ERP alignment.