When I speak with executives at manufacturing and distribution companies about B2B eCommerce, the conversation tends to start in the same place: technology. Which platform? Which integrations? What does the roadmap look like?
Those are legitimate questions, and eventually they need answers. But in my experience co-founding and leading Novatize over the past 12 years, the companies that struggle to get traction with their digital commerce programs almost never fail because they chose the wrong platform. They fail because the people inside the organization are not working toward the same goal.
Stop Losing Buyers. Fix the Experience with François-Jérôme Gosselin - YouTube
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B2B eCommerce Association
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Stop Losing Buyers. Fix the Experience with François-Jérôme Gosselin
B2B eCommerce Association
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I had a conversation recently on The B2B eCommerce Show with host Justin King that gave me a chance to say this plainly. King put it well: “Executive alignment and customer adoption are the real issues across the industry, big companies, small companies. It really doesn’t matter.” He is right. And I think it is worth explaining why, and what manufacturers and distributors can actually do about it.
The Metric That Tells You Everything
In B2C eCommerce, the headline metric is customer acquisition. How many new buyers did we reach? What was our cost per acquisition? How did conversion rates perform?
In B2B, the metric that tells you whether your digital commerce program is actually working is customer adoption. Are your existing buyers, the ones who have been ordering from you for years, using your digital channels? Are they transacting online with their negotiated prices, their approved payment terms, their specific catalog access?
That shift in metric reflects a fundamental difference in what B2B eCommerce is for.You are not trying to acquire strangers. You are trying to serve people who already trust you, with an experience that makes your relationship stronger and your operations more efficient.
“90% of B2B buyers are ready to change suppliers if you don’t deliver that good buying experience online.”
That number should focus attention. The risk is not failing to acquire new customers. The risk is making it hard enough for existing customers to do business with you that they start looking elsewhere. The switching cost for a B2B buyer is real, but so is the patience threshold. When a buyer has to call a rep to complete a transaction that should be self-service, that experience compounds over time.
The B2BEA has documented this shift extensively. Research on B2B buyer demands in 2024 confirms that 93% of B2B buyers now choose digital channels for procurement. The expectation of a seamless digital experience is no longer a differentiator. It is a baseline.
Why Alignment Fails Before Technology Even Enters the Room
Here is the pattern I see most often with manufacturers and distributors trying to modernize their commerce operations. The company has multiple locations, each operating as an independent profit-and-loss unit. Each location has its own inventory, its own pricing logic, and its own staff who are measured on their location’s performance. A digital initiative arrives that promises to let customers order from anywhere, pick up at any location, and access the full organizational catalog. The technology can support all of that. But the incentive structure cannot.
If a customer places an order online and picks up at Location B, but the order was fulfilled from inventory held at Location A, who gets the revenue credit? If a regional manager’s bonus is tied to their location’s sales, why would they agree to have their inventory moved elsewhere? These are not technology problems. They are organizational design problems, and they will quietly kill a digital transformation even when the platform is working exactly as designed.
What We See in Practice
The first question I ask when a manufacturer or distributor comes to us is not “what platform are you on?” It is “when a customer places an order that crosses location boundaries, how does that revenue get attributed?” The answer tells me almost everything about how difficult the transformation will be.
Our approach at Novatize is to make this concrete before anyone talks about technology. We show leadership teams what the customer experience looks like when everything is working. A buyer starts their purchasing process on a phone, selects a drill and a safety helmet, and chooses pickup at the nearest location, all from a single seamless interface. Then we work backward. What has to be true organizationally for that experience to be possible? What incentive structures need to change? Which teams need to share data they are currently keeping separate?
When executives can see the destination clearly, the organizational changes required to get there become easier to discuss. Without that clarity, the conversation stays abstract, and abstract conversations about change management do not produce change.
Unified Commerce Is the Goal, and It Is Achievable
The term I use for this destination is unified commerce. It is the natural evolution of omnichannel, and it originated more in retail than in B2B, but the concept applies directly to manufacturers and distributors managing complex, multi-location operations.
Unified commerce means that inventory, catalog, pricing, and customer data are all visible and accessible across the organization, and that a buyer experiences the organization as a single entity rather than a collection of separate locations. It means that when a buyer starts a purchasing journey on their phone and finishes it at a branch counter, the experience is continuous and consistent.
Companies that achieve this see real results. On average, a successful unified commerce transformation delivers a 14 to 15 percent increase in revenue from digital channels for mid-market and enterprise-grade companies. That is not a marginal gain. For a distributor doing $200 million in annual revenue, that is a $28 to $30 million improvement attributable to giving buyers a better experience. You can explore how Novatize approaches unified commerce for manufacturers and distributors specifically.
What Good Looks Like at the Agency Level
I want to be direct about something that practitioners often find confusing when they are choosing a commerce partner. Not all agencies are built for B2B, and the ones that are not will rarely tell you so directly.
A B2C-focused agency is optimized for customer acquisition. Their talent is weighted toward advertising specialists, performance marketers, and people who know how to drive traffic and convert strangers into first-time buyers. Those are real skills, and they matter for some parts of a B2B strategy. But if your core problem is that your existing buyers are struggling to self-serve online, an agency oriented toward acquisition will solve a different problem than the one you have.
A B2B-specialized firm is optimized for customer adoption. The team composition is different: more backend engineers, more business analysts, more people who understand how ERP systems connect to commerce platforms, how approval workflows function, and how negotiated pricing needs to behave at checkout. The questions we ask at the beginning of a project are different, and the measures of success at launch are different.
When you are evaluating agencies, ask them to describe what they believe the business problem is in their own words. Ask what they would measure at launch and at 90 days. If a partner leads with ad campaigns when your core need is customer retention and digital adoption, that is important information.
SPINE: What We Built and Why
After years of working with complex B2B clients, we kept solving the same problems. Approval workflows where buyers needed manager sign-off before a purchase could be completed. Real-time pricing pulled from ERP systems so customers always saw their negotiated rates. Inventory visibility by location, with lead times that varied by product and fulfillment point. These are not exotic requirements. They are standard operating procedure for most distributors and manufacturers.
But building them from scratch on every project was expensive and time-consuming. A typical B2B commerce implementation could take 18 months. We built SPINE to address that. It is a Shopify-based accelerator that packages these common B2B requirements into a foundation that can be deployed in four to six months, with the flexibility to accommodate what is genuinely unique about each client’s business model.
Our philosophy on customization is straightforward. Most of the work can and should be done with what is available out of the box or through established tools. Some processes are genuinely foundational to a business model and require custom development; those we build carefully. But the goal is always to minimize technical debt and maximize the time the client’s team spends on their customers rather than their infrastructure. For manufacturers specifically, you can see how unified commerce applies to manufacturing operations.
The Timeline Is Longer Than You Think, and That Is Fine
Justin King made a point in our conversation that I think deserves to be repeated. He described how Chick-fil-A took seven years to roll out two words, “my pleasure,” consistently across all of its locations. Seven years for two words. And those two words are now the most recognizable phrase in American fast food.
Digital transformation in manufacturing and distribution is not a project with a go-livem date. It is a program, and the behavioral and organizational changes that make a digital investment pay off take longer than the technology implementation does. Leaders who go into these programs expecting that the launch is the finish line tend to be disappointed. Leaders who go in understanding that the launch is the beginning tend to build something durable.
The technology is there. The platforms, the integrations, and the tools available to manufacturers and distributors today are genuinely remarkable compared to what existed even five years ago. What has not changed is the difficulty of getting a large organization to change how it works. That difficulty is real, but it is not an excuse. It is the work.
If you are leading a manufacturing or distribution business and you are looking at your B2B eCommerce strategy, I would encourage you to start not with the platform selection but with a clear picture of what you want the buyer experience to look like. Make it specific. Make it visual. Show it to your leadership team. Then ask: what would have to be true, inside our organization, for that experience to be possible? The answers to that question will tell you more about your digital transformation than any technology assessment will. And if you want to explore what the path forward looks like for companies with complex needs, Novatize’s look at B2B Commerce trends heading into 2026 offers a grounded view of where the industry is going.
— This perspective was shared on The B2B eCommerce Show with Justin King.