Jan 7, 2026 | 11 minute read
written by Elastic Path
The temperature has dropped (metaphorically, at least) in the world of eCommerce strategy. As we kick off 2026, many B2B brands find themselves facing an unusually hostile climate: tighter margins, rising buyer expectations, fractured decision journeys, and a technology market full of bloated promises.
The tools that once defined eCommerce are being outgrown by the complexity of modern business. Mid-market B2B eCommerce teams in particular are stuck in a tough position: large enough to face serious operational and integration demands, but not so large that a six-figure, two-year replatform feels realistic. Or defensible.
Yet most eCommerce platforms force a false choice. You're either:
The platforms dominating analyst grids all claim to “support B2B,” but the fine print tells a different story. It often means retrofitting consumer-grade tooling with a handful of features that look B2B-ish. Think quoting modules that barely integrate, account hierarchies that fall apart on the second level, and catalog logic that assumes you only sell one thing, one way.
This B2B eCommerce buyer’s guide is a map for making sense of a marketplace that was not built for you, pointing you toward the platform that was.
Let’s get something straight; the idea that “every business is different” is a product requirement.
There’s a reason the metaphor of the snowflake works here. B2B companies, especially in the mid-market, don’t follow a standardized playbook. The variety in how they go to market, price their products, manage buyer relationships, and fulfill orders is staggering. And when your business looks like a snowflake, picking a one-size-fits-all platform doesn’t make sense.
Consider these scenarios:
None of those businesses can be reduced to "B2B, with some catalogs." And yet, the most popular platforms on the market still treat B2B as a simple toggle you turn on or off. They were built for a different customer, with different assumptions. If you want to stretch them to match your needs, you’ll pay the price in customization, performance, and time to market.
Elastic Path exists because of this mismatch.
Our product strategy is a direct response to the needs of real B2B teams: flexible enough to map to the way you work today, composable enough to grow with you tomorrow, and structured enough to give AI systems a clean system of record to operate on.
For many, it’s the difference between trying to re-shape your business to fit your platform, and choosing a platform that fits your business out of the box.
When you break down why most commerce platforms fail B2B teams, it usually comes down to this: they weren’t built with your logic in mind. The way B2B organizations manage pricing, buyer roles, product complexity, and integrations doesn’t map to a single storefront. It maps to a system of relationships that needs to be expressed in code.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
If your platform assumes one global product catalog will do, you’re in trouble. B2B brands often have overlapping catalogs that vary by customer type, market, regulatory requirements, and geography. You should be able to spin up new catalogs for new contexts, instead of copy/pasting entire store instances just to reflect regional differences.
Real B2B pricing involves contracts, negotiation, volume tiers, and contextual bundles — not just promo codes and coupons. A B2B platform should support price books, overrides, buyer-specific terms, and pricing rules that adapt automatically without requiring code-level logic every time.
A B2B sale isn’t a one-to-one transaction. You might be selling to a company with 40 buyers, four purchasing managers, and two layers of approval. Your platform needs to reflect that structure — down to user roles, spending limits, and account-based workflows.
“Composable” shouldn’t mean “figure it out yourself.” If your platform claims composability, it should also offer orchestration: integrations that work out of the box, monitoring tools to ensure reliability, and native support for modular growth. Without that, you’re just doing integration engineering with a different vocabulary.
If it takes you three months to change a product page or launch a new brand, you're not in control. Business teams should be able to act quickly using low-code tools to manage catalogs, build landing pages, and launch new experiences without a dev ticket.
2026 is the year AI becomes standard in enterprise tooling. Platforms that can’t expose structured, machine-readable data will fall behind. Your product catalog is just as important (if not more) than your storefront in an AI-mediated world. Your platform needs to present product truth to the systems making buying decisions on your customers' behalf.
There are dozens of platforms claiming to support B2B eCommerce. But when you filter for those that are actively used by mid-market brands, eight names rise to the top, each with their own trade-offs.
Some were built for D2C but retrofitted for B2B. Others were born as enterprise monoliths, now trying to look lean. And a few try to give you a blank slate, with the promise of freedom, and the reality of more complexity than most teams are equipped to handle.
Let’s get into the B2B eCommerce platform comparison.
Shopify deserves credit for democratizing eCommerce. It made it easy for small businesses to sell online, without a developer. That simplicity, however, comes with a cost — especially when you start pushing past its assumptions.
B2B support exists, but barely. With Shopify, you’re dealing with a frontend designed for fast checkout, not for account-based negotiation. Extensions for quoting, volume pricing, or reordering are bolted on through apps, not embedded into the architecture. Want to manage multiple catalogs for different customers? Prepare to duplicate effort or stitch together custom themes.
If your business runs a single product line and doesn’t mind adapting to the platform, Shopify might get you started. But growing beyond that — especially in B2B — means workarounds. And workarounds rarely scale.
No one ever got fired for buying Salesforce or SAP, but plenty have gotten stuck with implementation roadmaps that outlive their budgets.
These platforms are built for massive global enterprises with teams of systems architects (SIs) and endless customization budgets. If you’re a mid-market brand, you’ll spend half your time turning features off, and the other half rewriting the rest to reflect how your business actually works.
Salesforce B2B Commerce splits B2B and B2C into separate instances. SAP (Hybris) offers robust multi-site capabilities, but extending it often means engaging a full SI and waiting months for changes to go live. Even the simplest modifications — like adding a new payment method or adjusting approval rules — often requires custom code and regression testing. It’s also important to consider that starting new with SAP Hybris shouldn’t be an option, since the platform is reaching end-of-life at the end of July 2026. If you’re on that platform, it’s time to start shopping.
If you have a global team, a million-dollar IT budget, and no urgency, these platforms can work. But they’re not built for the pace of a growing mid-market brand.
Adobe Commerce still has strong name recognition, but that’s largely inertia. For many brands still on Magento, the platform has become a legacy system, or something they intend to replace as soon as they find the budget.
That’s because it wasn’t designed for today’s commerce environment. It’s slow, heavy, difficult to update, and often riddled with tech debt. B2B support is minimal without extensions, and even then, the complexity of building something usable from the available components is high.
Adding new capabilities usually means hiring Magento specialists. Scaling into new markets? Expect months of custom development. If your goal is fast time-to-value and reliable performance under load, Magento probably isn’t the horse to bet on.
WooCommerce is popular because it’s easy to start with if your site is already built on WordPress. But it inherits all of WordPress’s limitations: slow page speeds, plugin conflicts, fragile dependencies, and a codebase that wasn’t designed for enterprise-scale operations.
For B2B use cases, the gaps are even wider. There’s no native quoting, no concept of buyer roles or account hierarchies, and no serious catalog flexibility. You can plug in third-party tools to fake it, but you’ll end up managing a house of cards.
WooCommerce is fine for experimental storefronts or niche D2C. It’s not built for the demands of modern B2B.
BigCommerce’s pitch is appealing: an open SaaS platform, with more out-of-the-box features than Shopify and a dedicated B2B edition. And for certain small businesses with straightforward catalogs — it can be a solid start.
But once you need to manage multiple catalogs, blend B2B and B2C, or scale across brands and geos, BigCommerce starts to buckle. Its B2B capabilities live in a separate add-on, not the core platform. That means managing separate instances, and paying for each. The integration story is fragmented, often relying on third-party apps and plugins that don’t always play well together.
BigCommerce isn’t pretending to be enterprise, and it’s not as rigid as older monoliths. But it still isn’t composable in any meaningful way. And that makes it hard to grow with confidence.
commercetools gets points for composability. It’s a pure headless platform built on MACH principles — modular, API-first, cloud-native, and headless.
But it doesn’t come with batteries included.
Instead, it hands you a collection of APIs and expects your team (or your SI) to build a solution around them. That includes building a product experience layer, orchestration tools, and often, critical B2B functionality. Need account-based pricing, quoting, or catalog visibility rules? You’re building it. Or licensing it separately. Either way, you're managing it yourself.
For large brands with deep technical teams, commercetools can be powerful. But for most mid-market B2B companies, the overhead outweighs the upside.
Elastic Path was designed for exactly the kinds of businesses that get ignored in most platform conversations: mid-market B2B teams with complexity in their products, nuance in their pricing, and ambition in their roadmaps.
We support:
And unlike other composable platforms, we don’t leave you to figure out orchestration on your own. Composer gives you instant-on integrations with popular third-party systems, while Product Experience Manager lets you control product, pricing, and catalog data at the level AI tools demand.
The result is faster time to value, lower long-term TCO, and a platform that doesn’t ask you to compromise on how your business works.
Ultimately, B2B teams don’t need another forced migration or massive transformation plan. They need a way to modernize selectively by fixing the pieces that are slowing them down, without breaking everything else. This is where Elastic Path shines.
Want to start with catalog flexibility? Great. Need to modernize checkout, pricing, or quoting first? No problem. Each product in the Elastic Path suite can be adopted modularly, without waiting on a giant replatform event.
We’ve seen teams start small — updating their cart and checkout logic to support multi-account buyers — and then layer in Product Experience Manager once they realize how powerful structured catalog data can be. Others begin with Composer to tame a chaotic integration landscape, and only later swap out their legacy frontend.
Here’s the part where most comparison guides hand you a big table of green checkmarks and red Xs. But if you’ve made it this far, you don’t need another chart. You need clarity.
Elastic Path is for teams like yours — mid-market, complex, ambitious, and tired of trying to force their business into someone else’s platform.
Schedule a demo to see how Elastic Path delivers unified commerce for leading global brands.