Apr 15, 2025 | 6 minute read
written by Bryan House
Let’s be real. Tariffs used to be background noise. A slow-moving policy lever that mostly stayed out of sight. But lately? They’re front and center, and they’re anything but predictable.
In the last few weeks and days, manufacturers and wholesalers have been blindsided by a new wave of U.S. tariffs. They’re rolling out (and rolling back) fast, targeting everything from raw materials to finished goods, and giving brands little to no time to react. The result? Spiking costs, unstable pricing, and a ripple effect of uncertainty across the supply chain that’s impossible to ignore.
What makes this moment different is that tariffs aren’t just hitting procurement. They’re forcing B2B companies to rethink their entire approach to pricing. This isn’t a sourcing problem anymore — it’s a commerce problem. And most teams are still playing catch-up.
Here’s how tariffs are rewriting the rules, and what leading teams are doing to adapt.
When your landed costs jump 30 to 40 percent overnight, you can’t just eat the margin hit and move on. Tariffs are driving up the cost of doing business at every level (materials, shipping, parts, packaging) and pricing teams are left to figure out whether to absorb it, pass it on, or completely restructure their pricing models.
The traditional approaches don’t work anymore. B2B sellers are already under pressure to justify every line item. Now they’re trying to maintain margins while explaining unpredictable price swings to customers who are used to steady, negotiated rates.
In digital commerce, this shift is everywhere. Nearly half of wholesalers and manufacturers surveyed for our recent Digital Commerce Landscape Report say one of their biggest challenges right now is managing the increased workload caused by pricing changes. As one exec from Midwest Supply Co. said to Digital Commerce 360, “We’re rewriting the supply chain in real time.” That’s not hyperbole; it’s the day-to-day reality.
Static pricing might’ve made sense when your costs stayed flat for months at a time. That era’s gone. When your inputs change weekly, so should your pricing.
More manufacturers and wholesalers are now experimenting with dynamic pricing, fuel surcharges, and scenario-based modeling to stay ahead of volatility. If you’re still managing price lists manually, you’re already behind.
The challenge is infrastructure. Most pricing updates still live in spreadsheets. Legacy platforms can’t push updates across channels in real time. And internal tools — if they exist — aren’t connected to the systems that matter, like your ERP or digital storefront.
Composable commerce and tools like Elastic Path Product Experience Manager are changing the game here. They let pricing teams decouple their product catalog from rigid platform rules, so you can update a price once and propagate it everywhere. When done right, you get pricing agility without blowing up your entire stack.
Here’s the kicker. Your customers don’t care that your costs are volatile. They still expect pricing consistency, and when they don’t get it, they start to lose trust.
One manufacturer recently told us, “Pricing is a trust issue now. We can't afford to surprise our buyers.” That’s exactly the point. If your price changes feel random or unexplained, it erodes long-term relationships. Even a justified increase can do damage if it’s poorly communicated or delivered without context.
B2B sellers need smarter segmentation and account-level pricing strategies to navigate this tension. Not every customer needs to see the same change at the same time. Pricing logic should flex by contract, customer tier, geography, and history. But too often, sellers can’t implement that logic because their digital commerce systems don’t support it.
Over 60 percent of wholesalers and nearly a third of manufacturers in the Digital Commerce Landscape Report say they’re struggling with the inefficiencies in manually managing pricing. That’s a big issue, but a fixable one.
Most B2B commerce platforms were never built for real-time pricing logic. They were designed for a different era — one where updates were done monthly or quarterly, not hourly.
In today’s uncertain environment, companies are discovering just how brittle their systems really are. High-frequency price changes overwhelm their workflows. Integrations break. Business users give up and revert to workarounds. And the opportunity cost? Massive.
Eighty-two percent of wholesalers and nearly three-quarters of manufacturers surveyed in the Digital Commerce Landscape say their legacy tech is limiting their competitiveness. Over 70 percent agree that their commerce platforms are capping their revenue potential. They can’t move fast enough.
That’s why more organizations are turning to composable commerce, API-first architecture, and flexible product catalogs. These systems aren’t just more modern — they are built for volatility. When every week brings a new policy, a new cost structure, or a new supplier constraint, your pricing tech should move as fast as your business needs to.
This isn’t a five-year roadmap moment. It’s a today problem.
Elastic Path customers are already doing this. With Product Experience Manager, they can hot swap catalogs and roll out updates instantly — without rebuilding their storefront. That’s the kind of pricing agility B2B companies need now.
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Tariffs are the accelerant, but the underlying problem isn’t new. B2B pricing systems have been fragile for a while. Now that fragility is in full view.
For manufacturers and wholesalers, the companies that win won’t be the ones with the deepest discounts. They’ll be the ones that move the fastest — with the flexibility to adjust, the tools to automate, and the trust to keep customers close.
This is about more than just surviving the next tariff cycle. It’s about building a pricing strategy that can weather whatever comes next.
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