What Does Good Look Like for B2B Commerce?

B2B eCommerce is a hot area for growth, as modern buyers continue to expect more from their digital ordering, procurement processes, and more. Recent eMarketer research shows that digital sales channels for B2B are on the rise, expected to reach over $3 billion and 27.5% of overall sales by 2028. This is good news, since most B2B digital commerce storefronts today are B.S. and completely fail to meet the needs of buyers and sellers alike.

I’ve been in many recent meetings with B2B sellers who are frustrated with the constraints of their current platform. Most have trouble designing even the most basic systems that can help them differentiate their business and ultimately move product. Many of the challenges they face have to do with integration. Whether they’re operating on a legacy system like Adobe Commerce Cloud (Magento) or SFCC, or experimenting with Shopify’s B2B offerings, the story remains the same. They’re locked in to what the ecosystem says they can do, and customizing them seems nearly impossible.

It’s 2025, yet few B2B commerce platforms understand how to solve B2B problems. It’s time we get back to basics.

B2B’s “Test and Learn” era

Very few companies (B2B included) have the risk tolerance to replatform their existing commerce systems all at once. They’re struggling with the limitations of oversimplified, templated experiences like Shopify. On the other end of the spectrum, they’re stuck in a web of complexity with their legacy platforms whenever they want to make a change or integrate a third-party technology.

One thing I’d like to shout from every rooftop is that a “big bang” transformation doesn’t have to happen. There are multiple ways to experiment with more agile, composable commerce systems that don’t involve ripping and replacing what you currently have.

It’s time to enter the “test and learn” era for B2B. A proof-of-concept can show what good looks like to the rest of the business, even if it’s done with a different geographic area or a smaller brand in your portfolio. Here are a few tips to nail your B2B commerce PoC.

1. Ease of integration must be a top requirement

In a MACH or composable architecture, integration is a core part of the development process. Ease of integration should be the main consideration when evaluating B2B commerce technology for your PoC.

That’s why we launched Composer as an operating system for composable commerce. We believe you should be able to instantly integrate with the market-leading technologies that make up the best B2B commerce implementations. Integrations can now happen in minutes — think functionality like search, email, OMS, marketplace syndication, PIM, CRM, SSO, promotions, shipping and fulfillment, merchandising, translations, and more.

On top of our out-of-the-box integrations we offer an environment to create functions and integrations, run them on a fully-managed cloud infrastructure, and develop your own libraries of available integrations. These components inherit the operational management and underlying infrastructure of Composer, so you can build, test, and monitor all of your integrations in one place.

2. Keep customization focused on business differentiators

In the best B2B commerce implementations, core integrations happen fast so developers can focus on building business differentiation. Most B2B companies are either stuck within the constraints of a templated storefront, or trying to navigate dozens of features they don’t need.

Think about what would make your B2B storefront easier and more accessible for buyers. Would an AI assistant make your complex product catalog easier to navigate and search? Would your customers want a way to assemble and view different product configurations easily? Decide what matters most to business-driving metrics like increased conversions and AOV. Then build features of your storefront that differentiate from there.

Making good on B2B commerce promises

Building a great B2B digital storefront shouldn’t be hard. And it shouldn’t require ripping and replacing your existing commerce system. Start small with a proof of concept or by replacing a certain part of your storefront that isn’t working for you. From there, it should be easy to build and/or integrate the parts of a B2B storefront that mimic what buyers expect from the D2C world. While other vendors overcomplicate getting to the business results you want, Elastic Path makes it simpler than ever.