Why B2B Companies Must Move to E-Commerce to Survive in the Market
Just a few years ago, many B2B companies could treat e-commerce as an additional sales channel, an interesting direction for growth, or a project to be postponed until “the business was ready.” Today, this way of thinking is increasingly proving to be a costly mistake. The market is no longer asking whether the business customer is ready to buy online. More and more often, it assumes that they want to do so independently, quickly, and without friction, especially at stages that do not require a sales consultation. Forrester indicated that as early as 2025, more than half of large B2B transactions worth at least 1 million dollars were expected to be processed through digital self-service channels such as a supplier’s website or a marketplace, while Gartner reported in 2026 that 67% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free experience, meaning one with minimal salesperson involvement. At the same time, McKinsey shows that growth leaders in B2B consistently invest in omnichannel as a path to sustainable growth rather than as a side experiment.
This means a change far deeper than the mere emergence of a new sales channel. A B2B company that still bases its purchasing process mainly on phone calls, emails, PDF offers, manual confirmation of commercial terms, and manual order handling is not losing only at the level of convenience. It is also losing in terms of speed, data quality, ability to scale, and operational predictability. From the perspective of the business customer, it matters less and less whether the supplier “has a relationship.” What matters more and more is whether working with that supplier is easy, fast, consistent, and can be handled in the rhythm of day-to-day purchasing work. This is exactly why e-commerce in B2B is no longer a competitive advantage in itself, but is becoming a condition for maintaining competitiveness.
The business customer changed faster than many B2B companies
One of the biggest mistakes on the B2B side is still the assumption that a business customer accepts a lower standard of experience simply because they are buying “for a company.” In reality, the line between expectations known from B2C and the purchasing experience in B2B has blurred significantly. DHL shows that business buyers today expect the same things as retail consumers: speed, convenience, transparency, flexible delivery, easier returns, and better access to information. Forrester, in turn, points out that in the 2025 Buyers’ Journey Survey, 64% of business buyers at manager level and above were Millennials and Gen Z. These groups are bringing digital-world habits into B2B – independent research, low tolerance for friction, reluctance toward unnecessary contact, and the expectation that information should be available instantly and in an organized form.
This does not, of course, mean the end of the salesperson’s role. Gartner rather highlights a change in the logic of the purchasing process: the customer wants to do on their own everything that can be done safely and conveniently without assistance, while contact with a human becomes important where context, validation, negotiation, or risk reduction is needed. In practice, this means that a B2B company can no longer build its advantage on the fact that a salesperson will answer a question about availability, pricing, a document, or order status. These elements should be available on the platform. Today, the sales relationship should create value at a higher level – advisory support, cooperation development, help in configuring the purchasing model, and guiding the customer through more complex decisions.
In B2B, it is no longer about an “online store.” It is about sales infrastructure
Many companies still talk about B2B e-commerce in an overly simplified way, as if the goal were simply to launch a store for businesses. Meanwhile, a well-designed B2B platform is not only an online ordering layer. It is part of the sales infrastructure that takes over repetitive activities, organizes data, standardizes communication, and allows the business to grow without adding operational chaos. Shopware very clearly describes digital self-service as a solution that relieves the sales team, accelerates purchasing processes, removes bottlenecks, and makes it possible to scale service without a proportional increase in service costs. From a business perspective, this is hugely important, because in the traditional model, growth very often simply means growth in the number of manual operations.
If every new business relationship, every new quote request, and every greater sales load requires people to perform tasks that could be automated or made available in self-service, the company is building growth on an increasingly expensive foundation. That is precisely why the question “should we enter e-commerce?” becomes today not a question about technology, but about the economics of the operating model. In a company with a well-designed B2B platform, growth does not have to mean an avalanche-like increase in service costs. In a company without a platform, every new transaction very often generates another portion of work for salespeople, customer service, logistics, and finance. In the longer term, such a model loses not only in efficiency, but also in margin.
Lack of consistency is the most expensive problem today
From the business buyer’s perspective, one of the most frustrating issues is not even the lack of a platform itself, but the lack of consistency in information. Gartner reports that 69% of B2B buyers notice inconsistencies between what they see on a company’s website and what the salesperson communicates. In practice, this means a very real problem: the customer does not know which version of the information is true. Is the price current? Is the delivery date binding? Are the documents complete? Does the offer reflect the actual commercial terms? In B2B, such inconsistency is especially dangerous, because the purchasing process often involves more than one person, several approval levels, and a greater risk of error on the buyer’s side.
This is exactly why e-commerce in B2B should be understood as a single operational source of truth for the customer and for internal teams. The platform cannot be just a nice front end. It must show real prices, real availability, documents, order history, statuses, commercial terms, and the account structure in a way that is aligned with how the rest of the organization operates. If the data on the platform is not integrated with ERP, PIM, WMS, or the document management system, the company quickly falls into the trap of superficial digitalization. Formally, it has e-commerce, but operationally, it is still working in the old model, only with an additional layer of inconsistency. This is one of the most common reasons why B2B projects fail to deliver business results despite significant investment.
Companies without a platform lose not only sales, but also data and the ability to learn from the market
In the traditional B2B model, a huge portion of knowledge about customer behavior remains scattered across email inboxes, Excel files, ERP, salespeople’s notes, and arrangements that exist only in one-to-one relationships. The company sees the final sales result, but understands the path to purchase much less well. It does not know with sufficient precision where the customer stopped, what they checked, what they did not find, which orders repeat cyclically, where friction appears, how product preferences change, and which accounts begin to fade before revenue even shows it. This greatly limits the ability to manage growth in a conscious way.
An e-commerce platform changes this situation because it organizes purchasing signals and turns scattered customer activity into analyzable data. DHL shows that 61% of global B2B retailers already use AI on their e-commerce platforms, and 78% expect growth in sales through their own online channel within the next three to five years. Gartner, in turn, reported in 2026 that 69% of B2B buyers turn to sellers to verify AI-generated insights. This is a very interesting signal: the market is not moving away from relationships, but it is increasingly basing earlier stages of the purchasing process on data, digital research, and AI tools. If a company does not have its own structured e-commerce environment, it loses not only convenience of service, but also the ability to participate in this new, increasingly data-driven supplier selection process.
The salesperson is not disappearing. The scope of their work is changing
In a well-designed B2B e-commerce model, the salesperson’s role is not marginalized. What changes is the weight of their everyday work. The platform should take over those elements that are repetitive, measurable, and can be made available in self-service, such as access to pricing, order history, documents, repeat purchases, quick ordering by SKU, quote requests, or basic account management. This allows the sales team to focus on higher-value areas: negotiations, category development, contract-based work, support for large customers, expansion into new markets, and handling more complex purchasing processes. Gartner and Forrester consistently show that the future of B2B is not fully self-service, but hybrid – based on a combination of self-service and valuable human contact.
This distinction is fundamentally important when designing a platform. If an organization implements e-commerce with the aim of replacing sales relationships, it usually makes a mistake. If it implements it in order to remove from sales relationships everything that burdens them unnecessarily, then the platform truly starts working for the business result. This is exactly why, at CREHLER, we do not look at B2B e-commerce as an “online channel,” but as an operating model that is meant to make life easier for the customer while relieving the sales team. On the CREHLER website, we describe B2B self-service as an approach in which the goal is not to force the customer to use the platform, but to make the platform more convenient, faster, and more reliable for them than the previous process.
Why many B2B implementations fail to deliver results
The most common problem is not a lack of technology at all. The problem is an overly shallow approach to the implementation itself. In many organizations, the e-commerce project starts with a product catalog and a cart, and only later comes the realization that the business customer needs much more. They need an account structure with multiple users, roles and permissions, approval workflows, individual price lists, budgets, shopping lists, quick ordering by SKU, quoting, access to documents, and integration with operational systems. Shopware develops these features within its B2B components, including employee management, roles and permissions, quote management, and customer-specific features. The very existence of these components shows that mature B2B e-commerce is not about “moving the catalog to the internet,” but about reflecting the real purchasing process of the business customer.
At CREHLER, this is exactly why simply launching the storefront is never the end goal for us. In practice, a B2B platform implementation starts much earlier – with an analysis of the sales model, commercial processes, pricing logic, documents, approval workflows, ERP and PIM integrations, and an understanding of how a given company’s business customers actually work. Only on this foundation can a purchasing experience be built that is not only visually appealing, but operationally useful. In our materials, we also emphasize that Shopware is a strong choice for B2B precisely because it supports complex pricing models, individual commercial terms, multi-level permissions, approval workflows, and ERP integrations. These are not additional features. In many organizations, they are a condition for the platform to enter customers’ everyday work at all.
Moving to e-commerce is an organizational change project, not just an IT implementation
This is exactly where the context appears that is often missing in discussions about B2B e-commerce. Moving to a platform is not merely a technological implementation. It is a change in the way sales, customer service, logistics, marketing, and finance operate. The company must determine which information should be available in self-service, how data synchronization should work, which processes remain on the salesperson’s side, how approvals are organized, how documents are presented, how exceptions are managed, and how success is measured after the platform goes live. Without this, e-commerce very quickly becomes another channel that exists alongside the old process instead of organizing it.
That is why a good B2B platform implementation should lead to simplification of the operating model rather than to an increase in workarounds. In practice, this means working on architecture, integrations, and data, not only on the visual layer. From our experience at CREHLER, companies achieve the best results when they treat the platform as part of a broader sales ecosystem – connected to ERP, PIM, payment systems, logistics, quoting processes, and document handling. That is when e-commerce becomes a real growth tool, not just a new URL. This way of thinking is also consistent with the broader direction of modern Shopware implementations, where architecture, integrations, and readiness for further development are becoming increasingly important compared with the feature set available “on day one.”
The biggest risk is not the cost of implementation, but the cost of waiting
Many decision-makers still postpone e-commerce because they fear the cost, the scale of the project, or disruption to current sales. This is understandable, but increasingly short-sighted. The biggest cost today does not lie in implementing the platform itself. The biggest cost lies in remaining with a model that becomes less efficient, harder to scale, and increasingly less suited to the way customers buy with each passing year. As the market becomes accustomed to self-service, consistent data, rapid research, integrations, and omnichannel behavior, a company without a platform begins to be perceived not as “traditional,” but as more difficult to work with. This affects conversion, retention, margin, and the ability to grow.
The later an organization starts this change, the greater the risk that it will do so reactively – under pressure from customer churn, an overloaded sales team, rising service costs, or growing data chaos. And projects launched in haste much more often end with the implementation of a tool that formally works, but does not solve the fundamental problems of the sales model. A much more mature approach is to treat B2B e-commerce as an investment in the company’s ability to continue operating in the market, to develop self-service capabilities, and to build a scalable relationship with the business customer. Shopware explicitly describes digital self-service as a mandatory direction for B2B companies, while McKinsey shows that market winners consistently invest in digital channels and omnichannel because that is exactly where sustainable growth is taking place today.
B2B companies no longer need to ask whether to enter e-commerce. They need to decide how to do it well
The most important change is that e-commerce in B2B is no longer an add-on to sales. It has become part of the business model that determines whether an organization will be able to maintain growth momentum, service quality, and operational predictability. Today, the business customer wants to work with a supplier that gives them quick access to information, the possibility of self-service, data consistency, convenient repeat ordering, and contact with a salesperson where that person truly adds value. A company that cannot provide this increasingly loses not on price, but on the quality of cooperation.
That is why the right question is no longer: should a B2B company move into e-commerce? In 2026, the right question is rather: how should it design and implement a platform that reflects the customer’s real purchasing process, integrates data and systems, relieves the sales team, and at the same time does not add another layer of chaos to the organization? At CREHLER, this is exactly how we understand B2B platform implementations – not as a storefront project alone, but as the creation of a coherent sales environment based on Shopware, integrations, self-service, and architecture ready for growth. For many companies, this will no longer be a matter of advantage. More and more often, it will be a matter of survival.
