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 of growth, or a project postponed until the moment when „the business is ready”. Today, such thinking increasingly turns out to be a costly mistake. The market no longer asks whether the business customer is ready to buy online. Increasingly, it assumes they will want to do so on their own, quickly and without friction, especially at the stages that do not require sales consultation. Forrester indicated that already in 2025, more than half of large B2B transactions worth at least USD 1 million were expected to be processed through digital self-service channels such as the supplier's website or a marketplace, and Gartner reported in 2026 that 67% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free experience, meaning one with minimal involvement of a salesperson. McKinsey, in parallel, shows that growth leaders in B2B consistently invest in omnichannel as a path to lasting growth, and not as a side experiment.

This means a change far deeper than merely the appearance of a new sales channel. A B2B company that still bases its purchasing process mainly on phone calls, emails, PDF quotes, manual confirmation of commercial terms and manual order intake does not lose only on the level of convenience. It also loses on speed of operation, quality of data, ability to scale and operational predictability. From the business customer's perspective, it matters less and less whether the supplier „has a relationship”. What matters more and more is whether working with them is easy, fast, consistent and manageable within the rhythm of everyday purchasing work. This is precisely why e-commerce in B2B is ceasing to be an advantage in itself and is becoming a condition for staying competitive.

The business customer has changed faster than many B2B companies

One of the biggest mistakes on the part of B2B organizations is still the assumption that the business customer accepts a lower standard of experience simply because they are buying „for the company”. Meanwhile, the line between the expectations known from B2C and the purchasing experience in B2B has blurred very strongly. Business buyers today expect the same things as retail consumers: speed, convenience, transparency, flexible delivery, easier returns and better access to information. In the 2025 Buyers' Journey Survey, 64% of business buyers at manager level and above were representatives of the Millennial and Gen Z generations. It is precisely these groups that bring habits from the digital world into B2B – independent research, low tolerance for friction, reluctance toward unnecessary contact and the expectation that information will be available immediately and in an organized form.

This does not, of course, mean the end of the salesperson's role. What changes, however, is the logic of the purchasing process: the customer wants to do on their own everything they can do safely and conveniently themselves, while contact with a human becomes important where context, validation, negotiation or reducing decision risk 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, price, a document or order status. These elements should be available in the platform. The sales relationship today should build value at a higher level – advisory work, developing the cooperation, support in configuring the purchasing model and guiding the customer through more complex decisions.

B2B 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 just an online ordering layer. It is a component of the sales infrastructure that takes over repetitive tasks, organizes data, unifies communication and allows the business to grow without adding operational chaos. Shopware very clearly describes digital self-service as a solution that relieves sales, speeds up purchasing processes, removes bottlenecks and allows service to scale without a proportional increase in 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 commercial relationship, every subsequent request for quotation and every larger sales load requires people to be involved in tasks that could be automated or made available in self-service, the company builds its growth on an ever more expensive foundation. This is precisely why the question „should we move into e-commerce?” today becomes a question not about technology, but about the economics of the operating model. In a company that has a well-designed B2B platform, growth need not mean an avalanche of service costs. In a company without a platform, every new transaction very often generates another portion of work on the part of sales, customer service, logistics and finance. In the longer term, such a model loses not only on efficiency, but also on margin.

The most costly thing today is the lack of consistency

From the business buyer's perspective, one of the most frustrating phenomena is not even the lack of a platform itself, but the lack of consistency of information. Gartner reports that 69% of B2B buyers notice inconsistencies between what they see on the 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. Whether the price is current, whether the delivery date is binding, whether the documents are complete, whether the offer matches the actual commercial terms. In B2B such inconsistency is particularly dangerous, because the purchasing process often involves more than one person, several levels of approval and a greater risk of error on the buyer's side.

This is precisely why e-commerce in B2B should be understood as a single source of operational truth for the customer and for internal teams. The platform cannot be just a pretty front end. It must show real prices, real availability, documents, order history, statuses, commercial terms and account structure in a way consistent 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 very quickly falls into the trap of apparent digitization. Formally it has e-commerce, but operationally it still works with the old model, only with an additional layer of inconsistency. This is one of the most common reasons why B2B projects fail to deliver a business result despite large outlays.

Companies without a platform lose not only sales, but also data and the ability to learn the market

In the traditional B2B model, a huge part of the knowledge about customer behavior remains scattered across mailboxes, Excel files, the ERP, salespeople's notes and arrangements functioning solely in one-to-one relationships. The company sees the final sales result, but understands the path to purchase itself far more weakly. It does not know with adequate precision where the customer stopped, what they checked, what they did not find, which orders recur cyclically, where friction appears, how product preferences are changing and which accounts are beginning to lapse before revenue even shows it. This greatly limits the ability to manage growth consciously.

An e-commerce platform changes this situation, because it organizes purchasing signals and turns scattered customer activity into analyzable data. Already 61% of global B2B retailers 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. What is more: as many as 69% of B2B buyers turn to salespeople to verify insights generated by AI. This is a very interesting signal: the market is not moving away from relationships, but is increasingly basing the earlier stages of the purchasing process on data, digital research and AI tools. If a company does not have its own organized e-commerce environment, it loses not only convenience of service, but also the ability to participate in this new, increasingly data-driven process of selecting suppliers.

The salesperson does not disappear. The scope of their work changes

In well-designed B2B e-commerce, the salesperson's role is not marginalized. What changes, however, is the weight of their daily work. The platform is meant to take over those elements that are repetitive, measurable and available in self-service, such as access to prices, order history, documents, repeat purchases, quick ordering by SKU, requests for quotation or basic account management. Thanks to this, the sales team can focus on higher-value areas: negotiations, category development, contract work, support for large customers, developing new markets and running more complex purchasing processes. 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 of fundamental importance when designing the platform. If an organization implements e-commerce with a view to replacing sales relationships, it usually makes a mistake. If it implements it in order to remove from sales relationships everything that unnecessarily burdens them, then the platform truly begins to work toward results. This is precisely why at CREHLER we look at B2B e-commerce not as an „online channel”, but as an operating model that is meant simultaneously to make the customer's life easier and to relieve sales. In B2B, self-service is 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 existing process.

Why many B2B implementations fail to deliver results

The most common problem is not a lack of technology at all. The problem is too shallow an approach to the implementation itself. In many organizations an e-commerce project starts with a product catalog and a cart, and only later comes the surprise 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 operating systems. Shopware develops these functions within its B2B components, covering among other things the management of employees, roles and permissions, quote management or 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 reproducing the real purchasing process of the business customer.

This is precisely why launching a storefront is never the end goal for us. In practice, implementing a B2B platform begins much earlier – with an analysis of the sales model, commercial processes, pricing logic, documents, approval workflows, integration with ERP and PIM, as well as with understanding how the given company's business customers really work. Only on this foundation can you build a purchasing experience that will not merely be aesthetic, but operationally useful. The chosen tool is also not insignificant. 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 add-on functions: in many organizations they are the condition for the platform to be able to enter the customers' daily work at all.

Moving to e-commerce is a project of organizational change, not just an IT implementation

This is exactly where the context that is often missing from the discussion about B2B e-commerce appears. 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 is to be available in self-service, what data synchronization looks like, which processes remain on the salesperson's side, how approvals are organized, how documents are presented, how to manage exceptions and how to measure success after the platform goes live. Without this, e-commerce very quickly becomes yet another channel that exists alongside the old process instead of organizing it.

That is why a good B2B platform implementation should lead to a simplification of the operating model, not to an increase in the number of workarounds. In practice this means working on architecture, integrations and data, and not solely on the visual layer. Our experience shows that companies achieve the best result when they treat the platform as part of a broader sales ecosystem – connected with the ERP, PIM, payment systems, logistics, quoting processes and document handling. Then e-commerce becomes a real growth tool, and not just a new URL. This way of thinking is, moreover, consistent with the broader direction of development of modern Shopware implementations, where architecture, integrations and readiness for further development matter increasingly more than the set of „launch” features itself.

The greatest 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 the disruption of current sales. This is understandable, but increasingly short-sighted. The greatest cost today lies not in implementing the platform itself, but in remaining with a model that with each passing year becomes less efficient, harder to scale and increasingly poorly matched to how customers buy. As the market gets used to self-service, consistent data, fast research, integrations and multichannel, a company without a platform begins to be perceived not as „traditional”, but as harder to work with. This affects conversion, retention, margin and the ability to grow.

The later an organization begins this change, the greater the risk that it will do so reactively – under the pressure of customer churn, an overloaded sales department, rising service costs or ever greater chaos in the data. And projects launched in a hurry far more often end in the implementation of a tool that formally works, but does not solve the fundamental problems of the sales model. A far 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 and to build a scalable relationship with the business customer. Studies conducted in recent years clearly indicate that digital self-service is a mandatory direction for B2B companies, and that the winners of the market consistently invest in digital channels and omnichannel, because it is precisely there that lasting growth plays out today.

B2B companies no longer have to ask whether to enter e-commerce. They have to decide how to do it well

The most important change is that e-commerce in B2B has ceased to be an add-on to sales. It has become a component of the business model that decides whether the organization will be able to maintain its pace of growth, quality of service and operational predictability. The business customer today wants to work with a supplier that gives them fast access to information, the possibility of self-service, consistency of data, convenient reordering and contact with a salesperson where they truly add value. A company that does not provide this increasingly loses not on price, but on the quality of cooperation.

That is why the question today should not be: should a B2B company move to e-commerce, but rather: how to design and implement a platform that will be consistent with the customer's real purchasing process, integrate data and systems, relieve sales and at the same time not add another layer of chaos to the organization.

At CREHLER, this is exactly how we understand B2B platform implementations – not as a project of the storefront alone, but as building a coherent sales environment based on Shopware, integrations, self-service and an architecture ready for growth. For many companies this will no longer be a matter of advantage – increasingly it will be a matter of survival.