The B2B ecommerce app space has grown in leaps and bounds over the years: Recent research values the B2B ecommerce market at $30.1 trillion—over 10 times the value of the B2C market. 

With this, the ability to choose the right apps and build the right tech stack has become a difference-maker for business leaders looking to scale successfully. 

Despite the massive market growth, people often underestimate the size and diversity of the app marketplace today. Business leaders now choose from a wide spectrum of apps, from all-in-one platforms to specialized solutions that can be customized to fit their needs.

Whichever app they choose likely includes additional integrations and customized options. Picking among too many great options is a good problem to have—but it’s a problem nonetheless. 

What are B2B ecommerce apps?

B2B ecommerce apps are add-ons that expand a store’s capabilities to conduct business-to-business sales. They build on a platform’s core features to manage the complexities of wholesale ecommerce, including integrations with procurement and back-office systems like enterprise resource planning (ERP), electronic data interchange (EDI), and punchout catalogs. 

Within Shopify, B2B capabilities like price lists, company profiles, and net terms are native to the platform. Shopify hosts an app marketplace filled with partners that help merchants extend functionality with best-in-class third-party apps—without sacrificing the benefits of a centralized platform. Apps that utilize Shopify’s B2B APIs require a Shopify Plus plan.

With Shopify, businesses can simplify selection by narrowing options without needing to test and integrate every app manually.

Modern B2B ecommerce technology stack essentials

A B2B ecommerce stack today must be flexible, intelligent, and interconnected. The most effective stacks are built on a composable, API-first foundation and leverage AI to automate and personalize the customer experience. 

Composable architecture 

Composable architecture, often referred to as MACH (microservices, API-first, cloud-native, headless), breaks commerce functions into modular, independent components. 

These components connect via APIs, allowing developers to swap or upgrade individual services without rebuilding the entire system. Organizations use an API-first structure to speed up development cycles and adapt quickly to new market demands. 

AI-powered automation and personalization apps

AI in ecommerce is increasingly a competitive advantage for organizations. A recent McKinsey survey found that B2B teams that combine generative AI with a data-driven customer experience are 1.7x more likely to grow their market share.

With AI, B2B teams can deliver:

• Dynamic experiences, including unique catalogs, price lists, and recommendations based on a buyer’s account, role, or region
• Intelligent search and merchandising that anticipates buyer intent
• Automated workflows for quoting, customer service, and reorder reminders

When evaluating AI tools, look for solutions that offer real-time decisioning based on first-party data, can handle large product catalogs, and integrate seamlessly via APIs.

Headless commerce and API-management tools

A headless architecture decouples your front-end customer experience from your back-end commerce engine. This separation lets teams experiment and innovate on the customer-facing side, whether through a B2B portal, mobile app, or marketplace, without disrupting back-end operations. 

As commerce becomes headless, strong API management is increasingly essential. A dedicated API-management gateway governs the connections between all your services.

Key capabilities to look for include:

• Security and access control through authentication methods like OAuth/JWT
• Performance management with rate-limiting and traffic- shaping policies
• Lifecycle governance, including versioning and analytics to monitor usage and health

Unified systems 

A B2B ecommerce stack doesn’t have to be messy. A unified commerce platform like Shopify can serve as the central operating system for your entire business. 

Shopify connects all your commerce data, from DTC and B2B storefronts, point of sale (POS), and social channels into one single source of truth. Unification reduces your reliance on fragile, point-to-point integrations and expensive middleware used to tie systems together. 

Adopting Shopify’s unified platform, retailers reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) by up to 36% on average, thanks to fewer patchy integrations and less middleware.

The cost of delaying unified commerce is massive. Shopify’s architecture offers advantages in key areas like operational efficiency, resource optimization, and innovation. Here are the latest stats:

• Implementation and integration costs are 11% lower, enabling faster realization of benefits. 
• Intuitive interface and streamlined processes lower staff training and onboarding costs by 21% per retail location, minimizing productivity losses.
• Third-party costs are reduced by 89%, thanks to Shopify’s robust app ecosystem, APIs, and first-party developer tools that reduce dependencies on developer support. 
• Development cycles speed up by 40%–60%, enabling faster delivery of new features. 

Top B2B ecommerce apps to consider in 2026

As business leaders look for options, they must consider that the best B2B ecommerce app will vary by business. Here are the top categories and apps to consider:

• Enterprise resource planning
• Customer relationship management (CRM)
• Inventory management
• B2B commerce analytics and business intelligence (BI)
• Accounting and finance
• Shipping and logistics
• Email marketing and lead-nurturing
• Customer support and success platforms
• Social media

Enterprise resource planning

Dynamics 365 Business Central

Dynamics 365 Business Central is a business management app built for small and midsize companies. With this app, businesses can easily get a big-picture view of their profits and costs and feel in control of their taxes. 

Dynamics 365 Business Central is especially useful for businesses with complex inventory needs, helping optimize inventory and provide visibility into purchasing, manufacturing, and warehouse operations. Dynamics 365 Business Central even includes AI features that use inventory data to forecast future sales. 

Brightpearl

Brightpearl is an app built for B2B merchants and wholesalers operating across multiple channels. The app manages everything post-sale, including order management, accounting, and inventory management. 

With Brightpearl’s Shopify integration, businesses can automate operations by syncing their Shopify storefront with back-office systems. 

Infor eCommerce Connector

Infor eCommerce Connector is a Shopify app that lets businesses using Infor M3 connect their ERP directly to Shopify. The Infor M3 ERP is built for enterprise manufacturers and distributors that manage complex, global operations. With the Infor M3 ERP, users can deliver strong user experience and advanced analytics across multiple countries and regions. 

Customer relationship management

HubSpot

Getting your marketing and sales data to talk to each other is a classic problem. HubSpot fixes that by connecting its Smart CRM platform directly to your commerce data. 

The app syncs your Shopify customer, product, and order data right into HubSpot. If you operate marketing through HubSpot, you can build automated campaigns based on what people have actually bought, viewed, or abandoned in their cart. 

Inventory management 

Katana Cloud Inventory Management 

If you manufacture or assemble your own products, you know that most inventory software just falls short. Katana is a cloud-based platform built specifically for makers, centralizing your entire production workflow from raw materials to finished goods.

When you connect it to Shopify, you get a real-time, floor-to-store view of your inventory. It helps you prevent stockouts, manage complex kits and bundles, and keep your stock counts accurate, even if you’re shipping from multiple locations.

B2B commerce analytics and business intelligence

Segment

It’s obvious that businesses that know their customers best outperform businesses that don’t, and leaders who take this fact as their first principle often make tools like Segment key to their tech stacks. Segment is a customer data platform (CDP) that allows businesses to collect, clean, enrich, and unify customer data across systems. 

With the Segment Shopify app, businesses can automatically send Shopify customer data to Segment, capturing every interaction from checkout actions to post-purchase. 

Accounting and finance

Affirm

Many businesses suffer from the results of sticker shock, when customers are surprised with higher-than-expected prices. At its worst, sticker shock can cause customers to abandon a purchase before recognizing a product’s real value.

With Affirm, businesses can reframe expensive, one-time costs as more manageable, pay-as-you-go options. The Affirm app automatically estimates monthly or bi-weekly payments, allowing customers to spread out costs over a longer term. Businesses can drive up average order value (AOV) and ensure customers aren’t constrained by strict budgets when making important purchases. 

QuickBooks

A mature approach to accounting is essential for growing businesses. Once businesses enter a growth phase, they need to carefully keep track of cash flow and spending to stay profitable. Enter QuickBooks, one of the most well-known accounting tools. 

With QuickBooks Online, businesses can track sales and fees, update inventory, and sync their products and orders. When businesses connect QuickBooks to Shopify via the QuickBooks app, they can easily track Shopify financial data and identify profit opportunities. 

Shipping and logistics

Shippo

The best B2B ecommerce apps allow businesses to think less about the background players and focus more on growth. Multi-carrier shipping app Shippo lets businesses work with over 40 global carriers from one place without having to integrate with each one individually. 

Shippo is especially useful for small businesses, which can use it to connect to stores and provide customers with tracking information, and businesses with developers on staff who can integrate Shippo via API. With the Shippo Shopify app, businesses can sync all their Shopify orders to Shippo and automate the many workflows between ordering and fulfillment. 

Email marketing and lead nurturing

Klaviyo 

The problem with generic marketing is that it gets ignored. Klaviyo uses your own Shopify data to create highly personalized emails and SMS messages that people actually want to open.

It pulls in all your customer data so you can build sharp segments and trigger automated flows for everything from abandoned-cart reminders to winback offers. Plus, it syncs SMS consent collected during Shopify checkout, helping you grow your list and stay compliant.

Customer support and success platforms

Gorgias

When your support team is buried in repetitive questions like “Where’s my order?”, they can’t focus on the conversations that build customer loyalty. Gorgias’s big idea is to use an AI agent to handle all the easy, repetitive stuff automatically.

It unifies all your customer conversations in one place and uses AI to automatically handle common requests about order status, refunds, or subscriptions. Automating these requests frees up your human agents to tackle the complex issues that drive customer retention.

Re:amaze

Great customer support is all about context, but agents waste a ton of time switching between their help desk and Shopify to find it. Re:amaze solves this by putting the conversation and the customer’s order data side by side.

You can manage email, live chat, social media, and SMS from a single inbox. While the app’s AI can help write replies, its real strength is showing your agents a customer’s entire order history, lifetime value, and recent reviews right next to their support ticket. Having this context at their fingertips lets your team deliver faster, smarter, and more personal responses.

Social media

Google and YouTube

For many people, search and Google are synonymous—and for good reason. But another Alphabet property, YouTube, may be underrated, as it is often ranked the second-most popular search engine. With the Google and YouTube app, businesses benefit from connecting their Shopify to both search powerhouses.

With Google, businesses can sync their products and deals to Google Merchant Center and spread the word through Google Search. With YouTube, businesses can extend their brand’s reach via YouTube Shopping, allowing shoppers to make purchases directly from videos. 

Facebook and Instagram

Though people often think of Facebook and Instagram as places where B2C businesses meet customers, B2B businesses can find value there too. With the official Facebook and Instagram Shopify app, businesses can integrate their Facebook and Instagram accounts and manage them from the same place.

Once connected, businesses can use Facebook and Instagram to grow and track conversions as they fulfill and manage orders via Shopify. This combination provides insights into their top-performing products and content, helping sustain visibility in customers’ feeds.

TikTok

Once considered a trendy app expected to grow and fade quickly, TikTok now stands as one of the most popular social media apps in the world. 

With the TikTok app for Shopify, businesses can easily create TikTok ad campaigns and sync their Shopify product catalogs. Once connected, businesses can sell products through videos that appear within users’ feeds and through the TikTok Shop tab. 

How to choose the right B2B ecommerce apps for your business

Evaluating integration capabilities and API compatibility

The best apps should play nice with your core systems. These connections are made through APIs, so you want to assess the quality, security, and developer experience of an app’s APIs.

When evaluating a B2B ecommerce app, look for:

• Non-negotiable standards support: Prioritize vendors that publish specifications using OpenAPI (OAS) for REST APIs and AsyncAPI for event-driven communications.
• First-class security: An app must support modern authentication protocols like OAuth 2.0 and provide options for mTLS to secure data in transit. Always ask for a current security report and the schedule for their latest penetration tests.
• Event-driven readiness: For high-volume B2B scenarios like real-time price changes or inventory updates, the app must support modern webhooks or streaming patterns with clear, documented schemas and guarantees for data ordering and replay.

💡Tip: Test an app before you commit to it. Integration is a top challenge for B2B commerce teams. Always use a sandbox to validate that the app can handle your specific use cases

Scalability and enterprise requirements assessment

An application you integrate into your store should perform under pressure. It should also meet enterprise-level standards for reliability and security. 

Start by evaluating a vendor’s operational maturity. Look for a consistent release cadence, a clear policy for backward-compatible API versioning, and transparent incident communication protocols. Strong lifecycle discipline is a sign of a mature and reliable vendor.

Your contracts should include clearly defined service level agreements (SLAs), along with the vendor’s documented recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) to set expectations for downtime and data loss.

Don’t just take a vendor’s word on their performance. Ask them to demonstrate horizontal scaling, show how their rate-limiting policies work, and explain their regional failover strategy through live or sandbox testing.

Total cost of ownership considerations

The subscription fee is only one part of an app’s true cost. A thorough TCO analysis will uncover hidden expenses related to implementation, maintenance, and data management. Ask yourself these when evaluating vendors:

• Is the pricing model transparent? 
• Have you received estimates for implementation, support, and potential data egress fees? 
• Are the renewal and exit clauses fair?

Build the right tech stack for a rapidly growing market

The rapid growth of the B2B ecommerce market means many new players will enter the space, creating a crowded field of options. 

These are important decisions, but not permanent ones. As business leaders weigh their options, they need to make sure they’re not dependent on any one app and maintain the flexibility to adapt as their business and market conditions evolve. 

This article originally appeared on Shopify and is available here for further discovery.