After decades in which B2B buyers hadn’t demanded great online buying experiences, the rise in Millennial and Gen Z decision makers has transformed digital commerce into a significant revenue driver for B2B organizations—and now some of the world’s most established companies are searching for ways to improve their online buying platforms.
At Shopify, we’ve helped companies like Simon Pearce reimagine the way they serve B2B buyers and sellers with faster and more unified commerce experiences. But for every success story, I’ve heard a handful of others about companies that were disappointed with the results they saw (or didn’t) from their digital transformations. In almost all of those cases, the businesses were quick to blame their software providers first for overpromising and underdelivering.
This misconception is permeating the market: that a new platform will magically solve decades of technical and process debt businesses collect along the way. This belief has led to countless failed migrations and millions in wasted investment. While choosing the right platform is certainly the first step toward success, achieving meaningful results requires retailers to critically evaluate—and often fundamentally change—how they operate. This willingness to transform is precisely what a surprising number of businesses have been slow to embrace.
Legacy processes and the burden of the past
Long-established B2B businesses carry a staggering burden of technical debt and outdated processes. Building these legacy systems was the right choice at the time because they solved critical business challenges at a time when no better options existed. But as digital commerce evolved, teams found themselves with no option but to reactively patch these systems, creating a tapestry of functionality never designed for today’s digital-first world. The result was a complex web of dependencies that dictates how businesses operate today—and actively works against the agility modern commerce demands.
Before switching to Shopify, Allied Medical found that its B2B operations were at the mercy of inflexible and outdated software. With no invoice history or a streamlined reordering process, Allied Medical’s customers faced a clunky online purchasing journey. A simple typing mistake led to error pages and abandoned searches and carts.
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“B2B on Shopify has allowed us to introduce features that greatly improved the experience of our wholesale customers, such as better search functionality, access to unique offers, and the ability to access history from different user accounts within the same company. This consolidated view allows for a faster repurchasing process.”
No ecommerce platform is a silver bullet solution
When merchants migrate to Shopify, they often arrive with the expectation that simply moving their existing operations to a new platform will eliminate their technical debt and streamline their processes. This is fundamentally misguided.
Sure, there are immediate benefits—no more managing on-premises servers or worrying about infrastructure scaling. But if you’re simply recreating your existing complexity on a new foundation, you’re missing the point entirely.
In my role at Shopify, I’ve seen several examples where B2B retailers have successfully modernized their operations by switching to Shopify and evaluating gaps in their processes. We’ve seen companies like Snyder Performance Engineering (SPE) increase average customer spend by 40%.
Here are just a couple ways SPE overhauled its B2B operations after migrating to Shopify:
- They integrated Quickbooks and ShipStation with Shopify to sync real-time inventory data and automate order fulfillment for their warehouse team.
- They launched a self-service portal that allows wholesale customers to assemble bulk orders and check out at their own convenience
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“Thanks to an exceptional self-serve experience and features like Shopify Flow, the team can spend more of its time selling.”
Start with a minimum viable product, then iterate
Rather than attempting to replicate everything perfectly from day one, focus on launching a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that handles your core business requirements. Then iterate and optimize over time.
Shopify’s architecture makes this approach particularly effective and faster to accomplish. You can deploy your core experience quickly, then gradually integrate additional functionality as you validate its importance. We saw this play out when TileCloud switched to Shopify in 2020. TileCloud launched several expansion stores, including a dedicated B2B online store for its wholesale customers. Over time, the TileCloud team wrote custom code to streamline its B2B checkout process and eventually launched a feature that allows shoppers to apply multiple automatic discounts at checkout.
