Wholesale buyers have changed. The majority are now millennials who expect fast, digital-first purchasing experiences—whether buying for themselves or their business. Delivering a better online buying experience than your competitors can help win you new business.

This article outlines the benefits of upgrading your ecommerce capabilities and explores key features to consider. We’ll also share case studies to show the potential of modern ecommerce technology and platforms.

The state of ecommerce for manufacturers in 2026

Market opportunity: Only 7% of manufacturing sales take place online

Manufacturers are on track to sell a massive $14.85 trillion in 2025. However, most sales are still made using outdated, clunky systems involving phone calls and emails, rather than easy-to-use websites where customers can serve themselves.

Today, only 7% of total manufacturing sales happen on modern websites. This reveals a significant gap between how manufacturers have traditionally conducted business and how their customers now prefer to make purchases.

Getting detailed product information for complex parts is often difficult, forcing engineers and buyers into time-consuming back-and-forth interactions. This approach is slow and inefficient, creating a big opportunity for manufacturing companies that offer a simpler online buying experience.

Why 21% of manufacturers prioritize digital transformation

To close this gap, 21% of manufacturers now make ecommerce a top priority in their plans to modernize. A recent survey of 150 manufacturing executives found half of all manufacturers are increasing their spending on technology to get ahead of their competition.

They are investing in specific areas like AI, smart manufacturing, and better data tools. According to one industry expert, AI is already a big trend and is being used in core business systems like enterprise resource planning systems (ERPs) to automate tasks. 

Younger engineers are also encouraging company leaders to adopt new technology. This internal push is making modernization a priority.

Benefits of ecommerce for manufacturers

Increase efficiency

Automation and workflow optimization

With a platform like Shopify, B2B manufacturers can quickly set up new stores for new markets and product lines with many out-of-the-box features. Even complex storefront builds can be streamlined and deployed faster with ready-to-use developer tools, composable frameworks, and robust APIs. 

One example is climate and energy solution provider Carrier. Previously, launching each new storefront cost Carrier nearly $1.2 million and took about 10 months. 

After migrating to Shopify and OneCommerce, they launched new storefronts faster and cheaper: in just one month and with a cost of $100,000. Getting to market nine months faster while saving hundreds of thousands of dollars per storefront has been game-changing for their agility and bottom line.

Real-time inventory and order management

Improving your website and encouraging online ordering will reduce your operational costs. Every transaction that happens online requires less work from your sales associates, with less paperwork and manual data entry. Errors are also minimized, increasing customer satisfaction and reducing order corrections.

A modern ecommerce tech stack lets you automate processes, integrate with your key business systems, and can work more strategically. This allows you to communicate and collaborate with your customers more effectively. 

Order statuses can be easily tracked, notifications sent, and past orders repeated quickly. You can increase order fulfillment, reduce lead times, and drive both efficiency and revenue.

Provide better customer satisfaction

Self-service portals and 24/7 availability

The way B2B customers buy has changed permanently. They are now very comfortable making purchases online, even for orders over $500,000, as reported by McKinsey. 

When they use a self-service portal, the most important features are the ability to easily place repeat orders and look up product specs on their own schedule. Offering a 24/7 online portal meets this demand for convenience and empowers customers, leading to higher satisfaction.

Mobile-first solutions for field sales

Mobile-first access is standard practice for B2B operations. About 65% of companies with B2B ecommerce portals already allow their field workers and customers to place orders on mobile devices. 

Onsite crews need this to order materials without leaving the job. It’s a simple way to cut project downtime, improve operational efficiency, and keep work on schedule.

Access new opportunities

Direct-to-consumer manufacturing models

Selling directly to your end-users through a direct-to-consumer (DTC) model is a major growth opportunity. US DTC ecommerce sales hit $213 billion in 2024, up 16.6% from the previous year. This growth shows a clear demand from customers. 

A DTC sales channel lets you own the customer relationship, build your brand, and create a powerful new revenue stream.

Global market expansion through digital channels

Digital channels are your entry point to a massive global market. The global B2B ecommerce market is projected to reach $61.9 trillion by 2030. B2B marketplaces are the fastest-growing part of this, topping $350 billion in sales in 2024.

Shopify Managed Markets is built to help you capture your share. You can manage all your international sales from a single Shopify store and administrative office instead of creating separate websites for each country. Show prices in local currency, offer familiar payment methods, and automatically translate your store into different languages with Managed Markets.

Take advantage of innovative technology

AI and machine learning in manufacturing ecommerce

AI and machine learning are practical tools for improving B2B commerce. Companies are applying AI to enrich product catalogs, improve site search, and personalize pricing to increase conversions. The impact on sales is clear: In 2024, B2B teams using AI were 1.3 times more likely to see revenue growth. 

Integration with Industry 4.0 systems

Smart manufacturing is all about connection. Top companies are integrating factory floor platforms like manufacturing execution systems (MESs) and ERPs with cloud and analytics tools to create a closed-loop operation.

The connection lets you show customers accurate, real-time data on product availability and lead times right on your ecommerce platform. That transparency makes the buying experience more reliable and builds buyer trust.

Choosing the right ecommerce platform for manufacturers

Once you’ve made the strategic choice to invest in ecommerce, you need to evaluate and implement the right tools and technology. The marketplace for ecommerce is continually evolving, so it’s important to choose tools that meet your needs today and into the future. Here are of the key features to look for:

Tailored wholesale buying

Tailored buying experiences are essential for building strong relationships with your wholesale customers and driving repeat business. When evaluating ecommerce technology, consider how well it equips you to customize buying experiences without lengthy development times or up-front costs. 

Key out-of-the-box features that will allow you to meet the unique needs of your buyers include:

• Ability to display tailored pricing, currencies, and store content to specific users
• Creation of unlimited product catalogs with custom pricing and product availability
• Support of fixed prices, percentage discounts, volume pricing, and quantity rules

Ideally, the right solution will help you streamline the purchasing process while also giving you the tools to offer customized products, pricing, and services that drive customer satisfaction and loyalty. 

Personalized storefronts

B2B manufacturers should choose ecommerce solutions that allow them to build personalized storefronts without high development costs and long implementation times. 

Choose a platform that allows you to personalize store content for each customer and the context they’re buying in, so they see information that addresses their needs and challenges. It should also support the development approach that works best for your business, whether that’s a storefront theme built for B2B or headless architectures powered by APIs. 

Self-serve purchasing

The largest benefit of ecommerce for B2B manufacturers is having wholesale orders placed online, avoiding a lengthy back-and-forth with sales reps. Any ecommerce solution you choose should offer intuitive, customizable portals for each of your buyers. They should be able manage their own accounts, update their details, and reorder quickly. 

A unified source of truth for sales reps

An ecommerce solution should equip your sales representatives to provide personalized, proactive support and build better customer relationships. Every rep should be able to instantly access up-to-date product, pricing, and customer data to inform their customer interactions. 

The platform should offer an intuitive admin interface so reps can easily place orders for customers without manual ERP entry. Finally, each sales rep ideally should have their own assigned account with permission levels specific to your business requirements.

Unified commerce

A great way to drive efficiency in B2B manufacturing ecommerce is by adopting a unified commerce approach. By operating both B2B and DTC storefronts on the same platform, you can streamline business operations and reduce development costs. You can also save on both up-front and ongoing operational costs by using a unified platform like Shopify to easily deploy and manage all channels from a single admin.

Robust integrations

Integrations are critical to ecommerce success for B2B manufacturers. Choose a solution that can easily integrate with your preferred ERP, order management system (OMS), and content management system (CMS) tools for seamless data, inventory management, and product syncing. The provider should offer a complete set of APIs, primitives, and developer tools that allow you to build integrations with your systems.

Platforms like Shopify make integrations even simpler through strategic partnerships. Ready-made integrations with leading ERP providers like Acumatica, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Brightpearl allow you to quickly connect your storefronts with key systems without extensive developer support. For businesses with unique integration requirements, Shopify supports connectors like Boomi, Jitterbit, and Celigo. The right provider will make integrating your key business systems easier and faster to drive agility and lower costs.

Flexibility and speed

Keeping up with the evolving needs of buyers requires investing in ecommerce solutions that offer speed and flexibility. In today’s competitive market, B2B manufacturers must be able to introduce new products, adjust pricing strategies, and implement promotions and marketing campaigns rapidly. Customers expect timely responses, streamlined interfaces, fast user experiences, and efficient order fulfillment. 

Meeting these customer expectations is critical for long-term competitiveness. But without the right ecommerce solution, this can become costly and technically challenging. That’s why providers like Shopify support a range of technical approaches, from turnkey, out-of-the-box solutions to composable frameworks and headless APIs. 

📚 Read: Best Practices for Implementing Headless Commerce for B2B Businesses

Without extensive coding, Shopify enables manufacturers to:

• Set up a new storefront quickly with a scaled composable framework
• Manage both sides of their business with an intuitive admin and first-party features
• Test new promotions, messaging, markets, segments
• Launch new features quickly based on customer feedback
• Customize the customer experience with first-party features and third-party apps
• Create unique buying experiences with headless storefront APIs, custom data, custom logic, and customizable checkout

When you have the right solutions in place, you can scale, innovate, and adapt to a changing marketplace more easily. A robust ecommerce strategy powered by modern features and capabilities will drive growth and customer loyalty, and allow you to go to market faster and at lower costs.

How do you create ecommerce for manufacturers?

Building a successful digital commerce strategy requires more than a simple online catalog. It demands a thoughtful approach that aligns with your unique customers, complex products, and core business systems. Here’s a six-step framework to guide your transformation.

1. Segment your customers and personalize their experience

In manufacturing, you aren’t selling to a single buyer persona. Your customers include:

• Engineers who need custom parts with detailed technical specifications and 3D models
• Procurement managers who buy standard off-the-shelf components and negotiate bulk pricing
• Field technicians who need to quickly order aftermarket repair kits from a worksite
• Direct-to-consumer buyers for specific product lines

Each segment has different needs, and a one-size-fits-all approach will fail. Effective segmentation is crucial, as B2B teams that personalize experiences with AI are 1.7 times more likely to grow market share. Although B2B buyers prefer a rep-free experience, it must be tailored to their specific job.

Start by identifying your key customer groups and understanding their primary goals. An engineer values a product configurator with instant access to technical data, while a procurement manager needs a self-service portal with custom price lists and quick reordering.

2. Map the B2B buyer journey

The industrial buying cycle is long and complex, often involving 11 or more stakeholders and lasting 6 to 18 months. Mapping this journey is essential to identifying friction points and opportunities for digital intervention.

Buyers complete around 70% of their research before contacting a supplier. Your website must provide educational content, technical specifications, and validation early in the process.

Consider the typical journey for a custom component:

1. An engineer discovers a need and searches for suppliers, requiring access to CAD models and technical data sheets to validate the part for their application.
2. The engineer passes the specifications to a procurement manager, who then contacts the supplier to negotiate pricing, confirm lead times, and place a bulk order.
3. The order is processed, manufactured, and delivered, with multiple touchpoints for logistics and payment along the way.

While self-service is preferred, a purely digital journey can increase purchase regret. A successful strategy blends digital efficiency with a human touch at pivotal moments, a core tenet of unified commerce. 

3. Create a value proposition for each customer segment

Your digital value proposition must clearly answer the question, “Why should this specific customer buy from me online?” Here are a few examples:

• For engineers: Speed and precision. An online product configurator that provides an instant price and lead time for a custom part eliminates days or weeks of back-and-forth communication.
• For procurement: Efficiency and cost control. A B2B self-service portal with custom catalogs, tiered pricing, and automated reordering streamlines their workflow.
• For aftermarket customers: Convenience. A great online experience offers complete repair kits and seamless ordering, especially for technicians needing corrective, preventative, or upgrade parts on the go.
• For executives: Margin expansion. For brands shifting to DTC, cutting out distributors can increase operating margins by 10%–15%. With US B2B ecommerce growing 17% in 2023, the ROI is clear.

4. Define implementation timeline and budget

For any manufacturer, the ERP system is the nucleus of the business, storing all critical data on orders, scheduling, pricing, and parts. Therefore, the most crucial piece of your digital commerce transformation is to ensure your ecommerce platform integrates seamlessly with your ERP.

A flawed integration can have serious rippling effects, breaking automated workflows and creating data silos that cripple efficiency. When defining your timeline and budget, prioritize a platform like Shopify with native connectors for major ERPs like SAP, NetSuite, and Microsoft Dynamics to avoid middleware issues and ensure real-time data syncing.

Look beyond the initial platform license to the total cost of ownership (TCO). With a composable platform like Shopify, you can launch new ecommerce experiences in as little as 30 days at 10% of the cost of legacy systems, as seen with Carrier.

5. Test and launch your B2B manufacturing ecommerce solution

With nearly 70% of online carts abandoned, a frictionless checkout experience is essential. This means simplifying the process for complex, configured orders and bulk purchases. 

To avoid pilot purgatory, where tech programs stall after a small-scale test, adopt a holistic, scale-minded approach from the start. Your launch shouldn’t be focused on just offering a digital catalog. It should be a solution that solves real-world problems for your key customer segments. 

For example:

• Launch an aftermarket parts store that makes it easy for technicians to find repair kits. 
• Build a B2B portal that lets your largest distributors manage their orders without picking up the phone. 

Use the launch to prove value and build momentum for broader digital transformation. The next wave is already on the horizon. Within five years, chatbots and large language models (LLMs) will process CAD models, suggest suppliers, and automate purchasing. These tools will integrate directly with ERP systems to streamline budgeting and approvals

6. Monitor, test, and iterate for continuous improvement

While traditional B2C metrics are important, industrial businesses should also track KPIs that reflect operational health and the complex B2B buying cycle. Your ecommerce platform should provide the analytics needed to improve these core metrics.

• Customer acquisition cost (CAC): Track the cost to acquire new customers, a key challenge in an industry with long sales cycles and an average CAC of between $662 and $905.
• Conversion rate: Monitor the percentage of site visitors who complete an order. After launching on Shopify Plus, Mac Tools saw a 25% increase in total orders.
• Checkout abandonment: Measure the percentage of buyers who start but do not complete the checkout process. 
• Quote-to-order rate: For custom products, measure the percentage of quotes that successfully convert into firm orders.
• Lead time and cycle time: Track the time from order to fulfillment, as lead time is a critical piece of information for online buyers.
• Rework and scrap percentage: Monitor these manufacturing KPIs to see how digital ordering impacts production quality and efficiency.

Ecommerce for B2B manufacturing case studies

B2B manufacturers have much to gain by embracing and investing in ecommerce. When a comprehensive ecommerce strategy is powered by the right solutions and providers, the results can be game-changing. Here are three manufacturers that saw major impacts on their business with ecommerce.

Carrier drives ecommerce success with go-to-market speed

Carrier got a mention earlier because adjusting their ecommerce strategy and tech stack saved them so much time and money. Carrier has an incredibly diverse set of buyers across 180 countries, including dealers, distributors, service technicians, national accounts, and homeowners. They knew providing tailored ecommerce experiences would drive online sales and improve customer loyalty, but their existing ecommerce tech stack was very complex, which drove development times and costs sky-high.

To save millions of dollars and cut launch times to just 30 days, Carrier launched OneCommerce, a central global Shopify accelerator to streamline and accelerate setting up online storefronts. Today, they can test ideas, iterate, and ship new go-to-market motions at the pace of a startup, instead of a typical large manufacturer.

“There’s a massive opportunity for us to unlock new selling motions, channel partners, and other areas of the business… For us to monetize a new idea in 30 days is essentially an opportunity to test billion dollar ideas. Instead of waiting years to do it, Shopify allows us to do it in weeks,” said Steve Duran, associate director of global commerce at Carrier.

Filtrous streamlines operations by improving their online order experience

Filtrous is a B2B laboratory supply company with global customers, from small laboratories to institutions like UCLA. They wanted to modernize their wholesale buying experience to stand out from the competition in an antiquated industry. However, their previous ecommerce solution wasn’t the right choice—and the results were disastrous. Customers found their website so hard to use that they contacted customer service to place orders over the phone instead.

Filtrous remained committed to their ecommerce strategy, and migrated to Shopify. They were able to quickly configure features such as customer-specific catalogs, custom discounts, and payment options. Using Shopify’s suite of core features, they automated many of their back-office operations, including the sending and payment of invoices. Filtrous built and launched their improved storefront quickly, and received their first B2B order on the new site just 63 days after signing with Shopify

Today, customers can place their own orders and manage their accounts within Shopify’s platform, saving Filtrous’s support team about 10 hours per week. Their new ecommerce solution saves sales reps an average of two hours per week by streamlining order processing. With more free time, these teams now focus on their core tasks—selling and building customer relationships.

“Everything is more streamlined with Shopify. I have so much more time to focus on marketing and growing the business,” said Yin Fu, director of ecommerce at Filtrous.

Industry West provides a DTC experience for new B2B buyers

Industry West is a supplier of unique, high-end furniture to businesses. The founders originally built their online store—and their only full product catalog—on Magento (now Adobe Commerce). However, a lack of customization options meant they couldn’t ever properly display the wide range of furniture sizes and types they sold. Their unique brand experience never came through.

Worse, the company faced significant challenges in managing their B2B customer flow. The unique requirements of B2B customers, such as trade account logins, discount registrations, and direct sales representative interactions, couldn’t easily be handled by the existing back end. Many B2B buyers resorted to filling their cart, taking a screenshot, and calling for discounts. They created a workaround, sending B2B buyers to a separate subdomain for their trade login. Then, each of these buyers had to be handled individually. None of this was sustainable.

Eventually, they chose to migrate to Shopify, where they were able to flexibly build multiple unique landing page formats for their various furniture sizes. Shopify’s B2B suite of services allowed them to build a fully customized experience. Today, Industry West can sell to their B2B consumers in increments and in quantity discount tiers.

Today, they also group companies into a single catalog with set pricing for each company. This simplifies management and ensures consistency for every buyer.

Since launch, Industry West has seen major results: a 90% lift in the share of B2B revenue and a 10% lift in new B2B accounts. The average order value (AOV) has increased by 20%, and they’ve seen a 15% lift in the average number of items placed in a cart.

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