What Is B2B eCommerce?

Is Shopify a B2B or B2C platform? Both, depending on configuration. It began as a consumer storefront product and later added wholesale capability, so the answer turns on what a given merchant has switched on.

Amazon Business runs the same pattern at scale, selling to companies on infrastructure built for consumers, and it reported $60 billion in annualized gross sales in July 2026, serving 11 million businesses across 11 countries.

Plenty of manufacturers do a smaller version of this, running a trade portal and a direct-to-consumer shop off one catalog with different pricing rules applied at login.

What separates platforms is less which of these they hold than how much of each one your own team can change without a developer: contract pricing, units of measure and approval routing, once a business account signs in.

Three public companies have published figures that show the model working at scale.

Watsco, a North American HVAC distributor, reported e-commerce of $2.7 billion for the twelve months to 30 June 2026, or 37% of total sales, growing 13% in the first half of 2026. Its strongest regions run above 70%, which puts the ceiling on digital adoption in distribution a good deal higher than most companies assume.

Fastenal breaks the integration layer out in its reporting. Its eBusiness channel, counting EDI and eProcurement transactions alongside website orders, ran at 29.4% of sales in the second quarter of 2026.

Grainger runs the marketplace model inside a traditional distributor. Its Endless Assortment segment, which houses Zoro in the United States and MonotaRO in Japan, grew 13.5% in the second quarter of its 2026 financial year, with Zoro US up 18.4% on a daily basis and MonotaRO up 24% in local constant currency, against company-wide growth of 10.3%.

💡 For more on how the marketplace variant works in practice, see how B2B marketplaces work.

Why B2B ecommerce, and why now? Because orders are relocating inside a market that isn't growing. Digital Commerce 360 recorded US manufacturing and wholesale distribution sales of $15.12 trillion in 2025, up just 0.4%, while McKinsey found 71% of B2B companies now offering ecommerce and roughly a third of their revenue running through digital channels.

Demand is broadly flat. What is changing is which channel captures the order, and every order that moves from a rep's inbox to a portal has left somebody's phone line, sometimes a competitor's, sometimes your own rep's.

Companies rarely rebuild their commercial systems because of a market statistic, though. They do it when something specific breaks, and the triggers repeat across industries.

• Growth is constrained. Adding a price list or opening a market takes a development project instead of a change the commercial team can make itself.
• Visibility ends at the distributor. The manufacturer is guessing about who is actually buying and what they are paying.
• A new country or channel arrives and the systems turn out to assume one of each.
• Several business models end up under one roof: wholesale, direct-to-consumer and contract supply running on infrastructure designed for one of them.
• The processes are still manual, and the cost of handling an order by hand has become impossible to defend.

Organizational complexity drives this as hard as product complexity does. A company has a harder problem than one with a large catalog when it runs three operating subsidiaries, two acquired brands, regional divisions holding their own pricing authority, an IT estate assembled over fifteen years and an independent distributor network it does not control. The catalog is a data question. The rest is a question about who is allowed to sell what, to whom, at what price, and how anyone finds out.

💡 We cover the buyer's side of all this in how the B2B buying process actually runs.

What is a B2B ecommerce platform? It is the software holding the account structure, pricing rules and order logic described above, and connecting them to the systems that already run the business. The list is short, and every item on it is worth testing against your own accounts, contracts and units of measure rather than against a feature grid.

• Contract pricing, held per account and per line, and expired or renegotiated by your own pricing team without a developer.
• Repeat ordering, including saved lists, quick-order grids and reorder from history.
• Units of measure, with conversion between cases, pallets and individual items, and pricing that follows the conversion.
• Roles and approvals, so orders route through the buyer's hierarchy instead of around it.
• ERP integration, so the order lands in the system of record instead of an export file.
• Multi-market support, covering currency, tax, language and separate catalogs per region.
• Self-service account management, letting buyers handle addresses, users, invoices and order status without calling anyone.

💡 Which vendor delivers these best is a separate question, and one we've answered elsewhere. If you're at that stage, the platform comparison is the right starting point, or you can look directly at a B2B ecommerce platform built for these requirements.

Integration is where the next round of investment is going, with AI-assisted discovery and procurement systems increasingly determining which supplier a buyer sees first. McKinsey now ranks generative AI among the top five channels buyers use to find and evaluate suppliers, alongside supplier websites, in-person meetings, web search and video calls.

💡 We cover the detail in where B2B ecommerce is heading.

Most companies reading this already have an ERP, and replacing it is not on the table. Virto Commerce is a digital commerce platform for complex sales operations, procurement, and distribution ecosystems, and it runs on top of the system a business already operates, whether that is SAP, Dynamics, Infor, NetSuite, Prophet 21, Sage or something custom. The ERP stays the system of record. The platform handles the account structure, the contract pricing and the self-service portal, and it can be added incrementally instead of through one replacement program.

De Klok Dranken, a Dutch beverage distributor serving more than 4,000 hospitality customers from five redistribution centers, shows the pattern. It launched a self-service portal and reached over 80% digital adoption among its customer base. It kept SAP ERP; what the project replaced was the Adobe Commerce (Magento) storefront in front of it.

So does MUSTAD, a Norwegian manufacturer that runs dealer order portals across 13 entities selling into more than 160 countries, each market with its own localized storefront, on one central product data foundation.

💡 See how enterprises run this in production.

The goal is a commercial foundation that survives the things that will change: the products, the markets, the channels, and the commercial models a business hasn't thought of yet. Companies that regret their choice usually solved for the catalog they had rather than the organization they were becoming.

Bring your ERP and your channel setup, and we will walk through what moving this online would take, whether or not you end up working with us. Book a meeting.