B2B Commerce Outlook 2026: Key Trends
Remember the days when B2B ecommerce meant a clunky portal, static pricing, and endless forms? Good news: those days are officially on the way out! The 2026 outlook is clear: B2B buyers - who, by the way, are the same people enjoying sleek, personalised B2C shopping experiences on their phones - expect nothing less than consumer-grade convenience. With B2B sales on track to surpass $3 trillion by 2028, the race is on to close that experience gap. How do you do it? It all comes down to a modern, integrated, and flexible tech stack.
Here are the key trends that will define success in 2026, powered by the best in the business:
You can’t deliver a great experience if your product data is scattered across spreadsheets and seven different legacy platforms. This is where the magic starts.
The Trend: Centralising, enriching, and syndicating product information is mandatory. A massive 99% of B2B organisations struggle with managing product information. Tools like Akeneo PIM (Product Information Management) are the unsung heroes of B2B.
The Movora Proof: Movora, a leader in veterinary orthopedics, faced this exact chaos after acquiring multiple brands. They were juggling disconnected systems, leading to inconsistent customer experiences and a major headache for their internal teams. By implementing a centralised data strategy, they established one single source of truth. The result? Customers could finally access real-time inventory and accurate product data, driving incredible growth.
The days of monolithic, all-in-one platforms that slow you down are over. Speed, flexibility, and the ability to scale globally are non-negotiable.
The Trend: Headless Commerce is becoming mainstream, giving brands the power to launch custom, localised storefronts that are super-fast and tailored to specific regions, while connecting to a robust back-end platform like BigCommerce or Shopify Plus.
The Movora Proof: Movora’s unified platform used a headless storefront architecture, rolling out localised sites across the US, Canada, and EMEA. This agility allowed them to deliver a seamless, region-specific experience to veterinary professionals worldwide, and contributed to their astonishing 100% ecommerce growth in the US within months, with 34% of orders now placed online.
A beautiful storefront is useless if it can't talk to your ERP about inventory levels or your PIM about pricing. Integration is no longer an IT project; it’s the engine for profitability.
The Trend: Seamless, real-time integration via an iPaaS solution like Patchworks is essential for automation, personalisation, and efficiency. This connectivity unlocks incremental revenue and is necessary to meet buyer demands - 83% of whom prefer self-serve ordering.
The Partner Power: When B2B buyers demand personalised catalogs and contract-specific pricing (a key feature in Shopify B2B and BigCommerce B2B Edition), the system must instantly pull that data from the ERP. Patchworks ensures this connection is robust, enabling the automation of tasks like order routing and fulfillment. This frees up sales teams to focus on high-value consultation instead of manual data entry, which is why integrated solutions can deliver rapid ROI and massive efficiency gains.
The future of B2B commerce belongs to the brands that are brave enough to embrace flexibility, clean up their data, and connect their systems. If you want to replicate Movora’s success - moving from chaos to triple-digit growth - it’s time to modernise your stack. It’s not just about selling online; it’s about selling smart.
Sources
The Shift in B2B Buying Behavior
Discover the shifting trends within the B2B landscape
The Future of B2B: Insights from Our Latest Survey
Movora: Global B2B ecommerce Expansion
9 Transformative Shopify Plus Trends for 2026
Five Shifts Reshaping B2B Commerce in 2026, And What to Do About Them
