In 2026, business-to-business (B2B) distributors like Grainger, MSC Industrial Direct, Fastenal, and Watsco are doubling down on digital commerce and AI as the backbone of their operating strategy. Their Q1 2025 earnings calls all pointed in the same direction: digital is now the price of admission.
If there’s anything holding B2B distributors back from making this transformation, it’s not that they don’t knowwhat their customers want. Instead, it’s because they’re trapped inside legacy architecture that buckles under every addition of customer-specific rules, catalogs, or integrations.
Ahead, we’ll break down key data, integrations, sales tools, and a 90-day plan to modernize. And we’ll tell you why unified commerce is the simplest way to do it.
What do B2B distributors need from ecommerce in 2026?
B2B distributors are after stability, accuracy, and speed, because that’s what their buyers expect every time.
And buyers are saying it out loud. The Hokodo 2025 B2B Commerce Buyer Expectations Report makes it clear:
- 84% of B2B buyers want suppliers to offer multiple channels (webstore, marketplace, in-store, telesales).
- 73% prefer to purchase through digital channels when available.
- 78% say payment terms are a deciding factor across every channel.
When people say “the B2B buyer journey is complex,” they often mean it doesn’t follow a traditional sales funnel. Because it isn’t a straight line, the technology behind it can’t be stitched together.
This is something Patrick Joyce, a senior engineer at Shopify, has talked about:
“Modern retail has fallen into a complexity trap.”
Every time a distributor adds a new portal, a new middleware connector, or a new “temporary” integration to solve one workflow, it creates three more problems somewhere else. And with every addition, you’re responsible for another potential point of failure—another system to monitor, update, and reconcile.
This is what Patrick calls the “fragmentation tax.”
And because distributors often sit between manufacturers, raw materials suppliers, and logistics providers, every breakdown in data accuracy ripples across the entire chain.
The core distributor capabilities every ecommerce platform must get right
These workflows are core to the modern sales process because they directly impact both customer experience and customer satisfaction.
- Contract pricing that stays accurate everywhere: For distributors, contract pricing is the relationship. If the price a buyer sees online doesn’t match the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system or the punchout catalog, the trust breaks immediately.
- Quick-order that feels instant: Your buyers are replenishing, restocking, punching in SKUs from memory, or pasting in lists from a clipboard. Quick-order has to be fast, forgiving, and impossible to break. CSV upload, bulk add-to-cart, keyboard navigation—all of it matters.
- Draft quotes you can build: Buyers need time to compare, negotiate, and get approvals, while reps need to jump in, adjust pricing, and send back clean, accurate quotes. A good quoting workflow simply makes the back-and-forth less painful.
- Approvals that mirror the buyer’s organization: The buyer wants to order, the system says no, and nobody knows why. Approvals need to follow the buyer’s actual hierarchy—branches, cost centers, supervisors.
- Reordering that takes seconds: Repeat purchasing is the core of distributor revenue. Reorders shouldn’t feel like starting from scratch. Buyers expect saved lists, reorder windows, “order this again” flows, and visibility into branch-level purchase history.
Ask home improvement giant, MR D.I.Y. They were running on a legacy ecommerce platform that couldn’t keep up with their scale. Every new feature required a scoped project, and every workflow change meant another technical dependency.
So they replatformed to Shopify, and our unified data model and native B2B capabilities gave them the foundation they’d been missing: consistent pricing, cleaner catalogs, faster order flows—plus, the ability to expand internationally without duct-taping more systems together.
Since the migration from Adobe Commerce to Shopify, MR D.I.Y. has seen:
- 16% growth in revenue
- 113% increase in daily order fulfilment (now at 1,000–1,500 orders/day)
- 41% reduction in platform maintenance costs
That’s the impact of getting these core capabilities right—and running them on a platform built for unified commerce at scale.
Why unified commerce is the future for B2B distribution
When a buyer’s journey zigzags across channels and stakeholders, the only thing that keeps everything coherent is the data underneath it. And for most distributors, that is where the cracks start to show.
You need something deeper: a shared data backbone that every workflow, every buyer, and every channel draws from.
That’s the real advantage of Shopify’s approach.
Instead of spreading logic across separate systems—one for pricing, one for inventory, one for reps, one for punchout—Shopify is built around a single, shared data model. Products, customers, organizational hierarchies, price lists, carts, orders, inventory, locations—everything lives in one place.
This matters because when:
- You update pricing once, and it flows everywhere.
- You add a new SKU once, and every channel can sell it.
- You adjust a buyer’s role, and approvals update automatically.
- You fix an inventory rule, and every touchpoint stays consistent.
And because Shopify’s primitives—products, customers, inventory, orders—are designed to work together from day one, distributors get the holy grail of modern commerce: set it once, deploy everywhere.
Plus, Shopify’s total cost of ownership (TCO) is 22% lower than comparable enterprise vendors, in case you’re keeping score.
A unified foundation solves the hardest part, but it also raises the next big question: what should you build next? That’s where distributors hit the crossroads between a theme-first build and a fully headless architecture.
📚Read more: B2B Ecommerce Trends 2025–2026: 15 Strategies Transforming Digital Commerce
When B2B distributors should go headless (and when you shouldn’t)
How much of the buying experience should you control yourself?
That’s the headless versus theme-first decision; and for distributors, it’s rarely a one-size-fits-all call.
When does headless make sense for distributors?
Decoupling your front end is the right move when your buyer experience looks more like a custom internal application than a traditional storefront.
So, think:
- Rapid, attribute-heavy SKU search
- Complex configuration workflows
- Multi-step ordering or buyer dashboards
- Portals for different industries, brands, or procurement groups
- Custom-built field rep experiences
- Strict performance requirements for buyers ordering thousands of SKUs at once
In these cases, headless gives you the freedom to tailor every pixel and interaction, without rewriting back-end logic or touching pricing, inventory, or customer hierarchies.
Shopify’s Hydrogen + Oxygen stack fits cleanly: Hydrogen lets teams build highly custom storefronts with React, while Oxygen handles the global hosting layer.
For distributors with strong internal engineering teams or a clear need for a unique buying interface, this combination delivers speed, flexibility, and scalability without rebuilding the commerce engine behind it.
📚Read more: What Is Headless Commerce: A Complete Guide for 2025
When is a theme-first build the smarter move?
Not every distributor needs a fully custom front end. Most don’t—so theme-first is often the faster, cleaner, lower-TCO path when:
- You rely on standard workflows (contract pricing, quick-order, reorder lists)
- Your team wants predictable updates without dev-heavy maintenance
- Your priorities are performance, stability, and uptime more than pixel-level control
- Your catalog logic is complex, but your user interface doesn’t need to be
- You want to use native features immediately instead of re-implementing them
This is where Shopify’s Online Store 2.0 architecture already delivers 90% of what distributors need, out of the box.
You get built-in B2B features like:
- Fast quick-order workflows
- Smooth checkout
- Multi-location inventory
- Easy localization
- AI enhancements
- Native upgrades without rewriting your codebase
The real decision criteria comes down to velocity.
Here’s the simplest rule of thumb:
- If your buying experience is evolving constantly—go headless with Hydrogen.
- If your buying experience is stable and your pain is back-end complexity—stay theme-first and rely on Shopify’s unified data model.
Both approaches draw from the same foundation: Shopify’s unified data model for products, customers, pricing, inventory, orders, and locations.
B2B distributor data and integration playbook
Most distributor ecommerce problems are data problems wrapped in integration problems.
That means:
- If your customer hierarchy isn’t modeled correctly, approvals break.
- If your price lists live in five different systems, punchout breaks.
- If your catalog is duplicated between platforms, inventory accuracy breaks.
You need to structure the three things that control everything: customers, pricing, and catalogs—plus integrations like punchout, electronic data interface (EDI), and single sign-on—that big buyers expect by default.
And because Shopify runs all your B2B logic on a single, shared data model, these decisions become a lot simpler.
Customer hierarchies, price lists, and catalogs
Most distributors don’t sell to “accounts”—they sell to organizations; groups with branches, cost centers, approvers, and buyers who each need different access and rules.
If the data model doesn’t reflect that reality, no amount of custom integration will save the experience.
Here’s a cleaner way to think about each layer:
1. Customer hierarchies
A buyer may place the order, but the organization holds the contract.
A solid hierarchy lets you define:
- Parent company
- Branches or locations
- Buyer roles (viewer, purchaser, approver)
- Spending limits or budget caps
- Cost centers or departments
Shopify B2B supports this through Company Profiles, where each location inherits the right pricing, catalog access, and approval rules automatically.
And as of June 2024, Shopify B2B supports:
- Up to 10,000 company locations under a single Company Profile
- Up to 10,000 customer contacts per company
- Up to 50 customers per location
- Counting each buyer only once, even if they’re attached to multiple locations
2. Price lists
Contract pricing is where most technology debt accumulates. Distributors often store price lists in their ERP system, a separate pricing engine, a punchout gateway, the B2B portal, and/or a spreadsheets used by sales.
That almost guarantees mismatches.
Shopify solves this with shared Price Lists. You assign one price list to the parent company, and every location gets the right version.
3. Catalogs
Distributors rarely show every buyer the same catalog. Some SKUs are restricted; others vary by region, and the pricing changes by market, contract, or volume.
Shopify addresses this with B2B catalogs. You can include all products, include only certain products, exclude products buyers shouldn’t access, show variants or hide variants depending on compliance, and support substitutes or alternates via metafields.
After creating a catalog, you can assign it to:
- A market (all B2B customers in a geography)
- An entire company
- A specific company location
For distributors with US, EU, APAC, and LATAM buyers (or any business selling into regulated or restricted regions), this setup massively reduces overhead.
Punchout/OCI, EDI, and SSO
Selling to large organizations means playing nicely with procurement systems.
That requires three things: punchout, electronic data interchange (EDI), and single sign-on (SSO).
1. Punchout/OCI
Enterprise buyers often begin the order inside their procurement platform (Coupa, Ariba, SAP). Punchout lets them:
- Start a cart internally
- Jump to your site to pull in real pricing + catalog
- Return with a validated cart for approval
Punchout only works if your pricing, catalogs, and inventory are clean, which is why Shopify’s unified data model reduces the integration effort dramatically.
2. EDI
EDI handles purchase orders, invoices, shipment notices, and inventory feeds. EDI expects structured data—but most ecommerce platforms have five competing versions of that data.
On Shopify, all orders, customers, and inventory live on one consistent API surface, so EDI connections configure cleanly.
3. SSO
SSO gives distributors safer authentication, frictionless onboarding, correct buyer roles on day one, and cleaner audit trails.
How do B2B distributors grow margins? A real-life case study
A modern B2B ecommerce platform needs to support both sides of the same revenue engine: self-service for predictable, repeatable tasks, and sales-assist for complex, high-value workflows.
And the only way these coexist cleanly is through a unified data model, so neither channel contradicts the other.
To see how this plays out in practice, it’s worth looking at how a century-old B2B distributor handled this shift.
As a distributor selling highly specialized precision tools to other businesses, Gesswein needed a reliable way to manage online transactions without compromising the customer experience for products used in production environments and in technical settings.
Their BigCommerce-powered B2B experience depended on a fragile ERP connector that frequently broke. When it did, the downstream effects were immediate: product data mismatched, inventory counts desynced, orders stalled in processing, staff spent hours correcting sync issues, and buyers lost confidence in the online experience.
On top of that, essential B2B workflows like quoting, reordering, and account management were stitched together through third-party plugins. So when a buyer tried to reorder a familiar set of tools or generate a quote, the process felt unworthy of the brand name.
Gesswein, in partnership with Zaeleb, rebuilt their B2B presence on Shopify.
Here’s what changed:
- Zaelab engineered a real-time, reliable connection between Shopify and Acumatica. Pricing, inventory, product data, and orders now sync consistently.
- Gesswein replaced multiple third-party tools with Shopify’s built-in B2B features, including company-specific login portals, negotiated pricing, role-based permissions, complete order history, accurate, fully synced catalog access, and multi-shipment and back-order visibility.
- With more than 12,000 products, Gesswein needed a buying experience built around how professionals search. On Shopify, they expanded filtering by material, application, tooling characteristics, and compatibility attributes.
The results speak for themselves: a 101% increase in transactions YoY, a 225% growth in site sessions, and a 343% increase in users.
And at the heart of those gains is a unified data model that keeps every channel (self-service, sales-assist, and back-office systems) working from the same, accurate information, so buyers can move faster and the business stops losing margin to preventable operational friction.
Moving from legacy to modern is intimidating, but as Gesswein found, it can be done.
Your 90-day roadmap
Most distributors can make meaningful progress in 90 days if they approach the project in the right order: fix the data foundation first, build the buying experience second, and train teams last.
Here’s a practical, distributor-ready roadmap.
Weeks 1–4: Audit, data readiness, and pilot SKU group
The first month is about understanding what data exists, what’s missing, and what needs to be cleaned before anything goes live.
1. Run a systems and workflow audit: Map how orders move through your business today:
- Where pricing lives
- Where inventory is updated
- How approvals flow
- How reps quote
- How buyers reorder
2. Clean and structure product data: Choose a pilot SKU group of 200–500 products. Normalize:
- Attributes
- Variants
- Compatibility fields
- Substitutes and alternates
- Regulatory flags
3. Prepare ERP and operational integrations: Plan how the ERP will sync to Shopify (inventory, orders, customer data). This is the foundation that prevents the sync issues distributors struggle with on legacy platforms.
4. Identify buyer segments and test users: Choose a small group of customers who can act as early testers. Pick buyers who reorder frequently—they feel the pain points most clearly.
This is often the stage where distributors surface blind spots in their coordination with logistics providers and uncover how outdated systems lead to rising shipping costs.
Weeks 5–8: Buyer organizations, pricing rules, and approvals
Month two is where you model how your customers actually buy.
1. Build Company Profiles: Model parent-to-branch hierarchies. Assign:
- Purchasing roles
- Cost centers
- Approval requirements
- Spending limits
2. Configure price lists and contract logic: Define contract pricing once and let locations inherit it. Set up:
- Fixed SKU pricing
- Percentage adjustments
- Volume tiers
- Region-specific variations (via Shopify Markets)
3. Assign catalogs and availability rules: Make sure the right buyers see the right products. For distributors, this often includes:
- Restricted items
- Technical product groupings
- Specialized variants
- Category-level visibility rules
4. Set up approvals and terms: Define how large or sensitive orders move through the buyer’s organization. Configure:
- Approval routing
- Credit limits
- Net terms
- Pay-by-invoice flows
Run all of this with your pilot customers and gather honest feedback.
Weeks 9–12: Launch, training, and operational KPIs
The last month is about go-live and onboarding.
1. Launch your pilot experience: Release the full B2B experience to your early testers, including the self-service portal, contract pricing, saved lists, quick order, reorder workflows, order history, invoicing and terms.
2. Train internal teams: On Shopify, most teams need significantly less training than on legacy portals, but they still need clarity on:
- When to use draft carts
- How to generate quotes
- How to place orders on behalf of buyers
- How to troubleshoot common customer questions
3. Roll out to all B2B buyers: Once the pilot performs as expected, expand to additional companies and branches—the unified data model ensures that everything scales cleanly.
4. Track the right KPIs: Focus on the indicators that show whether the platform is reducing operational friction:
- Average order value (Are buyers finding what they need?)
- Reorder rate (Is self-service working?)
- Line-fill rate (Are inventory and pricing synced correctly?)
- Quote-to-order conversion (Are reps moving faster?)
- Support ticket volume (Are buyers self-serving?)
- Time to fulfillment (Are there fewer manual corrections?)
These are the KPIs that correlate directly with margin improvement.
B2B distributors FAQ
What’s the difference between a distributor and a wholesaler?
A wholesaler buys in bulk and resells to retailers.
A distributor sells directly to business customers and typically manages more of the supply chain—everything from technical support and product education to stocking inventory across multiple distribution centers.
Because they deal with raw materials, compliance, and coordination with logistics providers, distributors typically require more advanced technology solutions and a more structured distribution strategy.
Which ecommerce features matter most for distributors?
The most important capabilities are the ones that meet customer expectations, create a competitive advantage, and drive cost savings:
- Contract pricing that stays accurate across all distribution channels
- Quick-order and CSV upload for fast bulk orders
- Customer- and location-specific catalogs
- Role-based approvals
- Self-service account management
- Reliable ERP syncing for inventory and shipping costs
- Sales-assist workflows that streamline the sales process
These features help distributors sell directly to other businesses with the same speed and accuracy expected by end customers.
How do distributors handle complex pricing online?
Modern B2B platforms like Shopify B2B use price lists and catalogs to model distributor-specific logic:
- Fixed contract pricing
- Volume tiers
- Percentage adjustments
- Location-level variations
- Buyer- or branch-specific rules
You define the rules once in Shopify, and they apply consistently across ecommerce, reps, and marketplaces.
When should a distributor go headless?
Go headless when your buying experience functions like an application: advanced configuration, attribute-heavy search, or multi-step workflows that standard storefronts can’t support.
This approach suits distributors with a highly customized business model or those prioritizing performance at scale.
If your workflows are standard (pricing, quoting, reordering), a theme-first build offers a faster, more cost-effective technology solution—and helps teams stay ahead without adding engineering overhead.
How do marketplaces fit a distributor strategy?
Marketplaces like Amazon Business are best treated as complementary distribution channels, not core systems. They’re best used to:
- Capture demand you’re not reaching directly
- Expand into adjacent categories
- Serve long-tail buyers
- Test new geographies
The key is routing marketplace orders through the same pricing, inventory, and approval logic as your main channel. Shopify’s unified data model keeps marketplace, ecommerce, and rep-assisted orders consistent—preserving margin and supporting long-term revenue growth.
