• Many B2B businesses start their digital transformation with a platform tick-list, but the ones seeing the strongest results start by understanding how customers discover and experience their brand across every touchpoint
• UNRVLD helps B2B businesses understand their customer journeys, customer behaviour and digital maturity to build a transformation roadmap grounded in evidence, while reducing technical and operational complexity and cost
• This article builds on the opinions shared by UNRVLD Head of Commerce Tom Williams in the Simply Commerce podcast published in March 2026

UNRVLD’s Head of Commerce Tom Williams recently recorded an episode of Simply Commerce’s Future of Digital Commerce podcast on the challenges and opportunities for digital transformation in B2B commerce.

In the full episode, the discussed topics such as complexities of B2B commerce, the challenges of migrating customers away from legacy ordering channels and how businesses should go about making commerce platform and architecture choices.

Expanding on one of the important themes of the podcast, we’ve pulled together insights from B2B commerce projects we’ve delivered for clients in the past five years. Below, we explore why B2B commerce transformation should begin with your customer, and how businesses that get it right now can gain a competitive advantage in 2026 and beyond.

Your B2B customer journey is your motive

Understanding how customers interact with your business across every touchpoint, channel and friction point is central to how we approach digital transformation at UNRVLD.

Yet, there’s a pattern we see in almost every first conversation with a B2B organisation. They come to us with a technology tick-list: can this platform do complex pricing? Can it do tiered promotions?

These are valid questions, but they’re not the strongest starting point. A customer journey in B2B doesn’t begin and end on your website. It spans how buyers discover your products, how they get pricing, how they place and track orders, how they interact with your sales team and how they’re served after the sale. Understanding that full picture across every channel is what should inform your technology decisions.

As Tom puts it on the podcast: “If they were customer-centric, they would go through an analysis process of understanding what do their customers use on their website? Do I need to replicate that piece of functionality in the new world, yes or no?”
Most businesses skip this entirely and go straight to a vendor with their requirement list of starting features. The questions that should come first are: how do your customers interact with you today, where does that journey break down, and what do they need from their digital experience? This way, the technology decision is backed up by evidence rather than assumptions.

As Tom explains: “They should always start with the customer and work backwards. I know what I want, I know what I need to deliver for my customers. Now, does the technology fit what I’m prepared to deliver?”  

This is why our commerce strategy focuses on the foundations: understanding your customer data and how well you’re set up to serve customers across your channels, plus whether your processes and operations support where you want to get to.

Why your customer must come first in B2B commerce transformation decisions

Lots of businesses pay lip-service to being customer centric. To deliver real value through a transformation project, why is it so crucial to put customer requirements before tech or business process decisions? Put simply, not considering your customers creates risks for both the transformation project and the business.

There are multiple risks of taking a technology-first approach. When B2B businesses rebuild the same experiences and user journeys they already had on a new platform, unused features are carried forward, growth opportunities missed, and market share may be lost to competitors more quickly.

Online revenue will be more fragile because B2B customers will only use higher-friction ecommerce sites if they can’t find the same products elsewhere or you are the cheapest. This leaves you more susceptible to customer churn if competitors come into the market offering better alternatives.

Overspend is also more likely in a big bang replatform project without clear goals beyond replacing the technology, so internal project sponsors and stakeholders are more likely to block the change.

As Tom highlights, there’s a generational shift happening for B2B transactions as digital natives build their careers. Buyers and procurement teams increasingly want to self serve, manage orders, check stock, track deliveries and reorder without picking up the phone or sending an email.

For many of our clients, enabling that self-serve experience through customer portals has become a key part of how they deliver on their customer journey, reducing operational costs while giving customers the access and control they expect. We explored this in more detail in our recent piece on the ROI of customer portals.

Building a vision for transforming B2B commerce

Every digital transformation project UNRVLD leads begins in the same place: understanding the current state of your business and building a shared vision for where you want to get to.

In practice, it’s where the hardest but most valuable work happens. In the podcast, Tom describes how we support clients to make customer-centric decisions:

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We use a digital maturity assessment framework to determine their current state in relation to aspects of their commerce operation such as use of data, automation of processes and organisational structure. Alongside this we analyse which sales channels customers are integrating with, plus user behaviour on their website to assess potential gaps in user journeys and friction in the experience delivered.

An SEO and AEO review may uncover that the site or certain product pages aren’t easily discoverable. And this analysis helps us to build a picture of where digital could better support new customer acquisition, buyer journeys or account servicing processes. This analysis is utilised by our experience design team when they are considering the use cases new digital services and site designs are solving for.

At the same time we work with stakeholders across the business to map your current technology landscape; understand what each system does, how they talk to each other and where the process and data gaps and friction points are.

From there, we assess your current ‘as is’ state versus where you want to be. We look at how well the existing set-up measures against five digital transformation pillars:

• Content ops and marketing resource management
• Experimentation and optimisation
• Data and personalisation
• Client access and post-sale service
• Generative and agentic AI

Each of these areas are tested against a scoring matrix to surface where the biggest gaps between ambition and reality sit. It’s designed to give us and you a complete view, not just of what your customers need, but of how well your digital operation is positioned to deliver it.

Tom put it simply: “Once you have a clear vision of the as-is and where you want to get to, then you can think about how do we make this more customer centric? What elements can we bring into this conversation to elevate the buying experience and making life generally easier for your end user?”

When you understand the full picture of your digital maturity – the customer needs, the operational reality, the data landscape, the dependencies between systems, we can then confidently help you to make the right platform choices.

Customer-centric B2B ecommerce in practice

Ecommerce transformation for premium appliances brand Smeg is a great example of how customer requirements have been placed before technology decisions. When we kicked off a project to modernise the digital experiences it delivered, we had to consider online and in-store customers, plus the B2B experience for its retail partners. Each of these channels had its own requirements, its own customer expectations and, previously, its own systems.

Taking a customer-centric approach allowed us to make the decision that Shopify could be used as a platform to build multiple commerce websites, plus a POS solution for stores and trade shows, underpinned by a single customer view.

As a Shopify partner, we’ve been able to make the solution work for the B2B ecommerce store we’ve built for Smeg, including personalised pricing and product selections for each retail partner. At the same time, the brand benefits from the reduced technical complexity and cost of the site being built on the same infrastructure as its other webstores.

By understanding how your customers interact with you today, identifying where the journey falls short, and building your digital transformation around closing those gaps, your B2B business will introduce the right complex commerce solutions to meet your current needs and as a suitable foundation for future development and business change.

And you don’t need to be at the beginning of your digital transformation journey to benefit from this customer-centric thinking; as Tom in the podcasts puts it: “It doesn’t always have to be a big bang approach. It’s about iterative change. How do we understand your customer to drive more ROI through the checkout? How do we get more clicks on a landing page?”

This is the approach UNRVLD has taken with our client YPO, where we have delivered better search engine visibility for new potential customers, and then improved on-site search and merchandising to reduce friction once they land on the site. These two projects have happened to improve the existing experience, while a larger digital transformation takes place. You can read more on the success of those iterative customer experience improvements here.

If you’re exploring what a customer-led approach to digital transformation could look like for your B2B business, our omnichannel commerce strategy work is designed to get you from where you are to where you need to be – grounded in evidence, phased around value and built to scale.