The Echidna Blog

We knew this year would require brands to work on the ongoing challenge of optimizing the customer experience. However, being able to embrace a customer-first approach through digital operations has turned instrumental for brands in 2020. As merchants work towards the post-coronavirus future, what does that look like?

Working together while working apart has become commonplace and will continue to be more important than ever these upcoming weeks and even months. Thousands of in-office workers are experiencing their first foray into the world of remote working as businesses try to manage the threat of COVID-19 by asking their employees to stay home. Since Echidna’s founding, we’ve served many companies as a virtual extension to their teams- building a proven practice of team collaboration, project governance, and reliable delivery whether team members are in the office or distributed far-and-wide. We’ve put together this informative blog and free downloadable resource to help you navigate remote teams' best practices.

Distributors and manufacturers, it’s go time. Many of you have eCommerce sites, many are working towards getting it up. But is your on-site search box ruining your customer experience? The search box continually ranks #1 as the top thing that frustrates buyers with the B2B user experience.

As a manufacturer, distributor, or wholesaler, how do you make sure you are gaining that competitive edge? In today's market, one way is by being a disruptive force in eCommerce. With many ways to approach a build-out of your eCommerce ecosystem, the two main goals should be around keeping customers pleased and efficient operations which will in turn aid you in standing out as a digital commerce disruptor.

Have you ever clicked onto a website searching for a specific item, but you just can’t seem to find it? Beyond that, you want to ask for help and it takes digging around the site to find their service contact section. Frustration sets in as you circle around the site trying to find the right page and you finally end up leaving the site to make a purchase elsewhere. Beyond that, maybe your loyalty to the company dissipates because they aren’t easily able to serve your needs. More often than not, clients nowadays associate their negative user experience with the company or product.As more B2B buyers shift from sitting behind a desk all day to doing tasks in the field, during commutes, between meetings or after regular hours with their mobile devices the need for an intuitive B2B mobile user experience is becoming more apparent. Whether you choose to go with a native app, progressive web app or simply a responsive website (or a combination of these)- making sure the customer is able to easily navigate and complete their tasks with ease is imperative to the success of the mobile strategy.

Many B2B organizations look at excelling their mobile strategy as a complicated process for both the business and technology side, as there are many approaches and options. While this is true when broken into phases and aligning with each pillar of your organization you can ensure a smooth journey that checks all requirement boxes for both customers and internal teams. When it comes to a B2B mobile strategy, the key is not to emulate on a B2C environment or even create something completely new, but to maintain your B2B heritage while coupling B2C processes and solutions to add multiple points of value to all users.

The winners in Retail are continually changing the game and delighting consumers with surprising innovations in self-service and user experience to improve online interactions, all while gaining an edge on the competition. This includes the use of chatbots to their sites, which have increasingly gained popularity over a short period of time and for good reason. Chatbots offer automated, intelligent responses to customers queries on demand, online and even have the ability to be hyper personalized. So what is the impact of chatbots in the B2B market going into the new year and what can they offer their users? As most B2B buyers tend to expect the same experience online as they are getting a B2C buyer, it’s more important than ever for the B2B market to take a look at chatbots.

As 2019 comes to a close, many leaders in B2B are reviewing their digital strategy going into the new year. Digital transformation is a strategic journey of innovation that offers incredible potential for growth. Consider it less about a complete system overhaul and more about shifting plans to invest in and be more competitive in today’s digital markets by delivering valuable online solutions. One of those online solutions is offering e-commerce and m-commerce (mobile commerce). Digital commerce offers B2B the ability to introduce new innovation to delight their customers, make their internal operations more efficient, and outpace their competition.

2019 has been full of enormous transformation in retail as the entire industry works to evolve with the consumer and strike a balance in all the purchasing paths one might take. Pair that with the blurring on industry lines as the consumer goods companies approach into their territory and other direct to consumer brands take off without the need of retail assistance and there is no doubt that in 2020 retail will (have to) continue to push the envelope to delight and maintain loyal customers.  We are sharing several insights into what will help make for a successful new year for many retailers and insights into what will be discussed at the upcoming NRF 2020 Conference.

At Echidna, we have been developing on Oracle Commerce for over a decade and extended our capabilities to Oracle’s newest e-commerce platform solution, Oracle Commerce Cloud, making us a preferred Gold Partner. Besides the fact that Oracle Commerce Cloud is ranked as one of the top SaaS e-commerce platforms and offers both B2B and B2C merchants a unified, modular SaaS infrastructure, we’ve come to recognize it also has additional features that are important when crafting a building products site while we were doing just that for one of our clients in the industry.

Preparing for the future of commerce is no easy feat. While looking for a solution to fulfill current needs, you also need to be able to anticipate how you wanted to adapt and change in the future as you drive your commerce business forward. With an e-commerce platform being a core foundation for any business looking to create positive disruption within their industry, it is important to understand the basics when it comes to designing, building and maintaining a modern viable commerce solution. This includes the continuous innovation that is required to keep up in today’s digital economy. We are giving insight into this and the seven key steps on how to ensure the future-readiness of your commerce solution.

When it comes to getting prospects to your B2B e-commerce site, you're doing a great job- the traffic numbers speak for themselves. However, what about where it really counts- are you converting enough of these visitors to add items to their carts? Product pages are becoming increasingly important as more people head online to make purchases. As retailers raise the bar on self-service e-commerce, B2B buyers expect the same. By leading with a customer-centric mentality and tackling common gaps within the B2B online purchasing process by using integrated e-commerce and CPQ technology solutions you will be able to create a solid foundation for the future and allow customers to be served how they want to be.

Enterprise eCommerce integration projects have a failure rate that the industry does not talk about enough. Failure as in the integration was built, went live, and then proceeded to quietly undermine the commerce experience it was supposed to power. These are not edge cases. They are the normal outcome of integrations that were designed without enough rigor, implemented without enough governance, or handed off to teams who lacked the context to maintain them.

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Boomi is how Echidna builds that foundation. Not as a simple data pipe — but as the central nervous system of the enterprise, transforming and cleaning data in transit, enabling parallel workstreams, and making it possible to modernize legacy systems without replacing them.

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Let’s debunk a popular myth before we start: Continuous innovation is not a one-off event or just a buzzword. It’s not about having that one groundbreaking idea that skyrockets your business to success. True innovation is a continuous process. It’s about applying strategic, tactical, and operational strengths consistently to prepare for future shifts. In a world where technology evolves at breakneck speed, staying relevant requires more than a flash of brilliance. It demands a relentless, ongoing commitment to change.

In recent years, voice search technology has transformed the way people interact with their devices and access information. This innovation allows users to search the internet, control smart home devices, and perform various tasks simply by speaking commands. Voice assistants like Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant have become integral parts of our daily lives, making voice search an essential aspect of modern SEO strategies.

Throughout 2022 and early 2023, there was an explosion of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology that captivated business leaders, investors, and society as a whole with its impressive ability to create new and seemingly human-made text and images.

You know that providing a seamless, personalized experience to your customers is the key to success. With online purchases on the rise and the growing popularity of omnichannel retail, chatbots have become the go-to tool for businesses looking to improve customer service and increase sales.

Construction Specialties has been at the forefront of providing specialty building products worldwide for more than seventy years. With a presence in twenty countries, they have obtained more than 40 registered product patents and produced ten distinct product lines. Their products can be found in or on some of the world's most famous buildings.

With eCommerce sales doubling in the past five years and markets expected to almost double again by 2026, companies are making sizable investments in their eCommerce capabilities.

In a time when every company is digital to some degree, your strategy is the differentiator. The stronger your strategy the easier it is to not only navigate rapid change and innovation, but as a result those companies also see higher conversion rates.

The automotive industry is at a crossroads. One way maintains the current status quo with little room for competitive edges and scalability, while the other path leads to reimagining its core operations and focusing on digital channels. While the latter path might seem intimidating at the moment, it is important to understand that the industry is moving towards digital selling as a business model for both B2B and B2C markets. Choosing to ignore buyer demands can hurt automotive brands in the long term.

We’re living in an accelerated world of eCommerce.

10 years growth in 3 months according to a recent study by Bank of America and Forrester Analytics. While it can be debated how this measured, we can all agree things have changed rapidly in digital.

We knew this year would require brands to work on the ongoing challenge of optimizing the customer experience. However, being able to embrace a customer-first approach through digital operations has turned instrumental for brands in 2020. As merchants work towards the post-coronavirus future, what does that look like?

Quoting is not the reason your products cannot be sold online. Unexamined quoting workflows are. Sort your order volume honestly, move the standard majority to self-service, give the negotiated remainder a visible digital workflow, and measure quote abandonment the way you measure cart abandonment.

B2B site search fails when it speaks catalog language instead of buyer language. The evidence is sitting in your search logs right now, and most of the fixes are content and configuration work, not a replatform.

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When a B2B buyer gets stuck on your site, they do not generally abandon the relationship. The site's conversion rate is technically unaffected, because the buyer never entered the funnel at all. Meanwhile a sales engineer spent part of their afternoon reading a spec sheet aloud. Your support volume is the usability report your analytics cannot produce. Here is how to read it.

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Most B2B eCommerce sites look fine and perform poorly. Here's what enterprise buyers need from a digital commerce experience—and where most designs fail.

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You don’t need another pep talk about “putting the customer first.” You need levers. The good news: modern UX testing tools are exactly that—levers that move revenue, reduce cost-to-serve, and de-risk big bets.

In today’s competitive online market, cutting the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of your eCommerce platform is critical for long-term profitability. Believe it or not, one of the most effective ways to do that isn’t about the technology—it's about user experience (UX). Here’s how enhancing UX can help you slash costs, boost conversions, and reduce hidden operational drag.

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, mobile users demand seamless, intuitive experiences. A mobile UX audit is the key to uncovering friction points, optimizing usability, and boosting engagement. Whether you’re launching a new mobile app or optimizing an existing one, following best practices ensures your mobile experience meets user expectations and drives conversions.

Seamless system integration has become foundational for success in B2C and B2B eCommerce. As companies shift to digital-first strategies to remain competitive and responsive to client demands, integrating systems like ERP, CRM, and inventory management is no longer a luxury—it’s a necessity.

Once upon a time, the most advanced digital assistant many of us knew was Clippy—the quirky, ever-helpful paperclip in Microsoft Office. For all his flaws, Clippy was groundbreaking: the first mainstream, interactive UX assistant that tried to understand what users were doing and offered guidance (even if often unrequested). Though Clippy fell short in many ways, he introduced the idea of proactive assistance in a digital workspace—a concept that has since evolved dramatically.

The holiday shopping season is already in full swing—don’t panic! There’s still time to make quick, impactful adjustments to your eCommerce site that can help you handle the holiday rush like a pro. 🎁 With these last-minute tips, you can boost site speed, optimize your checkout process, and leverage social media to drive more traffic and sales. Let’s dive into the tweaks you can implement right away to get your site holiday-ready.

The industrial goods sector has seen a significant shift toward eCommerce in recent years, with businesses increasingly turning to online platforms to purchase tools, machinery, and raw materials. However, selling industrial goods online comes with unique challenges—ranging from large and complex product catalogs to diverse customer needs, such as procurement managers, engineers, and technicians seeking highly specific items. In this evolving landscape, AI personalization in industrial goods eCommerce is becoming a key driver for success, as buyers now expect tailored product recommendations, custom pricing, and seamless navigation through large inventories.

In the rapidly evolving world of automotive eCommerce, data-driven decision-making is no longer just an advantage—it's a necessity. With the rise of online vehicle shopping, managing customer expectations, inventory, and competitive pricing has become increasingly complex. Automotive eCommerce managers need more than just intuition to succeed in this environment; they require the power of data to make informed decisions that drive growth and enhance customer experiences.

Quoting is not the reason your products cannot be sold online. Unexamined quoting workflows are. Sort your order volume honestly, move the standard majority to self-service, give the negotiated remainder a visible digital workflow, and measure quote abandonment the way you measure cart abandonment.

Replatforming does not have to cost you your search traffic or your place in AI answers. The teams that come through clean treat SEO and AI visibility as first-class requirements of the migration, with an owner, a checklist, and a monitoring window, not as a task for launch week.

B2B site search fails when it speaks catalog language instead of buyer language. The evidence is sitting in your search logs right now, and most of the fixes are content and configuration work, not a replatform.

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Digital commerce projects stall because the return gets measured in the wrong place. Incremental online revenue frames the website as a channel competing with your sales team. Cost to serve frames it as capacity you are currently spending on order entry. One of those arguments makes reps resist. The other makes them advocates. How to build the case, and the four things that have to be true first.

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Shopify B2B has closed most of the gaps that used to disqualify it for manufacturers and distributors. It has not closed all of them. Deeply configurable products, multi-stage quoting, and complex organizational hierarchies are still where the enterprise platforms earn their cost. A clear assessment of both sides, plus the four questions that produce an answer when feature checklists produce a tie.

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Every AI demo in B2B commerce is buyer-facing. Agents drafting orders. Chat windows answering spec questions. The work that actually returns is none of those. It is catalog enrichment, and it is the only AI investment that makes every later one cheaper. Why the unglamorous use case wins, what the work involves, and the four controls that keep AI-generated product data from becoming a liability.

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Adobe's lifecycle documentation lists August 11, 2026 as the end of support for the Adobe Commerce 2.4.6 release line. If you are running 2.4.6, your store does not stop working that day. What changes is quieter and sometimes moreexpensive. New vulnerabilities discovered after that date do not get official patches. Your PCI posture starts drifting. Extension vendors begin testing against newer versions and stop testing against yours. Every future integration decision gets made around a platform version that is no longer moving.

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We rank nine real use cases by whether they are delivering ROI in production today, whether they are conditionally working depending on the substrate underneath, or whether they remain experimental for most enterprise teams. The framing matters. Investing in a use case in the wrong bucket is how AI budgets quietly disappear in year two.

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Every B2B commerce leader is facing the same set of decisions right now. Should we build this AI capability ourselves. Should we buy it from a vendor. Should we wait until the market settles before committing budget.

Getting these three decisions right matters more than picking the right AI use case. A team that buys when they should build ends up locked into a vendor that owns their data. A team that builds when they should buy spends two years reinventing what was available off the shelf. A team that invests when they should wait funds a category that will look completely different in eighteen months. All three mistakes are common. All three are avoidable with a clear framework.

After working with enterprise B2B commerce teams for seventeen years, including most of the past three years deep in AI implementation work, a pattern is clear. The companies pulling ahead are not the ones investing the most in AI. They are the ones operating with the clearest framework for what AI is actually changing in commerce, and what it is not.

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After four articles on what AI-ready commerce actually requires, the question we get most often from enterprise commerce leaders is the same one: "How do I tell where my organization stands without spending six months on an outside assessment?"

Here are the twelve questions we use to anchor every conversation with a new enterprise commerce client. They are grouped into the four pillars of AI-ready commerce: data, integration, organization, and measurement. Answer them honestly and the priorities will be visible by the end.

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AI commerce features rarely succeed or fail cleanly. They tend to deliver real value in narrow places and underperform in others, with the net result obscured by attribution challenges, attribution overlap with other initiatives, and metrics that were not set up at the start of the project to answer the question that finance is now asking.

The teams that hold up well in their year-two budget conversations are not the ones with the biggest results. They are the ones with the clearest measurement. Six metrics, in our experience working with enterprise B2B commerce organizations, cover the picture honestly. Together they tell finance whether the AI investment is paying back, where it is leaking, and what to fund next.

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Replatforming does not have to cost you your search traffic or your place in AI answers. The teams that come through clean treat SEO and AI visibility as first-class requirements of the migration, with an owner, a checklist, and a monitoring window, not as a task for launch week.

B2B site search fails when it speaks catalog language instead of buyer language. The evidence is sitting in your search logs right now, and most of the fixes are content and configuration work, not a replatform.

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If your brand sits in that sweet spot—north of $10M, south of $5B—social shouldn’t just be “posting and hoping.” In 2025, social is a performance channel, a customer research lab, a talent magnet, and for many categories, a storefront.

Let’s be honest: digital marketing budgets are under more scrutiny than ever.

When it comes to showing up in search, your site isn’t just competing for attention—it’s fighting for relevance. And in 2025, the rules of SEO are sharper, smarter, and more user-focused than ever. If you want better rankings, more organic traffic, and a website that actually converts, it starts with a solid on-page SEO audit.

Unlock Better PPC ROI with the Right Strategy and Execution

Why eCommerce Platform Implementation Matters

A Strategic Approach to SEO and Digital Marketing for Sustainable Growth

The holiday shopping season is already in full swing—don’t panic! There’s still time to make quick, impactful adjustments to your eCommerce site that can help you handle the holiday rush like a pro. 🎁 With these last-minute tips, you can boost site speed, optimize your checkout process, and leverage social media to drive more traffic and sales. Let’s dive into the tweaks you can implement right away to get your site holiday-ready.

Imagine this: A small eCommerce business invests $500 in a PPC campaign and, within a month, sees a return of $2,000 in sales. That’s a whopping 300% return on investment (ROI). This scenario isn’t a fairy tale but a real possibility when PPC campaigns are executed effectively. However, achieving such high ROI isn’t just about luck; it’s about leveraging data to drive decisions.

In the ever-evolving landscape of search engine optimization (SEO), staying ahead of the curve is crucial for success. Recent developments have shed light on new opportunities and challenges within this dynamic field. A glimpse behind the curtain has provided us with a deeper understanding of how Google possibly evaluates and ranks content, underscoring the importance of adapting our strategies to align with these newly uncovered criteria. However, Google does caution against making assumptions based on potentially outdated or incomplete information contained in these documents.

The boundaries between social media and eCommerce are becoming increasingly blurred. Today's buyers expect not only to interact with brands through social platforms but also to make purchases there without skipping a beat. This shift has given rise to a new phenomenon known as social commerce, a fusion of online shopping and social media that is transforming the way brands interact with their customers.

Client Spotlight: Powering Up eCommerce Excellence for Continental Battery

Echidna's recent collaboration with Continental Battery Brands and Battery Sharks stands as a testament to our eCommerce expertise. This partnership showcases how strategic thinking and technological innovation can transform eCommerce operations.

In the digital era, starting an eCommerce business with the support of a skilled eCommerce agency opens doors to the global market. Online shopping allows customers to easily buy a wide range of products, from everyday essentials to specialized items. Thanks to the rise of user-friendly tools provided by eCommerce agencies, setting up an online store has become a more accessible and attractive venture for aspiring entrepreneurs.

10 B2B Commerce Trends to Watch for in 2024

Celebrating 14 Years of Winning Together!

October 2023 Digital Commerce Trending News and Insights

September 2023 Digital Commerce Trending News and Insights

In today’s fast-paced world, convenience isn’t just a perk; it’s a necessity. This mantra holds true for the automotive industry, where the B2B landscape is transforming rapidly to accommodate ever-changing customer needs. The shift towards digital commerce, fueled by marketplace business models, is accelerating the automotive industry's growth like never before.

Designing an Digital Commerce Storefront that Sells: Top Tips and Best Practices

Continental Battery Systems Partners with Echidna to Launch Modern Commerce Channel for Battery Sharks

The continued collaboration between Continental Battery Systems and Echidna has driven the launch of another innovative modern commerce channel, solidifying the company’s commitment to delivering unparalleled service and bolstering their position as a customer-centric industry leader.

Modern Commerce is Here. What Do You Need to Know?