The Echidna Blog

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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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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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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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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A failed or underperforming integration does not just delay your go-live. It creates ongoing operational drag that undermines the business case for the entire commerce investment — for years. This guide gives enterprise teams a practical framework for evaluating integration partners: what to look for, what to ask, and what answers should give you pause.

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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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B2B eCommerce integration is not a technical afterthought. It is the connective tissue that determines whether your commerce platform works as a real business capability or as an expensive storefront with a broken backend.

The organizations that treat integration as a strategic investment — architecting it deliberately, governing it continuously, and partnering with specialists who understand the complexity — are the ones whose commerce channels actually deliver the ROI they were promised.

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Most B2B eCommerce projects launch. Few scale. The difference is strategy—defined before the platform is chosen and executed long after go-live.

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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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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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Choosing the wrong platform costs millions and years. This guide walks through the evaluation criteria that actually matter for enterprise B2B organizations.

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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 starting an e-commerce business or adding e-commerce into your rolodex of purchasing options for your customers, you need to ensure you are fulfilling certain strategic, creative and technology needs in order to ensure short and long term success. Furthermore, in order to retain e-commerce business, you need to offer a superior web, mobile, and conversational interface or your customers will look to a supplier or merchant that does. So where do you start to research, launch and grow a profitable e-commerce business? By following a roadmap that is focused on a holistic approach to commerce strategy and solutions- building a team with strategy, design, technology, operations, merchandising, and data skills to mix into each individual clients particular needs at a particular point in time, you will be setting your e-commerce business up for future-readiness and success.

Taking on a customer-centric strategy is not just about success now, but in the future. Being able to show customers that you are not only here to sell them something, but to help them out in other ways is key to seeing continual growth. Many B2C companies are focused on this path, which includes personalized communication with every customer. The B2B market should also watch this topic closely, because it will likely be a huge disruptor of their operating models in the near term. Luckily, personalization strategies can be easier to implement than you think by understanding common roadblocks and starting with the data that you already have.

These three terms- digitization, digitalization and digital transformation have created a lot of confusion over the past decade (Probably longer. I’ve lost count.). As their meanings have slightly evolved over time, people are consistently using them interchangeably and oftentimes incorrectly. Obviously, it makes things clearer when you present the word correctly and are able to articulate the words meaning so everyone is on the same page, this is especially important when you are relating it back to your business. So what do all these terms mean and why are they important when it comes to discussing your overall business strategy and path to finding long term success?

The journey to build and grow your eCommerce business requires Continuous Innovation.  Your online storefront supported by eCommerce operations lays the foundation for innovation, and your journey ahead requires a diligent and practiced commitment to disciplined innovation. Finding an eCommerce platform to support your evolving needs can be easier said than done, as no one has a glass ball to look into the future. Ultimately, the biggest challenge in choosing an eCommerce technology platform is assessing current state and taking stock of what’s working well and what needs to be improved in order to advance growth long term and achieve leadership’s vision. eCommerce platforms that will offer future-readiness will ultimately fix gap areas and stand strong in three key pillars.

This blog heading is nothing we haven’t all seen by now. Many of these writings contain opinions and data around how to improve a brands digital maturity and further their reach in the market. However, at Echidna we feel that a lot of these post and articles are lacking one important topic essential to the growth and future-proofing (if such a thing exists) to a digital business. Whether you are focused on the B2B or B2C market, if you are not continually innovating you will be left behind. Left behind can mean many things; perhaps your sales growth slumps, maybe your site performance is lacking, for some it means your workflow process and business operations are antiquated, or perhaps you can’t keep up the changing demands of your ideal buyer because you don’t understand their behaviors.

When we talk digital maturity, the technology pillar is imperative. All of the digital capabilities we have discussed in the various pillars rely on the solid foundation of your technology, which is why it has been saved as the final pillar to discuss in our Digital Journey Maturity Model blog series.

Customers are more savvy than ever, with the ability to find what they perceive they want, when they want it. If your marketing pillar can focus on aligning itself with your organizations other pillars to gain important customer insights and move towards a strategy that treats customers as profiles not simply personas, to create a truly individualized experience, you will suddenly be able to perceive what these customers want before they do. And that is where your edge on the competition and ticket to customer loyalty is.

One size does not fit all for customers digital experiences anymore, no matter your industry or market. How you present and promote your merchandise in digital markets is going to move your business to the next level and set a solid foundation for being ready for what the future holds. Being able to succeed in digital merchandising requires a mix of both artistic expression and scientific analysis, along with complete alignment of your other company pillars. After all, without the right strategy, user experience, operations, technology, and marketing in place you will fail to convert the browser into a buyer or up-sell your current customer any day. By approaching digital merchandising with this in mind and taking a holistic view at your data, you will be able to resonate with your unique visitor profiles and offer a superior digital merchandising experience.

The user experience you create is the greatest competitive differentiator in the digital age for your customers. With 61% of US online adults stating they are unlikely to return to a website that does not provide a satisfactory experience¹ and the growing statistics in both B2B and B2C about the amount of people using digital commerce and preferring screens to calling or in-person conversation, the user experience can not simply be putting features, tools, and capabilities in a neatly packaged site anymore. In both B2B and B2C commerce, user experience is about focusing on the individual person to ensure they stay your customer.

It comes as no surprise that how your behind-the-scenes operations run will ultimately shape customer perception more than any other aspect of your business. Beyond that, it is also instrumental in increasing efficiencies and reducing costs throughout the buying cycle. Being able to have a clear view of where all your operations currently stand in order to meet future goals of improving order management, fulfillment, and customer care is the objective for the operations pillar in Echidna’s Digital Journey Maturity Model.

Digital growth is often driven by leadership’s vision and strategic directives. Many of our clients come to us because they have a vision, but it needs definition and an execution plan. This is where the business pillar that lies within Echidna’s Digital Journey Maturity Model emerges. The business pillar of your company is directing and driving your company’s innovation. Digital maturity fuels that drive with tactical efficiency and efficacy.

These next few months have become peak season for many eCommerce sites. Whether B2B, B2C, or DTC, taking a proactive approach to prepare for peak season creates an excellent opportunity to jump-start brand growth and sets a solid foundation moving forward.

Optimizing the online customer experience is an ongoing challenge for both B2B and B2C companies. As digital adoption has accelerated, the result in people's expectations continues to grow. By embracing a customer-first approach, merchants will not only be able to work towards creating the modern commerce experience their customers desire but gain a truly competitive edge.

Evolving technology has now made building an online marketplace within reach for many companies. With a variety of strong marketplace solutions available, many are no longer joining them but working towards creating their own.

How many clicks does it take a new visitor to find what they need on your website? The #1 annoying feature of a website is improper or confusing navigation that leaves your user lost and wondering what to do next in order to find what they need.

Google has officially switched to mobile-first indexing for all websites. This means Google is first looking at your mobile site and using that to based on how it will rank your desktop site according to the information given.

Poor eCommerce user experience continues to be a top main reason businesses are failing to hit their digital growth goals. From drops in conversions, increasing bounce rates or cart abandonment, and overall low sales, a poor UX can do major damage. Echidna's user experience (UX) team has provided actionable insights and recommendations to remedy these issues and more for our clients. By leveraging data and applying best practice user experience and usability principles, you can start to identify key pain points and areas of opportunity.

You can feel the opportunity to differentiate your brand's online presence. But how? Visitors are finding your site and even going through the steps to put items in their cart. But they suddenly stop short at clicking purchase. Optimizing your conversion, increasing revenue, and improving engagement is literally clicks away from your reach. So what's stopping them- your user flows, too many usability errors, something else?

The coronavirus pandemic has created an unprecedented challenge for eCommerce merchants. The long-term impact of COVID-19 will have on digital commerce is unknown, but for some, it means near-term planning to keep afloat while others are thinking about once the crisis has passed and what the new normal will look like. We recognize the difficulties merchants are facing to pivot their business strategies with little or no staffing and stay-at-home orders nationwide. So how do you navigate what’s next when the news is changing at a rapid pace?

If your website or mobile app is continually underperforming, it means it is time for a UX Site Review. With organizations taking on a customer-centric approach, this is one of the most important tools you can have to make sure you are putting your customer's needs first.

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.

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.

Last week we starting discussing how taking on a customer centric approach should include reviewing your user experience and what that means for your e-commerce growth going into the 2020 and beyond. When a customer centric approach is taken in user experience, you will be able to see an improvement in understanding your user behaviors, increased opportunities to innovate because of user interactions and a return on your user experience investment. By following user centric design, you can better create user personas, site maps and customer journeys to start to craft your ideal user experience. Now we understand that precisely mapping out key user tasks, understanding the core processes and watching actual user behavior fulfills one piece to the user experience puzzle, but what’s next? This week, we are discussing how wireframes, prototypes and design concepts play and important part in the user experience.

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.

Echidna will be at Boomi World 2026 in Chicago. As a Boomi partner with 16+ years of integration experience, we work with B2B commerce organizations to design and implement the integrations that keep operations moving — from ERP and EDI to CRM, PIM, OMS, and modern commerce platforms.

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March 2025: Your Monthly Digest of Top Digital Commerce Insights

February 2025: Your Monthly Digest of Top Digital Commerce Insights

January 2025: Your Monthly Digest of Top Digital Commerce Insights

The NRF 2025 Big Show is packed with innovation, inspiration, and strategies to shape the future of retail. With so many sessions to choose from, it can be tough to decide where to focus your attention. That’s why we’ve rounded up three of the most exciting, game-changing sessions you simply can’t miss. These discussions bring together retail leaders, digital visionaries, and industry disruptors who are reshaping the way we do business.

December 2024: Your Monthly Digest of Top Digital Commerce Insights

November 2024: Your Monthly Digest of Top Digital Commerce Insights

October 2024: Your Monthly Digest of Top Digital Commerce Insights

September 2024: Your Monthly Digest of Top Digital Commerce Insights

August 2024: Your Monthly Digest of Top Digital Commerce Insights

July 2024: Your Monthly Digest of Top Digital Commerce Insights

The automotive industry is undergoing a major shift, driven by rapid advancements in digital technology. This transformation is reshaping how vehicles are manufactured, marketed, sold, and serviced. From AI-driven manufacturing processes to sophisticated online sales platforms, automotive eCommerce is becoming the backbone of modern automotive operations. This shift is not just a trend but a necessity for survival and growth in an increasingly competitive market.