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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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?

We sat down with Joshua Webster, a UX Lead here at Echidna, to get his thoughts on some of the latest trends related to user experience and commerce. The questions and his answers appear below.

Shoppable images are both immersive and contextual in ways that digital has never seen before. Whether it’s shoes, apparel, and accessories on a model or the latest living room setup, people want to be able to visualize how a product will fit into their own style and environment. Shoppable images are turning that idea into a reality for customers of all kinds. From the company’s perspective, shoppable images present a great opportunity to share the story of your brand – they allow you to naturally tell a story as users are browsing through products in a way that hasn’t been possible through traditional commerce.

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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The digital marketing world is undergoing a seismic shift with the gradual disappearance of third-party cookies. For over three decades, cookies have been the cornerstone of targeted advertising, enabling marketers to track and analyze consumer behavior online. However, with growing privacy concerns and regulatory changes, the era of third-party cookies is coming to an end. This transition poses challenges but also opens up opportunities to embrace a more secure and reliable source of data: first-party data.

In the fast-paced world of digital commerce, a robust and scalable e-commerce platform is crucial. Magento, known for its flexibility and extensive features, stands out as a leader in the arena.

In the ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing, the role of eCommerce PPC (Pay-Per-Click) has become increasingly pivotal. Recent trends suggest that PPC can significantly enhance online visibility, with studies indicating that PPC visitors are 50% more likely to make a purchase than organic visitors. This shift underscores the growing importance of selecting the right eCommerce PPC agency.

When it comes to eCommerce, getting visitors to your site is just the first hurdle. According to a study by the Baymard Institute, the average online shopping cart abandonment rate is nearly 70%. This means that 7 out of 10 visitors who add an item to their cart will leave without completing a purchase.

In today's digital age, a strong social media strategy for eCommerce is essential for success. With billions of users across various platforms, social media offers an unparalleled opportunity to connect with customers and drive sales.

The Ultimate Guide to a Comprehensive eCommerce SEO Audit

In today's digital landscape, businesses place a strong emphasis on two fundamental facets of marketing: getting people to know your brand and making them trust it. These elements play pivotal roles in shaping a company's identity, market positioning, and overall success in a hyper-competitive environment. An SEO audit can be a valuable tool in this context, helping to optimize your online presence for both visibility and credibility.

In the fiercely competitive world of eCommerce, where over 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine, success hinges on visibility and choosing the best Magento development company. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) isn't just a marketing buzzword; it's the strategic key that unlocks higher rankings, drives organic traffic, and builds brand credibility.

In the fast-paced world of B2B digital marketing services, the landscape has witnessed a transformative shift with the advent of social media. No longer just for reaching consumers, data is increasingly showing that buyers are heading to social to research and engage with vendors. In fact, 75% of B2B buyers use social media to support their purchase decision, according to recent data.

Google Universal Analytics (UA) is set to stop collecting data on July 1st, 2023, which means that companies need to start planning for the move to GA4 (Google Analytics 4) now. While UA will still be available for six months after that date, historical data won't be available. This means that it's crucial for companies to start planning for the migration to GA4 now to ensure that they don't lose any valuable data.

Remember just ten years ago when on any given Saturday people filled malls to socialize and shop all day? Shoppers of today have shifted gears in how they like to socialize and shop, and it’s no shock to learn that social media is the preferred outlet. And while the effects of Covid might have jump-started this process, it will have a lasting effect on future consumer shopping habits.

Pay-per-click (PPC) is a moving target and one that can no longer be ignored by merchants. Without having a PPC budget you are leaving growth opportunities and a competitive advantage on the table, something that can’t afford to be done this year. On the flip side, with an effective and optimized PPC strategy, your brand will reap the benefits of improving your larger ongoing strategy which can lead to increased sales, brand recognition, and improved customer loyalty.

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.