Scalable B2B commerce is not a technology issue — it’s a matter of organizational design.
Many companies have invested heavily in digital platforms, integrations, and AI initiatives. Yet the expected scaling effect often fails to materialize. The bottleneck is rarely the frontend. It lies in the operating model.
In Part 1 of this blog series, we outlined why digital maturity alone is no longer enough. The current landscape makes one thing clear: intelligent and agent-ready commerce does not emerge from adding more tools, but from building stable organizational and structural foundations.
This blog series addresses exactly that challenge. Across six consecutive articles, the B2B Ecommerce Compass 2026 examines the key action areas that determine competitiveness, efficiency, and AI readiness.
We begin with the operating model. Because before automation, AI, or agentic commerce can create lasting impact, organizations need clear accountability, aligned incentives, and robust governance structures. This is where the real decision is made: whether digital commerce scales strategically – or remains structurally constrained.
Action 1: Build the operating model for scalable B2B commerce
The first and most critical action area is organizational. Many B2B companies have invested heavily in digital platforms, integrations, and AI tools – yet their operating models still reflect a pre-digital reality. As a result, digital commerce remains constrained by unclear ownership and misaligned incentives, leading to fragmented decision-making. To scale digital organizations must move from channel-centric thinking to operating-model thinking. Redefine roles and responsibilities Digital commerce requires clear ownership across the end-to-end value chain. Responsibilities that were once implicit or spread across departments must now be explicitly defined. This typically includes:
Data Owners, accountable for data quality, consistency, and availability
Process Owners, responsible for end-to-end workflows rather than departmental steps
Digital Experience Owners, ensuring coherence across websites, portals, and self-service journeys
Without clear ownership, automation stalls, data quality degrades, and AI initiatives remain isolated experiments.
Align incentives with digital value creation
Outdated incentive models often work against digital adoption. Sales teams may be rewarded for manual effort rather than efficiency, while service teams absorb the cost of broken processes. To enable scale, incentives must be aligned with digital value creation, not channel protection. This means rewarding outcomes such as higher digital order volumes, increased self-service usage, shorter handling times, lower error rates, and consistent customer experiences. When incentives reinforce digital goals, organizational resistance decreases and adoption accelerates.
Establish data governance and shared visibility
As digital commerce becomes more complex, data governance moves from an IT concern to a business-critical discipline. Organizations need shared rules for data ownership, validation, access, and change management. Centralized dashboards and shared data views enable cross-functional teams to work from the same facts in real time – reducing friction between sales, ecommerce, operations, and IT. This transparency is a prerequisite for automation, AI-driven decision-making, and reliable customer experiences.
What this shift looks like in practice at global scale:
Case Study: Beijer Ref — From decentralized commerce to a scalable operating model
Beijer Ref operates a highly decentralized global B2B organization with more than 500 branches across 45 countries and multiple ERP and ecommerce systems. This fragmentation limited the ability to scale digital processes, apply shared standards, and introduce new capabilities consistently across markets.
By consolidating its digital commerce landscape on Shopware 6, Beijer Ref established a centralized operating backbone while preserving local market flexibility. Core processes, plugins, and self-service capabilities are now governed centrally and deployed across regions, enabling faster rollout of new features and shared digital standards. Digital self-service absorbed routine orders and service requests, reducing manual ERP work and freeing local teams to focus on customer expertise and complex cases. Within 36 months, ecommerce grew from 0.1% to 15% of total revenue – not as a channel experiment, but as a result of a fundamentally redesigned operating model.
Key takeaway: Digital scale in global B2B organizations requires centralized governance with local execution – not fragmented platforms.
Prioritize digital KPIs and SLAs
Traditional revenue metrics alone no longer capture digital performance. Organizations must prioritize KPIs and SLAs that reflect operational reality and customer experience, including:
Average Order Time
Digital Order Ratio
Price Consistency Index
Time-to-Resolution
These metrics shift the focus from channel output to end-to-end effectiveness and expose where processes break under scale.
Build new skills across the organization
Digital and AI-driven commerce requires capabilities that go beyond classic ecommerce or IT skills. Organizations must actively build AI literacy to understand where automation creates value and where human oversight remains essential. At the same time, teams need stronger data competency to interpret and act on real-time information, as well as a solid understanding of integrations to reduce dependency on manual workarounds. These skills cannot be isolated within a single function; they must be distributed across sales, operations, product, and digital teams to enable scale.
Harmonize sales and digital channels
Digital commerce will not scale if sales and digital channels compete internally. Websites, portals, and sales-assisted journeys must be treated as one connected system rather than parallel motions. Harmonizing sales and digital requires shared data and pricing logic, consistent customer rules across all touchpoints, and seamless handoffs between self-service and sales-assisted steps. When these elements are aligned, organizations reduce friction, increase trust, and create the foundation for AI- and agent-assisted workflows.
Define clear ownership for data, processes, and digital experiences.
Align incentives to reward digital orders, automation, and self-service adoption.
Establish strong data governance to ensure accuracy, transparency, and AI-readiness.
Introduce end-to-end KPIs that measure real performance beyond channel silos.
Build AI-ready skills across sales, ecommerce, operations, and product teams.
Unify sales and digital workflows to remove friction and improve the buyer experience.
A resilient operating model is the foundation for scaling – but it’s not the answer to the next challenge: increasing industry complexity.
Even with clear responsibilities, aligned incentive structures, and strong governance in place, one central question remains: How can real business logic be translated into digital systems without sacrificing usability, speed, or control?
This is exactly where the next action area begins.
Part 3 of the blog series explores how to scale industry complexity in a controlled way – and why integration is the real bottleneck in B2B commerce.
Part 1/7: B2B E-Commerce Compass 2026: Why digital maturity in B2B commerce is no longer enough
Is your operating model ready for 2026?
Discover the five additional fields of action that are critical to building an intelligent, agent-ready B2B commerce model. Download the B2B E-Commerce Compass 2026 now.
