Strategic frameworks and practitioner insights for B2B commerce leaders. From executive strategy to platform execution — what actually works when you're in the middle of a transformation.
Categories
Leading — Executive strategy, organizational alignment
Growing — Scaling digital revenue, marketplace expansion
Funding — Building the business case, ROI frameworks
Built for B2B Practitioners
The Wholesale Playbook is a collection of strategic frameworks and practical insights developed from 18+ years of leading B2B digital transformation projects across manufacturing, distribution, and wholesale industries.
You probably have more B2B demand than you think. The accounts emailing for a “bulk price.” The distributor who wants Net 30 instead of a card. The retailer asking for a standing reorder. Most DTC teams handle that over email and manual invoices and never call it a channel. It’s a channel. It’s just not turned on. And what’s behind it isn’t small. Global B2B eCommerce is around $36 trillion in 2026, growing close to 14.5% a year, several times larger than B2C. Roughly 80% of B2B buying now starts digitally. Your wholesale buyers research and reorder without a sales call. They want a login, their own pricing, and a reorder button. Here’s what changed. The capability stopped being exotic. Your platform should let you run wholesale and direct-to-consumer from one admin. Company accounts with multiple buyers and locations. Per-company pricing and catalogs. Quantity rules, payment terms, tax exemptions. A…
Average time for a Schneider Electric employee to get a satisfactory output from their AI tools: 117 minutes. Average prompts to get there: 43. That number didn’t come from a pessimist. It came from the team running one of the most successful enterprise AI deployments in B2B. I just got back from B2B Online Chicago. Four sessions stood out, and together they tell a coherent story about where B2B commerce actually is in May 2026. The data: 40% of B2B revenue is now digital Shopify opened with fresh survey data, manufacturers and distributors between $500M and $10B in revenue, fielded April 2026. 40% of revenue now flows through digital channels. Expected to grow 15% per year through 2030. 90% of buyers said they’d switch suppliers for a better experience. 70% are ready to place orders over $50K online. Here’s the part that surprised me: 31% are still running custom or…
Every existing tool I tested was either a $400/month enterprise SEO platform with GEO features bolted on, or a free generic checker that scored your schema and called it a day. Useful work in both cases — but neither showed me what I actually needed in the first ten minutes of a client meeting: what AI says about you right now, and what to do about it. So I built one. Four buyer-realistic prompts, three engines, transcripts verbatim. No score-only dashboard. No subscription. Ninety seconds. It’s not a competitor to the enterprise platforms — it’s a different shape of tool, built for the specific job of showing a B2B operator what their buyers see when they ask AI for a recommendation. Run it here: https://humanafterall.ca/geo-audit/ To show what it actually surfaces, here’s what came back when I ran it against a leading North American electrical distributor — a billion-dollar operator,…
Most B2B distributors I talk to are making three expensive mistakes with Generative Engine Optimization right now. And the agencies pitching them “GEO audits” are making it worse. When I started advising B2B companies on GEO last year, I assumed the biggest challenge would be technical. It’s not. The biggest challenge is that everyone — vendors, agencies, internal teams — is thinking about GEO with an SEO brain. Three misconceptions keep burning budget across the industry. Here’s what they actually mean if you’re leading digital at a B2B distributor. Misconception #1: “AI search is just a fad. People will come back to Google.” They won’t. Not because ChatGPT is shiny and new. Because the traditional web experience became unbearable. Think about what your B2B buyers deal with when they search Google today. Cookie consent banners. Pop-ups. Gated PDFs that require a form fill just to read a spec sheet. Five…
Not because your products are worse. Because your platform can’t talk to AI agents. This week two things happened on the same day that every B2B distributor needs to understand. And almost nobody is connecting the dots for you. What happened on March 24 OpenAI confirmed it’s killing Instant Checkout — the feature that was supposed to let people buy directly inside ChatGPT. It flopped hard. Out of millions of Shopify merchants, roughly 30 actually went live with it. Users researched products but didn’t buy. OpenAI hadn’t even built sales tax collection. Their blog post said the feature “did not offer the level of flexibility” they wanted. Same day, Shopify announced a smarter approach. Instead of trying to own the checkout inside a chatbot, Shopify built Agentic Storefronts — a system that makes your products discoverable inside AI conversations and sends buyers to YOUR store to complete the purchase. Your…
I just got back from Chicago. Two days at Master B2B MindShare, hosting two roundtables on aligning sales teams with eCommerce. The room was split almost perfectly in half. Companies that had cracked the adoption problem. And companies still fighting it every day. One question separated them more than anything else: had they redefined what a sales rep is actually supposed to do in 2026? Most hadn’t. Why the resistance never comes from where you expect Every eCommerce implementation I’ve been part of, I’d hear the same warning before launch. “Our customers are old school. They won’t adopt a platform. They’ll never stop calling.” It was never true. Not once. The resistance always came from the sales team. And I get it. When you roll out a self-serve platform, the message reps hear — even if you never say it — is: we’re building something to replace you. Your accounts…
A16z just put $1.1B behind an AI startup built for industrial distributors. That sentence alone would have been unthinkable two years ago. Industrial distribution was the last sector anyone in Silicon Valley wanted to touch. Too messy. Too analog. Too many phone calls and faxes. That just changed. And every B2B distributor between $20M and $500M needs to pay attention. What happened Emanate, a San Francisco startup with fewer than 10 people, emerged from stealth with backing from Andreessen Horowitz’s American Dynamism fund, Peter Thiel, and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. Their pitch: autonomous AI agents that handle quoting, prospecting, inbound demand capture, and pricing decisions 24/7 for industrial materials companies. Not chatbots. Not dashboards. Autonomous agents that process phone calls, email RFQs, and web forms the moment they arrive. Check inventory. Pull specs. Generate quotes. All without a human touching it. They’re…
I didn’t expect the future of eCommerce operations to come from open-source. But here we are. Meet OpenClaw OpenClaw is an open-source AI agent that runs 24/7 on your computer. You message it on WhatsApp, Slack, or Telegram like a coworker — and it actually does things. Browses websites, writes code, manages files, sends emails, runs scripts. All on its own. Think of it as an employee who never sleeps, never takes breaks, and follows instructions literally. For better and worse. It hit 100K GitHub stars in two months. CNBC, Wired, and Forbes covered it. And it was built by a solo developer in Austria. Not Salesforce. Not Adobe. Not SAP. That part I didn’t expect. Testing Pinchy I installed it a week ago. Named it Pinchy. (If you know, you know.) And I had to test Pinchy on something real. So I pointed it at a test website and…
$15 trillion in US B2B sales. Sounds massive. But here’s what the headlines don’t tell you. The Real Breakdown 75% of digital B2B is EDI. Computer-to-computer. Automated POs between systems set up years ago. Actual B2B ecommerce — buyers on a website, browsing, ordering — is about $2 trillion. Still big. But a very different story. Most of that $15 trillion flows through channels that were locked in decades ago. EDI connections between large trading partners. Automated replenishment. Systems talking to systems. The “growth” everyone talks about? It’s happening in a much smaller slice of the market. Two Different Games Here’s what this means if you’re running a distribution business: EDI is for your whales. Big accounts. Recurring orders. Dedicated sales rep. These relationships are already automated. The POs flow. The invoices match. The system works. EDI processes transactions. It doesn’t sell. No upsell. No cross-sell. No “customers…
The most common objection I hear from CFOs about B2B eCommerce investment: “You’re just moving orders from the phone to the website. That’s not growth. That’s a channel shift.” I used to struggle to answer this. Then I saw the data. A note: I can’t name the companies below. But every number is real, shared directly by the people who ran these businesses. The data that proved it wrong. At a $2B+ food distributor, the eCommerce leader ran the full analysis. Segmented every customer. Controlled for region, category, buying habits. The result: all of the company’s profits came from eCommerce customers. Not most. All. If this was just channel shift—phone orders moving online—the profitability would be the same. It wasn’t. Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. The pattern repeats everywhere. A $25B distributor analyzed over 100,000 accounts. Customers who adopted their B2B…
80% of B2B sales interactions now happen digitally. Not “expected to”—happening right now. And 73% of buyers straight-up prefer buying online over traditional methods. But here’s the stat that should keep you up at night: 75% of B2B buyers say they’d switch suppliers for a better online experience. Not better pricing. Not better products. A better experience . The Buyers Have Changed. Have You? The person approving your purchase orders in 2025 isn’t the same person who did it in 2015. Millennials now make up 73% of all B2B buyers . And 44% of them are the final decision-makers—the ones signing off on six and seven-figure deals. These buyers grew up with Amazon, Netflix, and Uber. They’ve never known a world where you had to call someone to check if something was in stock. They don’t understand why your B2B portal requires a phone call to get “real” pricing. And…
Here’s what I keep seeing when I walk into B2B distributors: the AI conversation starts with excitement and ends with the same problem. “Wait, why do we have three different descriptions for the same SKU?” That’s the real blocker. Not technology. Data. Akeneo just dropped their 2026 report on product data in the age of AI commerce. The numbers confirm what I’ve been seeing for years: 95% of GenAI pilot programs fail, largely due to poor or fragmented data foundations. Let me break down what this means for $5M-$1B distributors—and what I’d actually do about it. The Hidden Tax You’re Already Paying Here’s what bad product data actually costs: Your employees waste up to 12 hours a week hunting down information across systems. That’s not a typo. Twelve hours. Per person. Per week. The average business runs nearly 300 software applications. Large enterprises? Over 600. Your product data doesn’t live…
Ahrefs invented a fake luxury paperweight company called Xarumei last month. They built the website in an hour. AI-generated product photos. Absurd prices—$8,251 for a paperweight. A brand name that returned zero Google results. Then they did something interesting. They seeded three conflicting stories about Xarumei across the web. A glossy blog post claiming 23 “master artisans” in Nova City, California. A Reddit AMA from a fake insider describing a Seattle workshop with 11 employees. A Medium “investigation” that debunked the obvious lies—then slipped in new ones about a Portland warehouse and a founder named Jennifer Lawson. Three sources. Three different stories. All fabricated. Then they asked eight AI platforms what they knew about Xarumei. The results should concern anyone selling products online. The Experiment Results Gemini and Perplexity repeated the misinformation in 37-39% of their answers. The official Xarumei website had…
With Amazon Business pushing toward tens of billions in B2B GMV, manufacturers and distributors now face a harder question: not if they should be on Amazon, but how . At B2B Online in Atlanta, we took this head-on with MasterB2B: a live debate with Andy Hoar Brian Beck Shalin Shah , Samantha Schwartz from UPS - Midland Industries Adrienne Hartman from Workplace Safety - J. J. Keller and myself on stage. The brief was simple: 1P vs 3P — which approach is right for B2B? The answer is not binary. It is a trade-off across margin, control, data, and operational maturity. 1. Margins and Profitability: 1P “Safety” vs 3P “Upside” The problem Most B2B leadership teams still compare 1P vs 3P on list price and assume: 1P = lower margin, lower risk 3P = higher margin, higher risk That’s too shallow. Once you break down the full P&L, the picture…
MIT dropped a stat last year that got everyone talking: 95% of generative AI pilots are failing. While everyone debated the number, a new survey of 200+ data and AI leaders uncovered something more useful: the pattern behind why most AI projects stall. Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Turns out, it’s not the models. It’s the plumbing. What you need to know: 71% of AI teams spend over 25% of their time just connecting data Only 6% of enterprises are satisfied with their current data infrastructure for AI 60% of companies at the highest AI maturity also have the most mature data infrastructure Investment priorities have flipped: 60% prioritize data governance vs. 9% prioritizing AI models The Real Bottleneck You pick a use case. Customer service automation sounds straightforward. Then you realize your customer data lives in five systems. Your CRM…