The New B2B Advantage: A Q&A with Verndale’s Commerce Practice Lead

Operability as the new B2B advantage

The same flexibility that makes ecommerce so appealing, also allows the space to move alarmingly fast. What worked one year ago may not work today, nor will today’s approach work tomorrow.

In recent years, much of the B2B commerce discussion has been around platforms and business models. Are you utilizing omnichannel? Is your B2B experience offering self-service? What’s your stack look like?

But, what if this isn’t the conversation we should be having anymore? What if none of these questions are the right ones to ask?

Verndale, an award-winning ecommerce and digital experience agency, has worked with countless businesses in this space. Given they’ve helped businesses like Source Atlantic find success in the complex B2B ecommerce space, who better to speak to about all of this than Thomas John, the Commerce Practice Lead at Verndale?

To get a better idea of the space, we had a chat about Commerce Live, B2B Online, and his thoughts on BigCommerce. (Because of course.)

For the past few years the conversation has centered around architecture: monolith, headless, composable, and so on. Is this the right conversation today?

That conversation is winding down. The teams we're working with this year have already made those calls. What's slowing them down isn't the platform anymore, but their ability to operate it. That's the shift BigCommerce came to address at Commerce Live, and one the recent B2B Online trade show surfaced from the buyer side. 

The product announcements, the AI roadmap, and the displayed buyer behavior data all point in the same direction. The constraint has moved from architecture to operability, and BigCommerce is investing where the friction lives.

Unpacking that further, let’s focus on agentic commerce. What about BigCommerce’s framing of AI stood out to you at Commerce Live?

BigCommerce got the framing right by presenting its AI stack as a system. MCP lets AI tools build directly on the platform. Companion supports operators inside the control panel. Storefront agents support buyers. UCP and channel distribution extend the catalog into AI-driven discovery surfaces. 

Together, these layers shrink the distance between discovery and transaction. They also expose the underlying foundation in ways it wasn't exposed before. Fragmented catalogs, inconsistent pricing, and slow systems were once internal problems. Once agents are in the loop, customers can see inconsistencies in catalogs and pricing.

Did that align with what you heard at B2B Online as well?

It did. As mentioned by the B2B Online panel about future-proofing the B2B playbook, 26% of B2B search now happens through LLMs. In other words, buyers are interacting on channels suppliers don't control. 

BigCommerce's stack is built for that reality. The agent layer makes the existing data quality requirements visible to the market. That changes the stakes of how data is presented to prospects at the moment of decision, and BigCommerce is one of the few platforms with a coherent answer to it.

And what about Commerce Live? Did you see any similar signals there?

The biggest signal at Commerce Live was how BigCommerce is positioning Feedonomics. The storefront isn't the center of the buying journey anymore, and BigCommerce knows it. 

A PacSun example made the strategy concrete: Feedonomics handles catalog distribution across marketplaces, retail media, and AI surfaces, while BigCommerce powers checkout. This means the storefront becomes one channel among many.

How do you see that approach impacting the way B2B teams handle product data?

It raises the bar. Generic descriptions written for SEO get ignored by buyers and AI systems alike. Visibility now depends on how clearly product data explains what makes a business different, and how cleanly that data flows across surfaces. 

BigCommerce's investment in Feedonomics reads more strategically in this light. It positions the platform as infrastructure for discoverability, not just a storefront engine. Feed strategy is becoming table stakes for participation in the buying journey, and BigCommerce is deliberately building toward that future.

You mentioned operability as the real constraint now. Where’s the friction, if it's not architecture?

Architecture used to be the bottleneck. It isn't anymore, and BigCommerce's product investments this year suggest they see it. Across the engagements we're running, the friction isn't with technology choices — those have already been made. 

The friction we’re seeing is with complex internal stakeholder structures, slow buying, and slower decision cycles. It’s disconnected workflows between marketing, merchandising, sales, and IT, and the persistent challenge of getting aligned enough to ship change. In that environment, more architectural flexibility doesn't translate into more speed. Often, it just adds more to manage.

How do you see this all connecting to BigCommerce's investments in Makeswift and Catalyst?

This is where those investments look well-timed. Both aim to enable platform teams to operate without long development cycles or cross-team dependencies. That's a direct response to where B2B teams get stuck. B2B Online echoed the same theme. Speed isn't a tooling problem anymore. It's a question of how quickly teams can align, execute, and improve.

Would I be wrong in saying this sounds like a rude awakening for a lot of the market?

Not at all. It absolutely is. Many teams that replatformed in the last two years are sitting on more flexibility than they can use. The next phase is the operating model that turns flexibility into pace. The commerce platform providers that read this correctly will be the ones whose customers are actually shipping, and BigCommerce is one of them.

Anytime pace or speed comes up in 2026, AI can’t help entering the conversation. Where do you see that fitting into B2B?

The Purchase Order Agent from BigCommerce is a great preview of where AI value lands first in B2B. 

For example, today, POs in most B2B environments are still received, reviewed, and processed manually. The work is repetitive, time-consuming, and critical to keeping the rest of the order flow moving. AI removes manual steps from an existing workflow, without altering the pattern.

Why does that pattern matter more than some of the flashier agentic use cases out there?

Because of customer expectations. Most B2B buyers aren't asking for new ways to interact with suppliers. They're trying to complete known tasks more efficiently. The fastest ROI from AI in B2B comes from automating existing tasks, not inventing new ones. 

We see this consistently in client conversations. The use cases that get funded are the ones that compress time on workflows everyone already understands. BigCommerce, starting with the PO Agent, signals that the platform is building agentic capability where customers will feel it first, not where the demo looks best.

Why reinvent the wheel, right? Going back to operability as the new constraint, how should B2B teams turn that into an advantage?

What BigCommerce is building tracks where the real work sits: data, integration, and execution. The platform is investing in the layer where B2B teams increasingly feel friction. That translates to an operating model question. It's the question most B2B teams haven't fully started on, even when their ecommerce platform is ready for it.

What about the handful of teams knocking it out of the park and moving fastest?

The teams moving the fastest right now are doing three things: 

1. Identifying specifically where data creates friction across systems, teams, and channels.

2. Mapping where integration gaps are blocking decisions or showing up in the buyer experience. 

3. Naming the workflows that slow teams down, with the goal of fixing the workflow rather than adding tools to it. 

This is the diagnostic work that turns a flexible platform, including a well-architected BigCommerce environment, into a fast operation. It's also the work that gets skipped most often, because it's harder than running another vendor evaluation.

How has this overarching shift shown up in your own engagement model?

We saw the same signals BigCommerce is responding to, and we've rebuilt our engagement model around them. 

Whereas engagements used to start with ecommerce platform conversations, they're now starting with diagnostic ones: identifying where data is creating friction, where integration gaps are blocking decisions, and where workflows are slowing teams down. 

That diagnostic work is what makes the platform investment pay off.

And on the delivery side?

Our delivery model has shifted too. AI runs through every phase of our engagements, from discovery through delivery, increasingly orienting our architecture work toward AI agent-readiness. This translates into catalogs structured for AI discovery, integrations built to support automated workflows, and operating models that let platform teams actually use the flexibility BigCommerce is putting in their hands.

What outcomes are you seeing as a result?

The outcomes align with the overall shift. Clients are achieving operational AI value faster, enabling them to see ROI. Marketing, merchandising, and IT are running tighter loops. And BigCommerce environments are reaching a state where customers can make changes without queuing everything behind an engineering cycle. 

BigCommerce is building the platform that addresses this shift, and we've rebuilt our practice around helping clients operate it.

The final word

If one thing is clear from speaking with Thomas, it’s that platform truly isn’t the main topic of conversation anymore. Operability is the secret ingredient that can help you deliver the best B2B customer experience, do more with the team you have, and stay competitive.

Take Andover Fabrics, for example. A legacy brand with a history that spans more than 100 years, they’re no strangers to business. After implementing BigCommerce B2B Edition, it wasn’t just the platform that made a difference — it was the operability it enabled. Gone were archaic B2B workflows, replaced by processes that offered the self-service convenience usually found in B2C.

Whether your B2B organization is 1, 10, or 100 years old, operability and the agility that comes with it are only going to grow in importance. Especially as AI continues to expand in capabilities and customer expectations right along with it.

See for yourself how BigCommerce offers a platform that’s built for operability, built for B2B, and built for your brand.