Faster time to market, lower risk, quicker ROI: How commercetools B2B accelerators expedite your eCommerce implementation

The B2B sector is at a turning point in eCommerce. eMarketer reports that B2B eCommerce sales grew 10.5% YoY in 2024, reaching $2.297 trillion USD. Manufacturers are leading the charge, with 66% investing in B2B portals or enhancing online experiences. By the end of 2028, 75% of B2B organizations will complete their highest revenue deals via digital channels, underscoring the urgency for businesses to build strong eCommerce capabilities.

However, many manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors embarking on digital commerce for the first time — or transitioning from outdated legacy systems to a modern commerce infrastructure — encounter significant obstacles. Common challenges include a lack of experience navigating B2B digital transformation, the inherent complexity of legacy systems and the need to integrate diverse, often fragmented, technologies. These issues are further exacerbated by mounting market pressures, including evolving customer expectations and intense competition.

In this context, the traditional approach to building and deploying eCommerce solutions can fall short of the speed and efficiency required. This is where B2B-specific accelerators play a vital role. Designed to streamline development, minimize risk and reduce time to market — all the while speeding up ROI — accelerators provide a structured path for B2B organizations to overcome these barriers and successfully launch their digital commerce initiatives.

Serving as companions throughout every stage of your eCommerce project, accelerators help you assess requirements and design a solution tailored to your business. In addition, they assist in developing and deploying your infrastructure, features and integrations, implementing automated testing and maintenance processes, and more. 

Accelerators are offered by system integrators (SIs), which are specialized companies that ensure systems or components function cohesively as a unified system. At commercetools, we collaborate with a diverse ecosystem of system integrators and implementation partners across regions and business models. While many of our implementation partners have B2B expertise, a few of our SI partners have taken additional steps to build accelerators leveraging commercetools B2B Commerce.  

This article highlights the value of B2B-specific accelerators and the SI partners that currently offer such an offering. 

More than the technical infrastructure delivery of your project, accelerators provide the best practices and methodologies to help your business succeed now and in the long-term. While each accelerator is unique and might cater to specific regions or B2B segments, commercetools B2B accelerators usually provide four elements:

Let’s explore each in more detail: 

Infrastructure setup 

The underlying infrastructure is based on cloud-native SaaS and serverless architecture, providing the foundation for best-in-class solutions, automation and deployment workflows, an end-to-end testing (E2E) suite and more. Middleware and API orchestration are often prebuilt and seamlessly integrated as well. 

All the B2B accelerators in our marketplace are fully compliant with MACH® principles, providing prebuilt deployments that can be seamlessly leveraged and scaled on your cloud provider of choice. 

B2B commerce backend: Pre-configured AND extensible components 

These B2B accelerators provide pre-configured core commerce components ready to go, built on top of commercetools B2B Commerce. This means all advanced B2B features and processes utilize commercetools’ comprehensive library of extensible APIs, including Business Units, Quotes, Product Catalogs and more. 

Utilizing commercetools’ APIs enables your business to attain a faster time to market as you can realize a wealth of use cases out of the box, from generating quotes with personalized pricing at scale to customizable role-based permissions and approval flows. At the same time, you have the freedom and flexibility to customize functions as your requirements and customer needs evolve, allowing your business to adapt without constraints. 

Frontend development: Prebuilt extensions for your digital storefront

B2B accelerators help you deliver stunning digital storefronts in tandem with the commerce engine that powers them behind the scenes. Similar to the backend, accelerators provide prebuilt components developed using common coding frameworks (such as React, Next, and TypeScript) within a modular architecture. Moreover, a few accelerators offer pre-built extensions for frontend-as-a-service (FEaaS) solutions, such as commercetools Frontend, which also provides B2B-specific templates and components, allowing frontends to be built faster.  

The same principles used in a composable backend are applied to the frontend: You can take advantage of pre-configured building blocks that streamline and accelerate development while having complete freedom to create customized digital storefronts according to your business requirements and buyer needs. It means you can spend less time building the basics and focusing on creating truly differentiating features for your buyer experience. 

System integration 

Another advantage of using accelerators is the availability of out-of-the-box integrations to best-of-breed components, such as search, CMS and payments. In a composable environment, these integrations adhere to MACH standards, making them plug-and-play. As a result, they can be seamlessly added, replaced or dropped according to your business needs. 

In addition to standard commerce components, accelerators will collaborate with your business to integrate your commerce components with critical systems of record like the ERP, CRM, OMS, etc., ensuring smooth data flows throughout the entire online purchasing experience. 

Last but not least: Best practices and project assets 

Accelerators offer pre-defined yet customizable workflows, business processes and wireframes, automated API testing and best practices across multiple implementation projects. That means your business can tap into know-how from experts who have contributed to tens, if not hundreds, of B2B eCommerce solutions. This makes the strategy, implementation and maintenance of your digital footprint much easier and faster to create, adapt and evolve.

#1 — Speed up time to market

Accelerate your commerce journey with unparalleled speed by leveraging a ready-to-go set of features, functions and infrastructure setup that can be swiftly deployed and customized, allowing you to kickstart development within days. Modular business capabilities, powered by our accelerators, enable you to customize and recompose effortlessly, ensuring that changes are easily incorporated.

#2 — Get returns on your investment earlier

By shortening the discovery and preparation phase to a few weeks based on the best practices, recommendations and prebuilt functionalities provided by accelerators, you can launch POCs (proofs of concept) and MVPs (minimum viable products) at a faster pace. This enables you to capture new opportunities, reduce time-to-value and generate ROI quicker. 

#3 — Reduce risks

Accelerators empower B2B businesses to navigate the complexities of eCommerce development with greater efficiency. The use of a well-defined process framework, coupled with pre-established requirements and running code, ensures a swift development phase, minimizing the likelihood of delays and unforeseen challenges and, ultimately, contributing to risk reduction.

Additionally, accelerators facilitate rapid and continuous delivery by implementing test automation frameworks, enabling companies to identify and address issues early in the development cycle. The modular nature of accelerators enables customization and recomposition, ensuring adaptability to specific B2B needs while mitigating the risks associated with software changes. 

#4 — Boost knowledge and empower your team 

With mature software delivery processes that encompass aspects of quality, security and compliance, accelerators set the stage for teams to embark on projects with confidence from day one. That way, teams can focus on innovation rather than grappling with foundational elements. 

Accelerators also come with ready-to-use documentation, allowing your team to leverage that knowledge and further enrich their internal expertise. In essence, accelerators not only expedite project timelines but also cultivate a knowledgeable and empowered workforce within B2B companies.

#5 — Grow your digital maturity 

Accelerators are built on the expertise of scores of implementations and best practices that help your business not only speed up deployments but also evolve its digital maturity across all crucial aspects: Digital tools, team culture, data and insights, as well as customer experience. 

This ensures that companies leveraging accelerators can enhance their digital maturity by adhering to industry best practices from the get-go. In other words, accelerators serve as catalysts for digital transformation, enabling B2B companies to elevate their digital maturity and stay at the forefront of the ever-evolving eCommerce landscape.

commercetools Foundry for B2B Manufacturing provides best-practice architecture, sample data, store launchpads, blueprints and documentation — all designed to help customers build faster, higher-quality solutions. It also includes commercetools Expert Services, ensuring guidance and alignment with commercetools’ standards.

Accelerators, created by SIs, GSIs or agencies, can build upon this foundation by combining commercetools technology with third-party integrations and industry-specific capabilities. These solutions leverage commercetools’ assets and best practices to accelerate time-to-launch while tailoring the experience for specific business needs or verticals.

In short, commercetools Foundry lays the groundwork; partner accelerators extend it — together driving faster, best-in-class commerce implementations.

B2B eCommerce doesn’t have to be slow or risky. With commercetools, your business can implement quickly, scale confidently and stay ahead of the competition. 

Download the eBook Expediting Your eCommerce Implementation with B2B Accelerators to find more details, as well as a directory of B2B-specific accelerator partners leveraging commercetools technology.

1. What is a B2B eCommerce accelerator?

A B2B eCommerce accelerator is a prebuilt set of features, architectures, templates and integrations designed to speed up eCommerce implementations, reduce risk and deliver faster ROI for manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors.

2. How do commercetools B2B accelerators reduce time to market?

They provide ready-to-use infrastructure, pre-configured B2B features, prebuilt frontend components and standardized integrations, enabling teams to start development within days instead of months.

3. What’s the difference between commercetools Foundry and partner accelerators?

Foundry offers the foundational architecture, sample data and best practices from commercetools, while partner accelerators build on that foundation with third-party integrations and industry-specific enhancements.

4. Who should use a B2B accelerator?

Manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors launching digital commerce for the first time — or modernizing legacy platforms — benefit most due to faster delivery, reduced risk and proven implementation patterns.

5. What types of features come out-of-the-box with commercetools B2B accelerators?

Typical features include B2B account structures, quoting, catalogs, pricing, approval workflows, prebuilt storefront components and integrations with ERPs, CRMs, OMSs and other core systems.