With three annual conferences each year, B2B Online has become a critical event for B2B business leaders embracing digital transformation. As the only truly composable commerce platform offering a dedicated B2B solution, it’s also a must-attend for the commercetools team. They returned with a plethora of takeaways to share, mostly focused on the panels Michael Scholz, our Vice President of Product and Customer Marketing, participated in as chairperson of Day 2. Here, we offer a roundup of some of the best highlights and insights.
MACH® is becoming more mainstream
Amber Bartholomeusz, Director of Marketing at the MACH Alliance, opened the “Composable Commerce in B2B: Building Agile and Scalable Solutions @ MACH Speed,” asking the audience how many of them were familiar with MACH and composable commerce. About 50% of the attendees raised their hands. Michael Scholz, Vice President of Product and Customer Marketing at commercetools, commented that when he asked the same question at the B2B Online in May of 2024, only about 3 hands went up. “So, market penetration is going up. I guess our product marketing is working.”
While MACH started out as a very technical concept embraced by IT teams, the composability factor has expanded its value to business teams as well. Michael said the newfound ability to deploy features and functions independently without worrying about redeploying an entire stack has led to the productization of teams. “You now full stack teams include developers as well as business analysts and merchandising managers that work together and focus on one particular thing, like search or promotions. It’s made MACH more than just a tech buzzword these days.”
RFPs are not necessary in the composable world
To find the right composable vendors, Tim Lavinder, Director of Digital at Beacon Building Products, a commercetools’ customer, advised attendees to identify the five to 10 things that are unique about their companies and what they feel might be challenging for vendors to deliver. Then, take these to vendors and ask them how they would address them. His approach is to say, “Tell us what you can do. Tell us how you can solve it,” and then he narrows the choices from there.
Tim said this breaks down the process into bite-size chunks that can be easily evaluated. The goal is to feel confident that the vendor can help you meet both your customers and your business needs. He reminded attendees that one of the key benefits of composability is that it gives you the ability to plug and play, so you can switch vendors at any time. This led to a second piece of advice, “Keep every single vendor accountable to deliver value from day one.”
Composable commerce helps eliminate tech debt
Amber pointed out that many organizations are still running on non-SaaS platforms, which generate huge technical debt. “They're spending 35 to 40% of their IT budgets just on upgrades, maintenance and bug fixes — that's important to note. These are business dollars that are not being reinvested into customer experience, innovation, experimentation and outcomes.”
Until recently, this was exactly the situation at Beacon Building Products. Tim said they discovered that migrating off their monolith platform (ATG) and switching to composable was the best way to fix the problem. “If you're not on a platform that automatically updates, that creates added cost. You don’t want to be spending $50,000 just to get the platform to a modern place. Choosing one that fully updates helps us with our total cost of ownership (TCO).”
Every year I have the same budget that I can spend on my capabilities. The question is where am I putting that money? Is that money going to go into better functionality for customers or keeping our tech updated? Is it going to go into giving us faster timelines or managing an outdated, complicated system? We need to be able to move faster — that’s really critical for us.
DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL, BEACON BUILDING PRODUCTS
Build a commerce experience that supports your customers
Multiple speakers in multiple sessions urged attendees to increase their focus on the customer experience. Jason Thomstatter, Head of Digital Commerce at Mars, said he directs his teams to talk to customers at the beginning of a project. “Find out what’s working and what’s not, and tie it into your requirements.”
The decision really is about the business [migrating to MACH], but the business is all about the customer and making sure the customer has what they want and their needs are met on your site.
DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL, BEACON BUILDING PRODUCTS
Graham Thorsen, Vice President of Digital Product and Technology at Univar Solutions, said that one of the things his team did was live a day in the life as a service rep and as a delivery driver. While these are interactions you might not normally pay much attention to, it identified issues, such as the need for drivers to obtain proof of delivery signatures, enabling them to deliver a technology solution that easily gained buy-in from users.
Think practical when it comes to AI
Jacobi Zakrzewski, Vice President of Tech Strategy and Solutions at Luminos Labs, who spoke on a panel focused on finding the right technology for your digital goals, wrote in a LinkedIn recap of the event, “There’s still too much emphasis on AI as the spearhead of solutions, rather than treating it as an ingredient that enhances them. Think of it as the salt.”
According to Andy Hoar, co-founder of Master B2B, vendors need to present B2B leaders with practical use cases for AI. Both he and Jacobi called out a presentation by Emanuela Delgado, Vice President of Growth and Innovation at Parts Town. She explained how AI is helping her company, “shift from a reactive mindset to a proactive mindset when it comes to customer service,” by allowing them to “gain insights into the reasons for customer service calls.”
The main thing B2B organizations need to remember is that fully leveraging AI requires a lot of data. In fact, the higher the quality of data, the better the results. As Michael Scholz shared, “At commercetools, we have a very pragmatic approach to AI. As a system of record, we can give you all your data and transactions and pump it into your search vendor or wherever else you want. So, we focus on making it as easy as possible to integrate.”
MACH supports tech growth
By freeing up financial and other resources, MACH enables B2B firms to achieve lower TCO and faster time to market, as well as the ability to innovate and experiment. However, it also benefits organizations from a talent retention and acquisition perspective. Amber Bartholomeusz stressed that tech talent coming out of school now wants to work on and experiment with cool tech — that helps a business attract more talent.
She also pointed out that MACH-driven composable platforms are technology-agnostic, “So even the people currently in your organization don’t have to be retrained. They don't have to have special certification, which again costs money and takes funds away from your budget.”
Tim Lavinder agreed, adding, “Our developers are a lot happier. They're learning new code and new technologies and they're learning faster. Now that we've transitioned to more modern technology, it's helped them grow their toolbox of development capabilities, it’s helped them be better developers, and they like that.”
Plus, he said, it puts the company in a better spot when they need to bring in new talent. “It may seem like a minor detail, but pretty important for my team.”
To learn more about how MACH and composable commerce work together to help you tackle immediate challenges, boost your ROI and maintain the agility needed to thrive in a competitive marketplace, download Unlocking value: A Framework for Composable Commerce TCO.
Anita J. Temple is the Corporate Journalist at commercetools. She was a fashion editor at Women’s Wear Daily (WWD) and W Magazine before launching a career as a freelance writer and creative producer. She has written content and worked on a wide range of marketing projects for companies including Dreamworks, Walmart, Coca-Cola, Verizon, and Adidas.