Purpose of the solution
GEAR is Valtech’s B2B commerce accelerator, designed to help manufacturers, distributors and technical wholesalers accelerate composable commerce programmes while reducing implementation risk and time-to-market. It lets organisations launch B2B commerce up to 50% faster on a commercetools-native foundation that supports customer-specific pricing, procurement integrations, quoting, approvals, recurring ordering and equipment-driven commerce.
Built on proven commercetools capabilities and validated through enterprise implementation experience, GEAR is designed for organisations that must support complex customer structures, account-specific pricing, approval processes, complex products such as installed bases, large catalogues and procurement-led buying journeys. As commercetools expands agent-ready capabilities through Commerce MCP, GEAR provides structured product, pricing, customer, quote, cart and order workflows that can form a practical basis for future AI-assisted and agentic commerce experiences.
Composition of the Accelerator
Built on commercetools, GEAR combines B2B buying and self-service, distributor and wholesale commerce, and technical product commerce, delivered on a composable, API-first architecture.
B2B buying and self-service
- Business unit hierarchies and account structures
- Role-based permissions and approval workflows
- Customer-specific catalogues and pricing
- Self-service account and organisation management
- Order history, quick reorder and recurring orders
- Collaborative purchasing and shared shopping lists
- Quote-to-order workflows and negotiations
Distributor and wholesale commerce
- Contract and customer-specific pricing
- Multi-site and multi-entity buying structures
- Large catalogue support and advanced search
- Bulk ordering capabilities
- Purchase order workflows
- Procurement integration through PunchOut
Technical product commerce
- Rich product data and technical attributes
- Advanced product discovery and filtering
- Product compatibility relationships
- Equipment and installed-base management
- Spare parts identification and ordering
- Account-specific product assortments
Benefits of the solution
- Purpose-built for B2B commerce rather than adapted from a B2C storefront foundation.
- A pre-built foundation of the capabilities and experiences B2B buyers expect, which can be flexibly adjusted to meet your customers’ expectations.
- Accelerates the commodity commerce features so budget and effort go to the real value drivers.
- AI-native engineering foundation: reusable architecture patterns, validation, testing, documentation and delivery conventions that help teams implement faster and more safely.
- Equipment and installed-base driven commerce, helping customers purchase compatible products and spare parts based on the assets they already own.
- PunchOut support for procurement platforms such as Coupa and SAP Ariba.
- Proven in enterprise implementations and evolved from lessons learned in real-world B2B commerce programmes.
Agentic commerce and AI-ready foundation
GEAR gives B2B organisations a commerce foundation that works for today’s users and can evolve towards tomorrow’s AI-assisted buying journeys. It does not position AI as a separate layer on top of commerce. Instead, it structures the underlying commerce capabilities so they can be exposed through governed, API-first interfaces as agentic commerce models mature.
- Structured commerce workflows for product discovery, quote requests, cart creation, approvals, ordering and account support.
- Clear product, pricing, customer, quote, cart and order concepts that can be made available to future AI agents through governed commerce interfaces.
- Composable, API-first architecture aligned with commercetools’ agent-ready commerce direction and Commerce MCP capabilities.
- A practical foundation for AI-assisted buying, replenishment, service support and operational commerce use cases.