Transcript:

Welcome to Friday 15, everyone. This is Brian Beck. I’m here with Andy, my partner in crime here at Master B2B, with the dysfunctional band. I don’t know. Anyhow, we’ve got a great session today, folks. We’re going to be talking all about e-commerce platform selection and Andy’s recently released 2025 Combine Paradigm B2B Combine. Andy, great to be here with you on this Friday, midsummer.

Yeah, I’m really thrilled to chat about the Combine here. We just released it on Wednesday. Some pretty interesting stuff. So, let’s jump right in.

What I love about this, Andy, is that this Combine is a very practical tool practitioners can use to guide their way through this platform selection issue. I was just talking to a VP of e-commerce yesterday at a very large company. He’s going through a replatforming. I asked him, what do you have budgeted for this? How much time do you expect it to take? He said it’s $6 million over the next two years. $6 million.

The stakes are high here, folks. I’ve lived this myself. I’ve replatformed twice in one year back early in my career. And guess what? It cost me my job because I didn’t do some of the things Andy’s going to share. This is real. The stakes are high. So, let’s get into it.

Let’s talk context first. We asked our LinkedIn audience: how will you be enhancing your e-commerce platform solution this year? We offered four options. It was interesting because it really spread across different approaches. We asked, are you going to replatform, tune what you have? It was really quite an even split. About 38% said replatform. Replacing portions or modules was 31%. Tuning what we have was another 31%. Zero percent said they’re making no changes. That’s fascinating, right Andy?

We’ve got folks that are obviously working on this issue. Tell us about the process that most folks go through here when it relates to replatforming, Andy.

Just as a refresher, the Combine is an evaluation of the leading platforms in the space. But you’re not going to get to that point unless you’ve done some homework ahead of time. I always say you’ve got to start with your vision of the experience you intend to create for your customers two to three years into the future. People’s eyes roll—they’re like, oh, that’s so hard to do, who knows? I say, better to have some idea than no idea. Remember, three years ago, nobody had heard of ChatGPT. So if you weren’t incorporating that capability into what you’re doing now, you’d be way behind everybody else. It’s important to think ahead.

There’s also the process of gathering the requirements. That’s a whole art form. I’ve worked with companies, so have you, to make sure they get the right requirements. Wrong input, wrong output. You’ve got to select a partner and a platform. There’s a whole process around that. We’ve talked about that before. Then you’ve got to implement and iterate. Iterate is the critical piece here. It’s not a project. It’s a program. It’s in constant evolution, which is why it really pays to think ahead.

There’s an image on the screen of a kid whose pants are too tight and another where the pants are too big. This is the problem most people make: they don’t think ahead. They don’t envision what it’s going to be, and then they buy the wrong platform. My favorite analogy is the car: on screen you can see a Honda Odyssey and a Lamborghini Countach. They both have wheels, engines, seat belts. They’ll both get you from point A to B. However, if you’re going to be driving kids around, you don’t want to shove them into a Countach. And if you’re going to be racing your friends, you’re not going to use a Honda Odyssey.

What we often see is people try to fuse the two together, and they do so very poorly. Here’s an AI rendering of a Honda Odyssey Countach. It looks cool, but it’s completely impractical. It would cost ridiculous amounts of money, and it wouldn’t work.

Does that sound familiar?

It does, Andy. I love the analogy there. Again, you’ve come out with this Combine which helps people very practically assess the universe. One of the challenges I always had in doing this work was figuring out: what is the right universe to start with? How do you create a universe that’s in the ballpark at a more detailed level than the traditional analyst reports provide, which are composite scores. That’s high-level. It’s good information. But at the end of the day, what you’ve created here with your Combines—for both enterprise and mid-market companies—is a practical guide.

What I love about it is you get down into details and allow people to assess based on their capabilities and needs. You categorize to create that list. Why don’t you tell us a little more about it?

I appreciate you saying that because that’s what I’ve always aimed for. Hopefully, it’s hitting the mark. There are two of these. There are nine companies in the enterprise evaluation and 13 companies in the mid-market. I define the mid-market as $50M to $500M in total revenue. If you’re a company with $425M in total revenue—not online revenue, total revenue—then you should be looking at a mid-market solution.

If you’re a manufacturer, distributor, that’s not the vendor you’re talking about—that’s the practitioner.

Got it.

If you’re a company with two or three billion in annual revenue, then you should be looking at an enterprise solution. There are some companies that play in both markets and some that only play in either enterprise or mid-market.

What I love about this, Andy, too, is that you’ve really got all the leading platforms in here. There are hundreds of options, I know, but you’ve got the top of the market here for the most part. That’s great.

The Combine process itself is a quick overview. There are 12 different categories. You and I were joking about this ahead of time—the Magic Quadrant from Gartner, the Forrester Wave, IDC MarketScape. Those are fine pieces of research. I used to do the Wave when I was at Forrester. But those models really have four options. There’s the leader quadrant and everybody else. I call it the leader-loser metaphor. Vendors have always told me, if I’m not in the leader category, I don’t want anything to do with it.

When you have 12 categories like I do, with product and non-product criteria, there’s an opportunity to zero in on who’s world-class in a particular area. I did the math: there are 16.7 million combinations possible with these 12 categories and four medals (gold, silver, bronze, no medal) in each category. That’s a lot of combinations, which seems more fitting for B2B’s complexity.

Practitioners don’t want just two options or four options. They want details.

Having spent almost 20 years as a practitioner, I know the things you’re evaluating here are very practical. I want to understand how capable this company is with site search, promotions, cross-channel enablement. Even things like their roadmap, vision, ability to execute, total cost of ownership—all critical elements to narrow the field. This is very practical, and I love that.

There are three components to this: an evaluation page, a product analysis page (a one-pager, because brevity matters), which covers pricing, go-to-market model, strengths, weaknesses, and a bottom line—all based on interviews with customers, partners, and vendors.

Then there’s a scoring page with medals awarded per category. Nobody gets all gold, nobody gets no medals. Finally, there’s a summary of gold, silver, bronze per category. This is as close as I get to comparing vendors. I reject the idea of putting everyone in one place and saying, “You’re this far ahead of your competitor.” That’s great for vendors but irrelevant to practitioners. Practitioners don’t care if you’re a tenth of a millimeter ahead.

As practitioners, we use those reports to create a long list of potential candidates. I’d much rather create that list based on practical, detailed understanding. This is very digestible.

Andy, you’ve been evaluating platforms for 15 years now, seven years on the Combine alone. You’ve talked to countless companies and invested hundreds of hours. What are some of the findings?

I call these the atmospherics—what’s happening in the space. First, there are many solid choices. Between this year and last, there’s nothing radically new. Some companies are doubling down on B2B, often because they’re exiting B2C more than actively pursuing B2B.

Everyone’s nailed promotions and pricing. Everyone gets gold or silver there.

The biggest issue for vendors is whether they can cost-effectively acquire customers. This matters because your bet is on whether this company will be around. Cool tech and funding don’t matter if no one hears of them or if SIs won’t support them. I’ve seen many of these come and go.

Channel strategy hasn’t changed much; big SIs aren’t adding practices except for Shopify. Verticalization is happening but is limited to mature companies.

Next year will be different. AI hasn’t truly penetrated this space yet. The standard for platforms will change. I want to see AI-native, agentic capabilities—this is coming fast. Bots could soon handle much of the buying, which calls into question the value of websites.

Everyone’s talking AI; few are doing it meaningfully. That must change.

Time and complexity are out. Even enterprises want pre-configured, pre-built solutions. Composable is still there but balanced with ready-to-go stacks.

Shopify is gaining traction but mostly in vendor discussions, not practitioners demanding it. Shopify has to prove staying power.

Pricing has shifted entirely to performance-based. Some vendors like Salesforce are moving to AI-based consumption models—buying credits for AI capabilities. That’s likely to expand.

Adobe? I don’t know where they are. I’ve tried to find out. Magento used to be big, but Adobe Commerce isn’t making waves.

SAP Commerce Cloud opted out this year. They’re apparently reinventing the platform.

Finally, differentiation comes from product, pricing model, geography, customer, and channel. Product examples include Oro’s 3-in-1 offering and Optimizely’s experimentation focus. Pricing models have harmonized; geography varies with companies like Shopware and Vtex. Customers differ—commercetools, HCL for IT buyers; Salesforce for marketing-led decisions. Channel remains most critical—BigCommerce, Shopify, Salesforce have strong channels. Without a channel, vendors must work harder to get noticed.

For practitioners, working with a partner can help. Andy’s Combine is a fantastic resource. You can find it on his LinkedIn or through vendors who’ve bought reprints.

Finally, a few announcements: our Nexus program offers expert advice exclusively for B2B eCommerce executives. Visit masterb2b.com for more. Our practitioner-only forum is growing—join at masterb2b.com/forum.

And don’t forget, Friday 15 is available via podcast on Spotify, Apple, Google, YouTube, and our website. Please give us a review.

Thanks, everyone. See you next week for another Friday 15.