Welcome to the 4th annual Master B2B Predictions Report. Nearly every conversation in B2B ecommerce now includes a view on AI, and 2026 will be shaped by AI in significant ways. But the through-line of this year’s report is that 2026 will be a year for getting the foundations right: data, SEO, site search, checkout, and competition from Amazon. The companies that get those building blocks right will have the most room to use AI to leapfrog competitors and lock in loyalty. Here are our six predictions.
1. B2B search and discovery will look completely different
If we had to make one prediction, it is that the product research and discovery phase is at the start of a complete transformation. Manufacturers and distributors who planned for two funnels, one starting with a Google search and one starting on their own site, now need to plan for a third. Many B2B buyers, especially younger ones, are starting their search in ChatGPT or its competitors.
Many B2B buyers are increasingly starting their search with ChatGPT or its competitors.
2026 B2B eCommerce Predictions
Winning here means generating far more use-case content about how your products are used, not just product descriptions, and being able to answer the questions that bots ask on a buyer’s behalf. Early signs suggest the payoff is real: Similarweb found that AI chatbot shopping converts at roughly double the rate of Google organic search, 11.4% versus 5.3% in US web data from June 2025. Companies will also need to upgrade on-site search toward guided selling that carries a buyer through the whole cycle.
2. Upheaval in organic search will catch teams by surprise
More than half of Google searches now return an AI Overview, with one June 2025 study from Xponent21 putting it at 57.6%, roughly double the rate from August 2024. That has three implications: zero-click answers will pull early-stage traffic away from B2B sites, the inbox will fill with vendors promising AI Overview shortcuts, and first movers will gain a lasting advantage, much as early SEO leaders once did. At a minimum, every B2B team should be gathering the full set of questions prospects ask and answering them in a structured way.
3. Teams will shift resources to answer product questions
The best way to be discovered in AI-generated results is to build content that answers the questions buyers actually ask. That takes a coordinated approach: customer service and sales tracking the questions they get, the web team sharing search-query data, and a content team turning all of it into pages, structured in an AI-readable format like JSON-LD. Beyond their own sites, companies will build influence through expert participation on relevant subreddits, a YouTube channel explaining product use cases, and newsletters that tell a larger brand story. The report even predicts a ceremonial “Chief Question and Answer Officer” role to signal how seriously a company takes this work.
4. Amazon Business will hit $100 billion in GMV
We expect 2026 to be the year Amazon Business crosses $100 billion in gross merchandise value. For perspective, it took Amazon about 20 years to reach $100 billion in revenue, a milestone Amazon Business could reach in roughly 11 years, and B2B giant Grainger generated about $17 billion in revenue in 2024. Walmart Business is growing quietly alongside it. The bigger point is that the consumerization of B2B is moving full steam ahead, and buyers have already voted with their wallets. Practitioners will need to treat Amazon and Walmart as both competitors and partners, deciding which assortment belongs on each channel and which lines to hold back for their own.
5. AI checkout is hyped, but AI customer service is the real breakthrough
Markets are excited about buyers researching and checking out inside ChatGPT, and Shopify’s stock jumped 6% on news of its ChatGPT partnership. We are skeptical that B2B checkout moves into the chatbot next year. The bigger shift is in customer service. In our own work standing up a new event platform, a capable AI chatbot answered detailed technical questions and handed off to a human when it could not. That combination of strong automation plus rapid human response is the change we expect B2B companies to invest in, because it creates an experience buyers cannot easily find elsewhere.
6. Platform vendors will specialize or integrate
With Shopify’s scale, competitors have two viable paths: specialize in one market, or acquire across the stack to offer a more integrated solution.
For BigCommerce, focusing entirely on B2B is just not a plausible option, especially as a publicly traded company.
Travis Hess, CEO, BigCommerce
BigCommerce has bundled its platform with Feedonomics and Makeswift under a “Commerce” banner aimed at selling on-site and pushing to marketplaces. We expect more publicly traded providers to be taken private to focus on B2B, and more point solutions to be acquired and integrated, leaving practitioners with more all-in-one options rather than a pile of pieces to assemble themselves.
The bottom line
2026 rewards the teams that get the foundations right. Answer engines, AI Overviews, structured content, and a clear assortment strategy across marketplaces are not flashy, but they are what let AI investments pay off. Build the building blocks now, and the AI conversation gets a lot more productive.