Measuring agentic commerce: revenue growth, or wishful thinking?
The episode opened with new survey data, reported by eMarketer from a Logicbroker study, on how US enterprise ecommerce decision-makers measure the success of their agentic commerce investments. Revenue growth led at 55%, the only metric a majority named, followed by customer satisfaction and cost per transaction. Andy, who has a book on the topic coming out, pushed back on the emphasis.
I think this is wishful thinking. Companies expecting agentic to drive incremental, non-cannibalized revenue are going to run into a problem.
Andy Hoar, Master B2B
His argument drew on the early ecommerce era and the distinction between shift and lift. Lift is incremental revenue, the thing every company wants. Shift is revenue that moves from one channel to another, which companies tend to dismiss, even though losing a customer to a competitor’s channel is the alternative. Andy expects agentic commerce to follow a similar pattern, with much of the early value showing up as customer satisfaction and cost-to-serve efficiency. Measuring it mainly by incremental revenue, he said, risks a business case that does not play out.
The B2C playbook B2B buyers now expect
The main topic was what B2B can take from B2C merchandising, prompted by a generational shift. By Brian’s estimate, around three-quarters of B2B procurement roles are now held by people in their early 40s or younger, buyers who carry consumer expectations into work. Salesforce research cited on the episode found 73% of B2B buyers want the same personalized experience they get as consumers. Brian ran through the B2C baseline: fast, intuitive search; easy browse and navigation; rich product detail pages; ratings, reviews, and social proof; personalized recommendations; transparent pricing and promotions; low-friction checkout; and real-time order visibility. In B2C, he noted, these have become the cost of doing business rather than a source of advantage.
Andy reframed the gap as one of digital maturity rather than a secret B2C formula. B2C companies did this work first and are farther along, and the most mature B2B companies now rival the most mature B2C ones. The issue is that so many B2B companies remain immature. Brian pointed to a sobering figure the hosts cited, that only 19% of B2B buyers say their online buying experience meets expectations.
Why B2B held back: sales reps and hidden pricing
Andy named two structural reasons B2B has lagged. First, B2B has sales reps, and much of B2B marketing exists to support those reps rather than to market directly to an end buyer, which distorts how these companies approach digital. Second, pricing. Some of the reluctance to show prices online reflects legitimate contract pricing, but some of it has been about preserving rep leverage over price, leverage that does not exist in B2C. Denise Foley, the guest, agreed there is often an assumption of secret-sauce pricing, and offered a practical middle path: show standard list pricing to everyone, and put contract or discounted pricing behind a sign-in. As she pointed out, buyers can already find prices on Home Depot, Lowe’s, Grainger, and Amazon, so hiding them rarely helps.
Merchandising, and the manufacturer data gap
Denise Foley, EVP of eCommerce at ULE Group, an electrical supply distributor serving electrical contractors, engineers, and DIY buyers, joined to talk through the move from B2C to B2B. Her background is in B2C ecommerce merchandising, including consumer packaged goods and the pet industry, and she said words like merchandising, marketing, and branding were new to much of the B2B side.
The consumer is just expecting to shop the way they expect to shop. B2B is not much different, or hopefully it will not be going forward.
Denise Foley, ULE Group
One recurring obstacle is product data. Denise said B2B manufacturers often supply only a thin set of attributes, the same way CPG manufacturers did a decade ago, on the assumption that the information lives on the packaging or comes from a sales rep or spec sheet. Ecommerce needs more: full specs, weights, and dimensions on the product page, so a buyer can read the details, add the item to a cart, see shipping cost, and know when it will arrive.
What transfers from B2C, and what doesn’t
Plenty of B2C merchandising carries over: detailed navigation, the right filters, and strong search. Denise stressed that B2B search has to handle UPCs, part numbers, and SKUs, since a contractor often searches by an exact identifier, where a consumer shopping for clothing or jewelry never would. Social proof transfers too, though for a distributor the useful testimonial is often about the company and the buying experience rather than a commodity product that can be bought anywhere.
What does not transfer is what Denise calls romance copy, the emotional, fluffy product writing common in B2C. B2B buyers want a short intro followed by specs, benefits, and documentation like spec sheets, how-tos, and install guides, so they can confirm a product fits the job. Her team has deliberately told its SEO copy partners to avoid romance copy entirely.
Friction is the conversion killer
Andy’s view is that the clearest lesson from B2C is the cost of friction. B2C learned, over years, that every bit of friction lowers conversion, and B2B is only now catching up, often losing buyers at the very end of checkout. Denise gave a concrete example. ULE sells electrical wire that has to ship on a reel, which used to mean a buyer could not get shipping calculated online and would get a call afterward about a few hundred dollars in extra freight. Her team treated the reel like a gift with purchase: select it, and the system adds it to the cart along with its weight and dimensions, so shipping calculates in the cart with no call, email, or fax.
I don’t want to have to call somebody. I don’t want to email back and forth. I want instant gratification. I want transparency.
Denise Foley, ULE Group
Marketing and social: vertical influencers and channel fit
On marketing, the panel agreed social matters, but channel fit varies by audience. For ULE, a Meta audience skews toward smaller independent electrical contractors, while the decision-maker at a large construction firm is more likely reachable on LinkedIn, Google, YouTube, or Reddit. Social also supports branding, which matters for a company that grew for 25 years on word of mouth and now wants to reach further. The group also discussed influencers. Horizontal consumer influencers have no real B2B equivalent, but vertical influencers do: an electrician creating content, or a brand like Milwaukee whose users promote the tools through their daily work. Andy added that as more B2B companies move from selling products to selling services, marketing will have to adapt, since marketing a service differs from marketing a product.
The agentic upside: spec-heavy content wins with answer engines
The conversation closed on an advantage hiding in B2B’s constraints. The unemotional, spec-heavy, factual content that B2B product pages require is exactly what AI agents and answer engines parse best.
This could position B2B ahead of B2C for answer engines, because the agents love this unemotional, factual information.
Andy Hoar, Master B2B
Denise’s team has spent years building detailed pages, now using AI tools tied to their PIM to pull specs and draft better copy, with help from an outside UK content firm. They are also adding FAQs, both about the company and on individual product pages. As the hosts noted, FAQs map neatly onto how agents work, a question paired with an answer, so the more a B2B site provides, the more discoverable it becomes in answer engines. The takeaway for practitioners is that the discipline B2B already needs for its buyers, clean specs, machine-readable detail, and direct answers, doubles as preparation for agentic discovery.