Most B2B organizations rely on six to ten systems to support a single customer journey: catalogs live in one place, pricing logic in another, quotes somewhere else, invoices in ERP, CRM tracks activity, and service tools hold support history. Each system owns a slice of the experience, yet no single system owns the buyer.
The result? Slow change cycles, inconsistent experiences, and fragile architectures where even small commercial updates ripple across multiple tools.
The Hidden Cost of Fragmented Commerce
From the customer’s perspective, fragmentation shows up as friction: inconsistent pricing, delayed quotes, missing context, and channels that don’t reflect one another. From the business side, it creates something more damaging – operational drag.
Organizations that rely on highly customized ERP and point-solution stacks struggle to adapt commercial processes quickly, with change initiatives often taking months rather than weeks due to system interdependencies and technical debt.
This is complicated by the nature of the B2B customer itself. In the industrial sector, a “customer” is not a single individual; it is a complex organization with layers of subsidiaries, budget centers, and approval trees.
When the data model for this relationship is scattered across ten different databases, the technology cannot form a complete picture of the buyer. The quoting tool might know the price, but it doesn’t know the hierarchy. The portal sees the user, but it doesn’t see the credit limit.
“Most enterprises don’t have a technology problem, they have a business problem,” says Jary Carter, CRO and Co-Founder of OroCommerce. “Everyone assumes unified commerce means integration. In reality, it means being very clear about the customer journey and ensuring that systems seamlessly work together to keep that to support that journey. .”
Why ‘Unified Commerce’ Is So Often Misunderstood
True unification is often confused with aggressive customization. Organizations assume that to unify the experience, they must customize their backend system to handle everything.
This leads many organizations to push buyer-facing workflows, pricing presentation, quoting rules, and portal logic into ERP systems that were never designed to manage experience orchestration. Others bolt on tools to address individual gaps, creating brittle architectures that are expensive to maintain and difficult to evolve.
Gartner has consistently warned against over-extending ERP platforms into experience-centric roles, noting that ERP should remain the system of record, not the system of engagement.
This distinction matters. ERP excels at core data authority: products, customers, contracts and financials. But when it becomes responsible for how buyers interact, transact, and self-serve, complexity escalates and agility disappears.
“ERP should be authoritative, not overloaded,” Carter explains. “When companies extend ERP systems beyond their core capabilities, you slow everything down from innovation, responsiveness, and ultimately revenue.”
A Clearer Definition of Unified Commerce
A more effective definition of unified commerce is emerging, one grounded in system ownership, not system count.
Unified commerce means:
- ERP remains the authoritative source of truth for financials, inventory counts, and master data.
- A buyer-facing commerce platform serves as the single execution engine for pricing, quoting, approvals, and purchasing rules.
- Whether the order comes from a self-service portal, a sales rep, or an API, it is processed by the exact same engine.
In this model, the commerce platform becomes the connective tissue between teams and touchpoints without turning ERP into a brittle, over-customized experience engine.
This is where OroCommerce fits into the enterprise architecture. Rather than replacing ERP or CRM, it serves as the buyer-facing as well as sales reps and customer service reps system of record for commerce interactions, unifying portals, quoting, pricing presentation, and service workflows on a single B2B-native platform while respecting ERP authority.
“True unification isn’t about doing everything in one system,” says Carter. “It’s about giving the buyer a single, coherent experience and giving internal teams a shared source of commercial truth.”
Why This Matters Now
The urgency around unified commerce isn’t theoretical. B2B buyers increasingly expect consumer-grade experiences with consistent pricing, fast configuration, and self-service options without sacrificing the complexity their transactions require.
When each channel is powered by a different system, scaling those expectations becomes nearly impossible.
“Every new pricing rule, contract structure, or customer policy shouldn’t require a six-month IT project,” Carter notes. “But in fragmented environments, that’s exactly what happens.”
From System Sprawl to Experience Ownership
Enterprises don’t need more tools, they need clearer boundaries.
By separating data authority from experience ownership, organizations can:
- Reduce technical debt tied to ERP customizations
- Speed up commercial change, expansion, and experimentation
- Deliver consistent experiences across sales, service, and digital channels
- Lower long-term maintenance and integration costs
This approach doesn’t eliminate complexity, it makes it organized. And in B2B commerce, this structure is often the difference between scalable growth and perpetual firefighting.
The Real Test of Unified Commerce
There is a simple way to check if your setup is actually unified:
How many systems does it take to change one customer-facing policy, beyond syncing data?
If a sales manager wants to restrict a product category for a specific region, can they do it in one place? Or must IT update the ERP, then the PIM, and then the portal?
If the answer is more than one, the architecture is fragmented.
As Carter puts it, “Unified commerce is a deliberate business decision supported by architectural design. And the companies that get it right are the ones that move faster, serve customers better, and spend less time fixing what shouldn’t be broken in the first place.”
