B2B Commerce That Sells Itself
At a glance
CLIENT
A mid-sized industrial distributor with multi-region catalogs
SERVICE
- Platform & Product Development, Commerce Engineering, API Integration, CX
INDUSTRY
- B2B Manufacturing & Distribution
The client ran a legacy B2B portal stitched to ERP and a patchwork of custom tools. Buyers couldn’t see contract-specific pricing, availability was stale, and quotes took 1–3 days to produce. Release cycles happened monthly with weekend freezes, and the portal regularly slowed to >3.5s p95 under seasonal load. Cart abandonment hovered near 62%, support handled thousands of “where is my order?” contacts each quarter, and new product lines needed manual onboarding across PIM, ERP, and the storefront.
LeanCoded rebuilt the experience as a headless B2B commerce platform with real-time inventory, contract pricing, customer catalogs, and self-service quotes. Acting as an api development company, we standardized partner interfaces to the ERP/PIM/CRM stack and introduced progressive delivery atop automated pipelines. In six months the portal handled 4.7× traffic bursts with <1.4s p95, quote time fell to <2 hours, reorder share rose to 38%, and support tickets per order dropped by 29%.
One Platform, Many Buyer Journeys—Without the Glue Code
Discovery showed duplicated logic for pricing, entitlements, and availability across three services. We introduced a single source of truth for contracts and inventory, exposed via versioned endpoints and governed by api integration support (mock servers, consumer-driven contracts, partner sandboxes). Checkout and quote flows were decomposed into domain APIs so sales and fulfillment could iterate independently. To sustain velocity, we delivered paved-road CI/CD as devops services—immutable artifacts, environment parity, and automated rollbacks tied to SLOs.
Front-end teams consumed the new platform through composition (customer catalogs, contract pricing, net terms, credit holds) with edge caching to reduce origin hits. We embedded a digital adoption platform for guided onboarding of buyers and internal merchandisers, surfacing “how-to” in the UI. Result: first-time buyer conversion +18%, average order value +12%, and page-level abandonment –21% after guided flows rolled out.
Real-Time, Not Nightly: Accuracy Buyers Trust
Legacy nightly jobs mismatched price and stock, creating cancellations and disputes. We replaced them with streaming updates and idempotent writes, keeping ERP and storefront synchronized within <60 seconds on average. Sales operations got quote templates with contract rules enforced at the API layer; finance controlled net terms via centralized policies. With tiered storage and autoscaling, cloud cost optimization solutions lowered run-rate by 19% while holding 3× surge capacity for seasonal peaks. Release frequency moved from monthly to bi-weekly without freeze windows.
Contract pricing that always matches the invoice
Quotes in hours, not days
Reorders in one click
Performance at B2C speed
Ops that scale with releases
Measured Impact Across the Funnel
The program improved every KPI that mattered—speed, certainty, and cost. Buyers complete tasks faster, sales gets compliant quotes without spreadsheet gymnastics, and finance trusts the numbers. LeanCoded combined platform engineering with enablement, using a digital adoption platform to cut “how do I…?” tickets by 34% and shorten merchandiser ramp-up to 10 days. Ongoing savings come from cloud cost optimization solutions—rightsizing, schedule-based compute, and data tiering—kept visible in FinOps dashboards.
- Conversion — +18% first-time buyer lift
- AOV — +12% per order
- Speed — Quotes <2h; p95 <1.4s
- Cost — Run-rate –19% with 3× headroom
- Support — Tickets/order –29%
Roadmap: Mobile, Field, and Partner Velocity
Next, we’ll ship field-friendly experiences via mobile app development services—scan-to-reorder, offline carts, and on-site approvals. Additional distributors will onboard through hardened api integration support (SLOs, test data, contract tests) so partners can certify changes without touching production. Release cadence will remain bi-weekly as teams expand the catalog and introduce dynamic bundles, with continued savings tracked through cloud cost optimization solutions.