{"id":84579,"date":"2025-07-30T10:50:18","date_gmt":"2025-07-30T14:50:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/network.napco.com\/total-retail\/?post_type=article&p=84579"},"modified":"2025-07-30T10:50:18","modified_gmt":"2025-07-30T14:50:18","slug":"b2b-commerce-workflows-are-broken-heres-what-we-can-do-about-it","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/www.mytotalretail.com\/article\/b2b-commerce-workflows-are-broken-heres-what-we-can-do-about-it\/","title":{"rendered":"B2B Commerce Workflows Are Broken: Here\u2019s What We Can Do About It"},"content":{"rendered":"

Let’s be honest: most B2B commerce workflows weren’t designed. They just … happened.<\/p>\n

They grew layer by layer, like geological strata, each new approval, exception and workaround piling on top of the last. Before long, what started as a straightforward transaction morphed into a tangle of emails, spreadsheets, verbal approvals, and a “just-check-with-Janet” step no one really documented.<\/p>\n

Throughout my career, I’ve been at multiple companies that have built complicated workflow solutions to address edge cases, only to watch those solutions fail to be adopted — or get ignored completely due to their never-ending complexity.<\/p>\n

This mess isn’t just annoying, it’s expensive and slow. And in an era when B2B buyers expect the same ease and immediacy they get from consumer platforms, it’s becoming a deal-breaker. What happened here? Software should be an enabler, not an intimidator.<\/p>\n

Workflow Chaos is a B2B Problem Hiding in Plain Sight<\/h2>\n

Most B2B purchases involve more than one person. Department heads manage the budget. Procurement manages the negotiation process. IT reviews security. Inventory and operations weigh in. Legal wants terms. And everyone’s working off different timelines, tools and assumptions.<\/p>\n

That complexity is real. But too often, companies respond by embedding rigid logic into systems that were never built to handle it, transforming commerce platforms into sprawling decision trees no one wants to maintain and people actively seek to sidestep.<\/p>\n

And the moment that system fails — someone’s out of office, an approval threshold changes, or pricing rules shift — the whole thing grinds to a halt. So what do people do? They revert by sending an email, walking down the hall, or Slacking someone for a shortcut.<\/p>\n

Instead of a workflow, you get a workaround.<\/p>\n

Are We Overengineering for the 10%?<\/h2>\n

Here’s a hard truth: 90 percent of B2B purchasing is repeatable. It’s simple. It follows a known path. However, we tend to design systems for the rare 10 percent — the edge cases, the special approvals, the “what if this one VP is out of town” moments.<\/p>\n

Designing for that 10 percent makes systems slower and harder for everyone. And ironically, those same exceptions typically require human judgment anyway, so all that extra logic still doesn’t remove the need for intervention.<\/p>\n

The smarter approach? Build flexible, minimal workflows for the 90 percent. Handle the 10 percent manually or through existing business tools such as BPM software, ERP logic, or yes, even a well-documented Slack channel.<\/p>\n

What B2B Commerce Workflows Should Look Like<\/h2>\n

It’s not that workflows aren’t valuable. It’s that they’ve become overengineered. So let’s reset the bar.<\/p>\n

A good B2B workflow should:<\/p>\n