B2B E-Commerce Glossary: ERPs, PIMs, AI

E-commerce Platforms

Sana Commerce (Cloud + 9.x): ERP-integrated B2B platform. Talks directly to SAP / Microsoft Dynamics at request time so pricing, inventory, and customer logic come from the system of record. Two products: Sana Commerce Cloud (SaaS) and the on-prem Sana 9.x: same philosophy, different stacks. Our Sana Commerce capabilities → · Article: ERP-first in practice
BigCommerce: Hosted SaaS commerce platform. Strong B2C heritage with mature B2B Edition (company accounts with buyer roles, quotes, price lists). Two storefront paths: Stencil (hosted theme) for fast launches, and Catalyst (Next.js headless) for full frontend control. Our BigCommerce capabilities → · Article: Stencil vs Catalyst · Article: B2B Edition deep dive
DynamicWeb: Northern-European all-in-one commerce + CMS + PIM + marketing platform. Native Microsoft Dynamics integration plus connectors for SAP and Salesforce. Multi-brand and multi-language without bolt-ons. Our DynamicWeb capabilities →
Shopify Plus: Enterprise tier of Shopify. Strong B2C, growing B2B (Shopify B2B). Great for direct-to-consumer brands adding wholesale; less of a fit when ERP-driven pricing is central.
Adobe Commerce / Magento: Mature platform from Adobe (formerly Magento Commerce). Highly extensible, large agency ecosystem. B2B Edition has good corporate-account features. Heavier infrastructure footprint than competitors.
Salesforce Commerce Cloud: SFCC: enterprise SaaS commerce, originally Demandware. Strong with retailers already on Salesforce CRM. Premium pricing.
commercetools: API-first composable commerce platform. Popular for SAP-led builds where the team wants headless from day one. Heavier engineering investment than monolithic platforms.
OroCommerce: Open-source B2B-native platform with strong workflow engine. Fits manufacturers and distributors with complex approval flows. Smaller agency ecosystem than the SaaS leaders.
Spryker: Enterprise B2B/B2B2C platform from Germany. Modular, marketplace-friendly, strong in industrial and complex catalog scenarios.

ERP Products We Integrate With

SAP S/4HANA: SAP’s flagship enterprise ERP. The current target for SAP customers: ECC / SAP Business Suite 7 mainstream maintenance runs through 2027, with optional extended maintenance through 2030 for eligible customers. Sana Commerce, DynamicWeb, and commercetools all have certified S/4HANA integrations.
SAP Business One: SAP’s small/mid-market ERP. Strong fit for distributors and manufacturers under ~$200M revenue. Sana Commerce has a deep, certified SAP B1 integration.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central: The modern SaaS evolution of Dynamics NAV. Very common in mid-market manufacturing and distribution. Sana Commerce, DynamicWeb, and most B2B platforms speak BC natively.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations: Microsoft’s enterprise-tier ERP (formerly AX). For organizations $500M+. More complex integration surface than BC but well-supported by Sana and DynamicWeb.
Microsoft Dynamics NAV / AX / GP: Older Microsoft ERPs. NAV → Business Central. AX → F&O. GP (Great Plains) is on extended support. When clients move from these to BC or F&O, we rebuild the storefront integration; their ERP partner implements the ERP.
Sage Intacct: Cloud financials for mid-market services and SaaS companies. Less of a B2B-distribution focus; common in software-led businesses.
Sage 100 / Sage 300 / Sage X3: Sage’s on-prem and hybrid ERPs for mid-market. X3 is the enterprise tier. Less common in the platforms we work with daily but real integration paths exist.
NetSuite: Oracle’s cloud ERP. Strong with mid-market SaaS and growing distributors. BigCommerce and most modern platforms have NetSuite connectors.
Oracle JD Edwards (JDE): Oracle’s long-established enterprise ERP. Common in industrial manufacturing. Custom integration is usually the path.
Acumatica: Modern cloud ERP popular with mid-market distribution and manufacturing. Open API surface makes commerce integration straightforward.
Epicor: Vertical-focused ERPs (Prophet 21, Kinetic, Eclipse), common in distribution and manufacturing. Strong industry-specific data models.

PIM Systems (Product Information Management)

inRiver: Mature B2B PIM, particularly strong for industrial / manufacturing catalogs with rich technical attributes. Good editorial workflow.
Salsify: PIM with strong retail-channel publishing (Amazon, Walmart). Great when your catalog needs to syndicate to many marketplaces; heavier than needed for a single storefront.
Akeneo: Open-source-rooted PIM with a strong B2B-friendly editorial workflow. Self-hosted or cloud. Solid mid-market choice.
Pimcore: Open-source PIM that also handles DAM and CDP. Very flexible, takes commitment to run well. Fits teams who want to own the platform.
Plytix: Lightweight PIM, often a fit for smaller B2B catalogs that have outgrown spreadsheets but don’t need enterprise tooling yet.
Sales Layer: Cloud-native PIM positioned for growing brands. Strong UI, good integrations with the major commerce platforms.

Not sure if you actually need a separate PIM? Read our take on when a separate PIM is the right call, and when the platform’s built-in product info is enough.

Marketing & Engagement Tools

Dotdigital (formerly dotmailer): UK-rooted email + cross-channel marketing platform with excellent native integrations to Magento, BigCommerce, Dynamics 365 BC, and Salesforce. Strong B2B fit.
Klaviyo: E-commerce marketing automation. Started B2C-strong; expanded into B2B. Excellent native integrations with Shopify and BigCommerce.
HubSpot: CRM + marketing + sales + service all-in-one. Strong for B2B lead nurture. Breeze Intelligence (formerly Clearbit) is their newer enrichment offering.
Marketo (Adobe): Enterprise marketing automation. Strong with sales-led B2B. Often paired with Salesforce CRM.
Mailchimp: SMB-friendly email + automation. Acquired by Intuit. Common starting point; teams often migrate to Klaviyo or Dotdigital as they grow.
Constant Contact, Brevo (Sendinblue): SMB email platforms. Reasonable for early-stage B2B; rarely the right answer for serious commerce-driven email.

Search & Merchandising

Algolia: Hosted search-as-a-service. Fast, well-documented, excellent dev experience. Costs scale with catalog size and search volume.
Searchspring: Commerce-focused search + merchandising suite. Strong UI for non-technical merchandisers to control results.
Klevu: AI-augmented search with strong B2C heritage; growing B2B presence.
Coveo: Enterprise search + AI for both customer-facing and internal use. Heavier and pricier than Algolia; richer feature set.
Constructor: Newer entrant focused on AI-driven product discovery. Well-regarded for personalization.
Elasticsearch / OpenSearch: Self-managed search engines. Cheaper at scale, more engineering burden. Solid choice when you have a platform team.

Tax, Payments & Logistics

Avalara: Tax-rate calculation and compliance: the standard for US sales tax across multiple jurisdictions. Native integrations with most B2B platforms.
Vertex: Enterprise tax compliance. Common in SAP / Oracle environments where Vertex is already running for ERP-side tax.
TaxJar (Stripe): Mid-market tax automation. Acquired by Stripe in 2021. Good fit for SMB-to-mid-market sellers.
Stripe / Authorize.net / Braintree / Adyen: Payment gateways. Stripe and Adyen lead for modern B2B; Authorize.net is heritage but still common; Braintree is PayPal-owned.
ShipStation / ShipBob / EasyPost: Shipping orchestration and fulfillment. ShipStation is the SMB workhorse; ShipBob is 3PL with software; EasyPost is API-first label generation.
Punchout / OCI (cXML / Oracle): B2B procurement protocols that let buyers shop your catalog from inside their procurement system (Ariba, Coupa, Oracle iProcurement) and bring the cart back. Common in industrial supply.
EDI (Electronic Data Interchange): Old-but-still-running standard for exchanging POs, invoices, and ASNs between trading partners. Many large B2B customers require it.

Mobile & App Technology

.NET MAUI (Multi-platform App UI): Microsoft’s modern cross-platform framework. Single codebase for iOS, Android, Windows, macOS. Successor to Xamarin. Our mobile capabilities → · Article: B2B companion apps with MAUI
Xamarin (retired): Microsoft’s previous cross-platform framework. Support ended May 2024. Active codebases should migrate to MAUI. Article: Xamarin → MAUI migration playbook
React Native: Meta’s JS-driven cross-platform framework. Strong for teams already in React; less ideal when the backend is .NET-heavy.
Flutter: Google’s Dart-based cross-platform framework. Strong UI consistency; smaller .NET ecosystem fit.
Swift / Kotlin: Native iOS (Swift) and Android (Kotlin). When the app needs deep platform integration that cross-platform can’t deliver, native is still the right answer.

AI & Agentic Systems

Frontier AI models: The large language model families from the major AI labs, used for writing, analysis, coding and multi-step agent work. Most vendors offer a flagship plus smaller, cheaper tiers through an API; not every model reaches the vendor's consumer app. Model choice is per task: there is no universal best, and a smaller model often wins on cost and speed. The lineups below are as of September 2026 and change every few months.
Claude (Anthropic): Anthropic's models are closed-weight; the consumer app is Claude. Claude Fable 5.1 is the most capable and most expensive tier, for demanding reasoning and long-horizon agentic work. Claude Opus 5.5 is Anthropic's recommended default for most work. Claude Sonnet 5 balances speed and intelligence, and Claude Haiku 4.5 is the fastest. We use Claude extensively for catalog enrichment, classification and copilot work, and inside our Free Scan tool.
GPT (OpenAI): OpenAI's GPT-6 family is closed-weight. The consumer app is ChatGPT, which still defaults to GPT-5.6; GPT-6 Astra appears there as GPT-6 Pro on higher plans. GPT-6 Astra is the flagship, for demanding reasoning and coding work. GPT-6 Sol balances intelligence and cost, and GPT-6 Luna is the efficient tier for focused, high-volume tasks. Reasoning is an effort setting, not a separate model line. Open-weight options: gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b (Apache 2.0).
Grok (xAI): xAI (part of SpaceX since February 2026) builds Grok; the consumer app is also Grok, on the web, X, iOS and Android. Grok 4.7 is the flagship, for coding and general use. Grok 4.3 is a cheaper, fast model suited to tool calling and instruction-following tasks. Both expose reasoning as an effort setting. Current models are closed-weight; xAI has only released weights for older generations.
Muse and Llama (Meta): Meta's Muse models come from Meta Superintelligence Labs; the consumer apps are Meta AI and Muse, a personal agent app. Muse Spark 1.3 is the closed-weight flagship, for long-horizon coding and agentic work; it is served through Meta Model API (public preview) and Muse Code. Muse Glimmer is a 30B open-weight model (Apache 2.0) for always-on local agents. Llama 4 (Scout and Maverick) is the older open-weight family, still downloadable.
Gemini and Gemma (Google): Google's Gemini models are closed-weight; the consumer app is Gemini. Gemini 3.1 Pro is the flagship for complex problem-solving and agentic work, though the API still labels it preview. Gemini 3.8 Flash is the generally available mid tier, for long-horizon software engineering and agents, and Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite is the fast, low-cost tier for high-volume tasks. Gemma 4 is the open-weight family (Apache 2.0), from small edge models to 31B.
RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation): Pattern where the LLM is grounded in your specific documents/catalog at request time. The right answer when you want AI that knows YOUR data. RAG reduces hallucination risk by anchoring answers in retrieved evidence rather than eliminating it outright.
Agentic workflows: AI that takes multi-step actions toward a goal, not just answering questions. Production agents work best when narrow, with hard contracts: validation, schema, human review. Article: Agentic AI for catalog enrichment
Vector databases: Pinecone, Weaviate, Qdrant, pgvector. Stores embeddings for semantic search. Underlies most RAG systems.
Embeddings: Numerical representations of text/images that capture meaning. The plumbing of semantic search and RAG.
Frameworks: LangChain, LangGraph, LlamaIndex, OpenAI Agents SDK, Claude Agent SDK: Tooling for orchestrating LLM calls, tools and memory. Useful for prototyping; production systems often outgrow them and consolidate on direct API calls plus custom orchestration. OpenAI's Assistants API shut down in August 2026, replaced by the Responses and Conversations APIs. The OpenAI Agents SDK defaults to the Responses API; OpenAI calls it feature complete and recommends its beta Agents API for new agents. The Claude Agent SDK was formerly the Claude Code SDK.
MCP (Model Context Protocol): An open standard for connecting AI models and agents to tools and data. Anthropic introduced it in November 2024; since December 2025 it has been hosted by the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation. The current spec revision is 2026-07-28. This site runs a read-only MCP server at https://www.projectthunder.com/mcp that lets AI assistants search our pages, articles and ERP partner directory.
Agentic commerce: AI agents that find, compare and buy on behalf of people and businesses, working from machine-readable product data, checkout APIs and payment credentials the buyer approved. Most activity today is discovery, where incomplete or inconsistent product data drops a seller out of the comparison. For B2B sellers, the first things to fix are catalog quality, pricing accuracy and availability data. Article: What is agentic commerce?
AGI (Artificial General Intelligence): AI that can match a capable person across most intellectual tasks, rather than excelling at a narrow set. No system clearly meets that bar as of October 2026, and the labs disagree on how close they are and even on the exact definition.
Superintelligence (SI or ASI): AI that would outperform the best people at nearly every intellectual task, including science, strategy and designing better AI. The major labs discuss it openly as both a goal and a risk (Meta named its research group Meta Superintelligence Labs), but it does not exist today. Our view: What about superintelligence? and how we use AI responsibly.
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B2B Architecture & Concepts

ERP-first commerce: Architecture where the storefront delegates pricing, inventory, customer logic to the ERP at request time, rather than copying ERP data into the storefront on a schedule. Sana Commerce is the canonical example.
Headless commerce: Decoupling the storefront UI from the commerce backend, communicating via APIs. Gives you frontend freedom but demands a frontend platform team.
Composable commerce / MACH: MACH = Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, Headless. The architectural pattern behind composable platforms (commercetools, Spryker, BigCommerce Catalyst). Powerful but engineering-heavy.
B2B Edition (BigCommerce): Layer on BigCommerce that adds company accounts whose buyers have roles (Admin, Senior Buyer, Junior Buyer, or custom), parent and child companies through Account Hierarchy, quote-to-order, company-specific pricing through price lists, and Shopping Lists (BigCommerce’s name for requisition lists). Necessary for serious B2B; not on by default.
Quote-to-cash (Q2C): The full B2B sales process: quote → negotiate → order → invoice → payment → revenue recognition. Modern B2B platforms increasingly cover this end-to-end.
Customer master / item master: The system-of-record records for customers and products. The data hygiene of these masters determines how much of a re-platform project is “rebuild” vs “clean up.” Article: Customer-master cleanup before re-platform
Available-to-promise (ATP): The real-time answer to “can I actually ship this customer this quantity by this date?” Driven by ERP inventory + open orders + lead times. Real-time ATP is one of the strongest reasons to choose ERP-first commerce.
Punchout / OCI / cXML: See Tax, Payments & Logistics above.
Single Sign-On (SSO): SAML / OIDC: Lets corporate buyers log in to your storefront via their identity provider (Azure AD / Entra ID, Okta, Ping). Table stakes for serious B2B.

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The vocabulary of B2B commerce, in plain English.