A B2B buyer’s expectations are no longer set by other B2B suppliers. They are set by every other screen that person uses. The buyer placing a wholesale order on Tuesday morning booked a flight, tracked a parcel, and reordered something for home over the weekend, each in a few taps, each showing them exactly the …
Read more “Self-Service Portals: What B2B Buyers Expect in 2026”
There is a gap in most B2B online stores, and every sales leader knows exactly where it is. The catalogue works when standing customers log in, see their agreed prices, and reorder. But a real chunk of the business never fits that flow. Take Riverside Foods, a distributor supplying cafes and restaurants. The Blue Door …
Read more “How to Handle B2B Quoting and Negotiated Pricing Online”
For pharmaceutical distributors, digital commerce is no longer simply about selling online. It’s about delivering a modern customer experience while maintaining the controls, traceability and compliance required within one of the world’s most highly regulated supply chains. Unlike many industries, pharmaceutical eCommerce cannot simply remove every step in the buying process. Access to products, customer …
Bharat Sharma, founder and CEO of Apex B2B, recently spoke with Drinks Industry Ireland (July/August 2026) on the topic of AI in B2B commerce and why it has evolved from ‘nice to have’ to competitive necessity. Here are the key points from that conversation: Recent figures show that 77% of B2B buying processes involved AI …
Read more “Why AI Is Now a Competitive Necessity for the Drinks Trade, Not a “Nice-to-Have””
Ask a wholesaler what a product costs, and you will not get a number. You will get a question back: for whom? That answer is the whole of B2B pricing. The pallet that leaves the warehouse at one price for a national account leaves at another for a regional independent who has been buying for …
Read more “Pricebooks Explained: Customer-Specific Pricing at Scale”
Our Founder and CEO, Bharat Sharma, recently shared his perspective on the future of food and drink wholesale in an opinion piece for eCommerceNews Ireland, part of the TechDay network. It also ran across TechDay’s sister titles, CFOtech Ireland, CMOtech Ireland, and IT Brief Ireland. Below is a short take on the argument and why …
B2B commerce for mid-market wholesalers has reached a turning point, and that is the focus of a new article by Apex founder and CEO Bharat Sharma in the June 2026 issue of Electrical Wholesaler. In it, he explains how B2B commerce has quietly become one of the most complex areas of digital transformation, and why …
Read more “B2B Commerce for Mid-Market Wholesalers: From Fax Machines to AI”
There is a meeting that happens in mid-market distribution businesses with almost predictable regularity. The ERP vendor, or sometimes the internal IT lead, walks in with a slide deck. It shows a web portal module sitting neatly on top of the existing ERP. It promises online ordering, account self-service, and a reduction in inbound calls …
Read more “ERP Limitations for B2B eCommerce: Why Your Back-Office System Can’t Face Your Buyers”
The UK wholesale sector is under a kind of pressure it has never quite felt before. Margins were always thin. Volatility was always present. But the combination of post-pandemic supply disruption, retail consolidation and rising operational complexity has created a different kind of challenge, one that now sits inside the business, not just outside it. …
Read more “Why Mid-Market B2B Commerce Can No Longer Afford Manual Wholesale Operations”