The self-playing piano in B2B – Read more about the report Nordic Digital Commerce in B2B 2026

For us at Toxic, this is a confirmation of what we see with our customers every day. Those who have gained the most ground are not the ones who built a webshop and stopped there. They are the ones building a cohesive, modular platform where PIM, CMS, commerce, CRM, ERP, customer portal, integration engine, payments, punchout, quote management and sales tools work in concert — and where the technology works for the salespeople instead of the other way around. A self-playing piano for B2B, in short.

In this post, we walk through the report's most important insights and how a composable architecture built around Litium Commerce Cloud, Toxic's Azure-based integration engine and selected third-party platforms like SQARP, Briqpay and ShopSpray can help B2B companies cut time, reduce costs and unlock sales capacity.

What the report is actually saying

It's easy to get stuck on percentage figures, but there are four threads running through the entire 2026 report:

1. Digital sales is no longer a project — it's a capability and a strategy. 93 percent of companies that sell digitally see digital commerce as part of their overall business strategy. 73 percent have been selling digitally for more than three years. The implementation phase is over for most. Focus has shifted to continuous optimisation of assortment, channels and customer experience.
2. Growth has replaced efficiency as the primary driver. Earlier this decade, the three main reasons to go digital were to simplify administration, raise service levels and meet customers' digital needs. Today, the three top drivers are about increasing sales to existing customers (43%), raising service levels (36%) and reaching new customers and markets (36%). The digital channel is seen as a growth tool, not a cost saving.
3. Customers demand simplicity. When asked what end customers value most in digital commerce, simpler order processes (44%), easily accessible product information (42%) and 24/7 availability (40%) come out on top. Expectations are shaped by B2C experiences. Friction is the enemy.
4. Data capability is unevenly distributed — and that will be decisive for AI maturity. 78 percent measure their digital interactions and 68 percent actively use data to develop their offering and channels. But only 31 percent can clearly demonstrate profitability on their digital investments. AI rewards companies with structured data — and penalises those with fragmented information spread across silos.

Add to this that 45 percent of those already selling digitally say their biggest challenge is translating personal sales and relationships into digital channels, and 25 percent struggle with integration against existing business and back-end systems, and a very clear picture emerges: the next phase of digital B2B commerce is about cohesive architecture, not more tools.

The hybrid buying journey — and why the systems aren't keeping up

One of the report's most revealing figures is buried on page 40. 53 percent of companies say customers can complete their entire buying journey digitally — but only 46 percent have systems that provide a consolidated view of the customer dialogue and buying journey. In other words: the organisation understands the hybrid buying journey, but the platform doesn't fully support it. The salesperson can't see what the customer looked at in the portal. The webshop doesn't know what the salesperson just quoted. The ERP has its truth, the CRM another.

That's where the composable philosophy makes a real difference. Not as an architecture trend, but as a way to let each system do what it does best while tying them together so the customer encounters a unified truth — whether they're logged into the portal at 11:20pm on a Sunday, calling their salesperson on Monday or receiving a quote by email on Tuesday.

Litium Commerce Cloud — the core of the piano

Litium Commerce Cloud is built for exactly this. The platform brings PIM, CMS and commerce together in one cohesive solution, while still letting each part be used modularly. You can run Full Power with everything activated, use Litium as a pure commerce layer behind a headless storefront, or bring in an external PIM if there's already an investment worth protecting. That flexibility is the whole point of composable: you don't need to replace everything, you just need to replace what no longer serves the business.

Litium's PIM addresses one of the most underestimated problems in B2B — product data quality. The report shows that 51 percent of companies offer their full assortment digitally, but among manufacturers, the aftermarket, spare parts and service, is often digitally untapped despite potentially accounting for 30 to 40 percent of revenue. With structured PIM, dynamic data modelling and workflows, you go from idea to published product in a fraction of the time. One of Litium's customers reports reducing manual work on product data by up to 80 percent.

The globalisation framework — with support for multiple markets, currencies, languages, tax groups, price lists and stock locations — removes what would otherwise become a headache when a company wants to expand. You click on a country and can start selling there. Then there's the campaign engine, segmentation, search, personalisation, customer-specific assortments and tier pricing for key account sales — all completely fundamental in a B2B context, but often patched together in other platforms.

And underlying it all: a cloud service with CDN, ISO 27001-certified infrastructure, GDPR compliance and an SLA of 99.6 to 99.8 percent. During Black Week the platform has handled over 40 million requests per day and 25,000 orders daily. When customers start expecting 24/7 availability, being open isn't enough — it has to work even when load peaks.

Toxic's Azure integration engine — the piano's nervous system

This is where we at Toxic come in. A commerce platform alone is never the full answer in B2B. The business lives in the ERP, orders need to reach warehouse and shipping systems, customer-specific price lists and agreements are often scattered, billing is handled separately, the CRM needs to know when a customer shops online, and so on.

Our Azure-based integration engine is built to solve exactly this complexity. It's scalable, event-driven and designed to handle large volumes without compromising on traceability. In practice, that means we can:

Synchronise products, variants, price lists, customer-specific prices, stock levels and organisations between ERP and Litium via the Litium Connect API — both in batch flows and as real-time direct updates when needed. When an order is placed in Litium, webhooks are triggered, picked up by the integration engine, validated, enriched with data from CRM or other sources and forwarded to the right recipient. Returns, payment status, delivery status — everything flows in the same cohesive stream.

The important thing is that the integration engine is not a black box. Every message is logged, every error is handled with retries and dead-letter management, and you can follow an order flow from click to delivery confirmation. That's the kind of visibility the report is actually calling for — when 25 percent of digitally active companies say integration against back-end systems is their biggest challenge, this is the problem they're talking about.

SQARP, Briqpay and ShopSpray — third-party solutions that move the needle

With Litium as the core and Toxic's integration engine as the nervous system, it becomes straightforward to plug in best-of-breed services where they add the most value. Three examples that fit particularly well in a B2B context:

SQARP for data modelling and AI translation. When product structure becomes complex — think a wholesaler with hundreds of thousands of variants across dimensions, lengths, surface treatments and customer-specific sizes from a large number of different suppliers — a standard PIM doesn't always go the full distance. SQARP complements Litium's dynamic data modelling for truly advanced product structures and configurable offerings. This becomes relevant when the report highlights that 11 percent want to sell complete systems and turnkey solutions digitally — something that requires product data to be modelled with an understanding of relationships, dependencies and rules.

Briqpay for smooth new customer registration and flexible payment methods. One of the quiet friction points in B2B commerce is the onboarding of new corporate customers: credit assessment, company details, approval of payment terms. Briqpay handles this in real time and also supports the full range of B2B payment methods — invoice, card, instalment — with the right permissions and rules per customer segment. For companies that want to open up to new customers online without getting stuck in manual processing, it's a critical piece of the puzzle. This ties directly to the report's insight that 33 percent of digitally active companies see increased sales to new customers as one of the most important outcomes.

ShopSpray for punchout. Here we're talking about a channel that's invisible to many but critical for winning large customers. When your customer is an industrial company with a structured procurement system (SAP Ariba, Coupa, IFS, etc.), having a good webshop isn't enough — you need to be inside their procurement flow. ShopSpray makes it possible to expose the Litium catalogue via OCI/cXML punchout, so the buyer searches, selects and approves within their own system and simply sends the order back to you. This is the same type of integration as EDI — which the report shows is used by 17 percent of companies today — but with a significantly smoother user experience and lower barrier to entry.

Sales, quote and project tools — the piano's keys

Here comes one of the most important insights in the entire report. 78 percent of companies say it's easy for customers to get personal contact when they need it. Digital commerce doesn't replace the salesperson — it amplifies the salesperson.

That means a modern B2B platform isn't just a webshop. It needs to accommodate:

A salesperson view where the salesperson can see the customer's digital behaviour, log in as the customer and assist them, suggest products that complement previous purchases, and see spare parts needs based on the installed base. This is what the report calls the "digital sales room".

A quote engine that lets the salesperson build complex quotes with customer-specific discounts, delivery times and terms — and lets the customer approve and convert the quote into an order directly in the portal. That's how you translate the personal relationship into digital efficiency without losing the nuance.

A project tool for companies that sell against construction projects, facilities or installations where the same "customer" may have different delivery addresses, approval structures and credit limits per project. This is an area where standard e-commerce rarely goes far enough, but where a composable solution built around Litium can be developed and extended with exactly what's needed.

When these three tools are tied together with the commerce platform, the integration engine and payment and punchout flows, you get something that actually resembles a self-playing piano: the customer's behaviour triggers relevant actions, the salesperson receives automated signals about where they need to step in personally, and the routine work flows on without anyone having to touch it.

How this saves money — concretely

Talking about savings in abstract terms is easy. But let's look at where time actually disappears in a B2B organisation today and where a cohesive platform makes a difference:

Manual product work. Litium's own customer cases show reductions in manual product data work of up to 80 percent. When data is modelled once and published to the web, reseller portal, marketplace and print materials, you eliminate the duplication.

Order and customer administration. When 35 percent of companies today use login-based e-commerce and customer portals, and the customer themselves can reorder, retrieve order history, track deliveries and manage their organisation's users, a large portion of incoming support requests disappears. The salesperson doesn't need to call back to provide an order number.

Integrations that don't need separate maintenance. When the integration engine is part of the platform architecture rather than a collection of point-to-point scripts, both development and operating costs decrease over time. A new system is plugged into the engine, not against ten different endpoints.

Onboarding of new customers. Briqpay flows can take time-to-first-order from days to minutes. For a company bringing in 50 new customers a month, that's 50 manual credit assessments that no longer burden the finance department.

Punchout-connected customers are sticky. When your catalogue is inside an industrial customer's procurement system, the switching effort is enormous for them. That's not just an efficiency gain — it's a competitive advantage that reduces customer attrition.

Composable without creating too complex a setup

One objection sometimes heard against composable architectures is that they become complex to manage. That's true — if you go composable just because it's fashionable and bring in ten different SaaS services without a unifying thought. But that's not what this is about.

The point is the opposite: a core platform (Litium) that handles the commerce fundamentals, an integration engine (Toxic's Azure solution) that ties everything together, and selected third-party services where they add value the platform isn't built to solve itself. This isn't best-of-breed sprawl — it's best-of-suite with composable options where they're needed.

This is also what the report points to in its conclusion. The companies that succeed are those that "continuously improve their digital offering and combine digital and human strengths". They don't see digital commerce as a project but as an ongoing capability that needs nurturing, ownership and an architecture built to evolve.

The road ahead

If you read the report and recognise yourself in any of the following situations, it's probably time to think about your architecture:

You sell digitally but can't clearly demonstrate profitability on your digital investment. You have a webshop but your PIM sits separately and product work takes longer than it should. Your salespeople and your web tell the same customer different things. You lose deals in the onboarding phase for new customers. You're on a platform that was right five years ago but no longer supports the hybrid buying journey your customers expect. You want to bring AI support into sales and customer service processes but your data is fragmented across silos.

Those are the conversations we want to have. With Litium as the core, Toxic's know-how, surrounding modules and integration engine as the backbone and the right third-party solutions in the right places, we're not just building a webshop — we're building the capability the report says will separate the winners from the rest in the years ahead.

The self-playing piano isn't magic — it's well-built mechanics that let the music flow. Get the architecture right, and the business plays itself.

👉 Read more about how we work with Litium

📖 Read the full report Nordic Digital Commerce in B2B 2026