Why This Matters to Distributors: Distributors whose product data is not structured, enriched, and distributed across AI discovery surfaces risk becoming invisible now of purchase, not because a buyer chose a competitor, but because an AI agent never surfaced them as an option.
Commerce, the parent company of BigCommerce, Feedonomics and Makeswift, this week unveiled a broad set of platform updates at Commerce Live in Chicago, including a new suite of artificial intelligence-driven capabilities designed to help manufacturers and distributors sell across an expanding set of AI-powered shopping surfaces.
The announcements mark a significant shift in how ecommerce platform providers are positioning their technology for B2B sellers, moving beyond catalog management and checkout optimization toward tools built for a world where AI systems, not human buyers, initiate, and complete transactions.
“Commerce as an industry is entering a phase where the distance between discovery and transaction is shrinking rapidly,” said Sharon Gee, senior vice president of product for AI at Commerce. “Our focus is on making sure merchants can reap the benefits of agentic commerce while maintaining control of their data, their customers and their operations.”
The centerpiece of the AI announcements is a set of agentic commerce capabilities that allow products to be discovered, evaluated and purchased through AI systems including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, PayPal, and Stripe. Commerce describes the framework as agent-enabled checkout, transactions completed by AI systems on behalf of buyers, with the merchant retaining control of the customer relationship and underlying data.
For wholesale distributors, the stakes extend well beyond adding a new sales channel. As AI-driven procurement tools become standard among commercial buyers, the ability to surface structured, agent-ready product data is becoming a prerequisite for remaining visible now of purchase. Commerce is positioning its Feedonomics data feed management platform as the infrastructure layer that makes distributor product catalogs readable and actionable by AI discovery systems. The company reported that merchants using its Feedonomics Surface product saw approximately 24 percentage points greater year-over-year gross merchandise value growth in November 2025 compared to peers not using the platform.
The B2B announcements are directly relevant to distributors managing complex pricing structures, purchase order workflows, and multi-account customer hierarchies. Commerce introduced AI-driven purchase order automation, event-driven webhooks and cascading price lists, a pricing architecture that applies layered, customer-specific pricing logic without manual intervention.
“From automating purchase orders to simplifying complex pricing models, we’re helping manufacturers and distributors reduce operational friction and scale more efficiently,” said Lance Owide, vice president of B2B product at Commerce.
Commerce also announced it is unifying its B2B and B2C platform experiences into a single control panel and storefront API layer, a move aimed at distributors currently managing separate systems for business account customers and end consumers.
Other platform updates with direct distributor relevance include a one-second reduction in checkout load times, expanded multi-language support with localized URLs and translation management tools, and advanced catalog filtering that lets merchants surface and manage inventory by category and stock status. The company also introduced BigCommerce Companion, an AI-powered assistant for day-to-day merchant operations, and expanded Feedonomics Surface channel support to include Microsoft Ads, TikTok and Pinterest, alongside existing Google, and Meta integrations.
“B2B commerce is one of our core strengths,” Owide said. “We’re continuing to support the depth and complexity their businesses require.”
For distributors tracking the convergence of AI and B2B ecommerce, the Commerce Live announcements reflect a clear platform-level strategy: that the next competitive frontier in distribution commerce is not the website or the mobile app, but the structured product data layer that determines whether a distributor’s catalog is visible to AI agents making purchasing decisions on behalf of their customers.
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