The ERP integration is usually discussed as back-office plumbing. In practice it decides how far a B2B buyer can trust what the store tells them. Stock, account pricing, credit terms and order status all start in the ERP. If they arrive late, wrong or not at all, buyers feel it long before anyone calls it an integration problem.
So a lot of what gets reported as a conversion problem is really an integration problem underneath.
How it shows up
A product shows in stock and the order comes back short. A buyer sees a price that does not match their agreement. An order sits in a state nobody can explain until someone checks the ERP by hand. Each one teaches the buyer that the site needs double-checking, and a buyer who has to double-check will eventually just phone.
No amount of work on the product page fixes this. The page can only be as trustworthy as the data feeding it.
Pricing is where trust goes first
B2B pricing is complicated for good reasons: customer-specific terms, contract prices, volume breaks and different rules for different parts of an account. The complexity is fine. The problem starts when the store cannot show it clearly and consistently enough for the buyer to believe it.
When that happens buyers check with their account manager or put the order off, and the site becomes somewhere they look things up before ordering the old way. The business keeps paying for a digital channel that is not trusted to do the job it was built for.
Pricing logic often ends up spread across the ERP, the store, a couple of extensions and a spreadsheet someone maintains. Some of that is unavoidable. What matters is that each rule can be traced, and that the price the buyer sees is the price they will be charged.
Manual checking hides the size of it
Where the integration is weak, staff compensate. Orders get checked before they are released, stock gets confirmed separately, and pricing errors get corrected after the fact. That keeps trading moving, and it also hides how big the problem is. The cost sits in salaries and in knowledge that lives in a few people's heads.
It gets worse as the business changes
Ranges change, pricing structures evolve and new channels need the same data. An integration built without clear rules gets more fragile with each new requirement. Built properly, with each piece of data owned by one system and failures reported rather than lost, it can take on more without breaking.
Where to start
Write down which system owns each piece of data the buyer sees: price, stock, lead time, credit and order status. Then check what happens when a sync fails. Does anyone find out, and how long does it take? That list usually shows where the trouble is.
Then look at how account pricing is shown. Is it clear which price applies and why? Is it calculated the same way on the product page, in the basket and on the invoice? If buyers trust the price, they will use the site to order.
In a lot of B2B stores, fixing the integration does more for online orders than another round of front-end work. If that is where your problem sits, see integrations, or start with an Adobe Commerce audit to find out.
