TL;DR
- What this guide covers: A complete, repeatable process for running a cross-functional B2B ecommerce requirements workshop that surfaces must-have features before you select or configure a platform.
- Who it’s for: eCommerce Managers and IT Directors at B2B manufacturing companies who need to align sales, operations, and finance around a single set of commerce requirements.
- Platform covered: Adobe Commerce, integrated with Epicor, NetSuite, or SAP Business One ERPs.
- What you’ll be able to do: Facilitate a structured discovery workshop, document prioritized requirements, and produce a shared requirements artifact that every stakeholder signs off on before development begins.
- Proof it works: FHC Fastener Hardware Co-Op reduced their order correction rate from 18% to 0.8% post-implementation after running a proper B2B ecommerce discovery workshop and aligning requirements across departments.
Most B2B ecommerce projects don’t fail because of bad technology. They fail because nobody ran a proper requirements workshop before selecting or configuring the platform. When sales, operations, IT, and finance each submit separate wish lists through email threads and spreadsheet tabs, you end up with a storefront that satisfies no one and costs twice the original budget to fix. This guide gives you a repeatable ecommerce requirements workshop template for B2B manufacturing companies running Adobe Commerce with Epicor, NetSuite, or SAP Business One. By the end, you’ll know exactly how to gather B2B ecommerce requirements through a structured, cross-functional discovery workshop that produces a single, prioritized document every stakeholder agrees on.
Why eCommerce Manager / IT Directors Get This Wrong
The most common failure pattern looks like this: the eCommerce Manager collects requirements from their own team, the IT Director gathers integration specs independently, and sales submits a separate list of “must-haves” that contradicts half of what operations needs. These parallel tracks produce a requirements document that’s really three or four documents stitched together, full of conflicting priorities and unstated assumptions. Nobody catches the contradictions until development is underway, at which point scope changes cascade through the project. A manufacturer with 50,000 SKUs and customer-specific contract pricing can’t afford that kind of rework. Every misaligned requirement that makes it into the build costs roughly 10x more to fix after launch than it would have cost to resolve in a workshop room.
The downstream costs are specific and measurable. When order workflows don’t match how buyers actually purchase, you see spikes in order correction rates, manual rework hours, and customer service tickets asking “what’s the price” or “is it in stock.” Sales reps end up spending 30-40% of their week on order-taking tasks the portal was supposed to handle. Operations teams lose trust in the platform and revert to phone and email ordering, which defeats the entire purpose of the investment. For manufacturers running on thin margins with complex tiered pricing, a misaligned B2B commerce platform can erode margin faster than it generates new revenue. FHC Fastener Hardware Co-Op faced exactly this: their order correction rate dropped from 18% to 0.8% post-implementation, and rework hours were cut from 60/month to 8/month (an 87% reduction) after they fixed their requirements process.
What You Need Before You Start
Before you schedule a single calendar invite, confirm these prerequisites are in place. Skipping any of them turns your workshop into a brainstorming session with no grounding in reality.
- ERP data export or read access: You need current pricing rules, customer tiers, and product master data from Epicor, NetSuite, or SAP Business One. Without this, participants will debate pricing logic from memory, which is always wrong.
- Adobe Commerce admin access: At least one person in the room needs configuration-level access to demonstrate current catalog structure, customer group settings, and checkout workflows. If you’re on a fresh instance, have a sandbox ready.
- Confirmed stakeholder attendance from every affected department: This means the eCommerce Manager, IT Director, a senior sales representative, an operations or warehouse lead, and a finance representative who understands credit terms and payment workflows. Missing even one function guarantees a requirements gap.
- Current-state process documentation: Gather existing order entry workflows, quoting procedures, and any approval chain documentation. Even if these are informal or outdated, they’re the starting point for identifying gaps.
- A list of known pain points from customer service: Pull the top 20 support tickets from the last quarter. Categories like “where’s my order,” “wrong price on invoice,” and “can’t find part number” reveal exactly where the current process breaks down.
- A pre-read packet sent 5 business days before the workshop: Include a one-page agenda, the current-state process maps, and 3-5 competitor or peer B2B portals for participants to review. People who arrive cold waste the first two hours getting oriented.
How to Run a Cross-Functional B2B Ecommerce Requirements Workshop: Step-by-Step
Step 1: Define the Workshop Scope and Ground Rules
Start by stating what this workshop will and won’t cover. A common mistake is trying to solve every problem in a single session. Limit the scope to the buying experience from product discovery through order confirmation, including pricing, catalog structure, checkout, and ERP handoff. Post the ground rules visibly: no feature requests without a business justification, no “we’ve always done it this way” as a valid argument, and every requirement must be tied to a measurable outcome like order accuracy, time-to-order, or support ticket reduction.
Step 2: Map the Current-State Buyer Journey
Walk through how a real customer places an order today, step by step. Use a whiteboard or digital collaboration tool and have the sales rep describe the process from initial inquiry through fulfillment. The operations lead should flag where manual handoffs occur, and IT should note where data moves between systems. This exercise almost always reveals 3-5 “shadow processes” that nobody documented: spreadsheets that translate between ERP part numbers and customer-facing SKUs, email threads that serve as informal approval chains, or phone calls that bypass the existing portal entirely. In Adobe Commerce implementations, these shadow processes are where the most critical requirements hide.
Step 3: Identify Integration Touchpoints with Your ERP
This is where the workshop gets technical, and it should. Walk through every point where data needs to flow between Adobe Commerce and your ERP, whether that’s Epicor, NetSuite, or SAP Business One. Common touchpoints include real-time inventory availability, customer-specific pricing and contract rates, order status sync, credit limit checks, and tax calculation. For each touchpoint, document the direction of data flow (one-way or two-way), the acceptable latency (real-time vs. batch), and the system of record. The ERP is almost always the single source of truth for pricing and inventory, but the workshop is where you confirm that assumption and identify exceptions.
Step 4: Capture Requirements by Department, Then Cross-Reference
Give each department 30 minutes to list their top 10 requirements independently. Then project all lists simultaneously and look for overlaps and conflicts. Sales might require “ability to override pricing for key accounts,” while finance requires “no price overrides without approval.” Both are valid, but they need a workflow that satisfies both, such as a tiered approval chain in Adobe Commerce that routes override requests to a finance approver. This cross-referencing step is the core value of a stakeholder workshop for your B2B commerce platform. It surfaces conflicts early, when they cost nothing to resolve.
Step 5: Prioritize Using a Business Impact Matrix
Not every requirement deserves equal weight. Use a simple 2×2 matrix: business impact (high/low) on one axis, implementation complexity (high/low) on the other. High-impact, low-complexity items go into the MVP. High-impact, high-complexity items get phased into a post-launch roadmap. Low-impact items, regardless of complexity, go into a backlog. This exercise prevents the common trap of building features nobody uses while delaying features that directly affect order accuracy or average order value. According to data from B2B ecommerce consulting engagements, roughly 40% of initial requirements fall into the low-impact category once stakeholders see them ranked against business outcomes.
Step 6: Document Functional vs. Non-Functional Requirements Separately
Functional requirements describe what the system does: “display customer-specific pricing based on ERP contract rates.” Non-functional requirements describe how it performs: “pricing must load within 2 seconds for catalogs exceeding 50,000 SKUs.” Mixing these together creates confusion during development. Use your ecommerce requirements workshop template to separate them into distinct sections, each with an owner, a priority level, and an acceptance criterion. Adobe Commerce handles many non-functional requirements through its architecture, but performance benchmarks for large B2B catalogs need explicit documentation.
Step 7: Produce a Signed-Off Requirements Document
The workshop isn’t done until every participant signs off on the final document. This doesn’t mean unanimous enthusiasm; it means every department confirms they can live with the priorities as ranked. Schedule a 60-minute review session within 48 hours of the workshop, while context is fresh. The output should be a single document with numbered requirements, assigned priorities, named owners, and explicit notes on any unresolved conflicts that need executive decision. This document becomes the contract between your business and your implementation team.
3 Mistakes to Avoid
Mistake 1: Letting IT Run the Workshop Alone
When IT leads the requirements process without equal representation from sales and operations, the output skews toward technical architecture and integration specs. You end up with a platform that syncs data perfectly but doesn’t match how buyers actually search, order, or request quotes. Assign a neutral facilitator, ideally someone who understands both the business workflows and the technical constraints.
Mistake 2: Skipping the Current-State Mapping
Teams often jump straight to “what we want” without documenting “what we have.” This creates requirements that sound good in theory but ignore the messy reality of existing workflows. A manufacturer with 200 customer-specific price lists managed through Epicor can’t simply request “personalized pricing” without specifying how those lists sync, how exceptions are handled, and what happens when the ERP and the storefront disagree. Always map the current state first.
Mistake 3: Treating the Workshop as a One-Time Event
A single four-hour session rarely captures everything. Plan for at least one follow-up session focused specifically on edge cases: what happens when a customer orders a discontinued SKU, when inventory drops to zero mid-checkout, or when a quote expires before the buyer’s approval chain completes. These edge cases account for the majority of post-launch support tickets and rework hours. One HumCommerce client discovered during a follow-up session that 12% of their orders involved superseded parts with cross-reference requirements that the initial workshop had completely missed.
Real Example: FHC Fastener Hardware Co-Op
FHC Fastener Hardware Co-Op was struggling with B2B ecommerce requirements gathering because their initial platform build had been driven entirely by IT without structured input from sales, warehouse operations, or customer service. The result was an Adobe Commerce storefront that technically worked but didn’t reflect how their buyers actually ordered fasteners: by application data, cross-reference tables, and alphanumeric part numbers rather than browsing a traditional category tree.
After getting this right:
- Order correction rate reduced from 18% to 0.8% post-implementation
- Rework hours cut from 60/month to 8/month (87% reduction)
What changed was the process, not the platform. FHC ran a structured cross-functional workshop that included inside sales reps, warehouse managers, and their top 5 customers. They discovered that 60% of order errors originated from mismatched part numbers between their ERP and the storefront catalog. The fix involved building a cross-reference lookup directly into Adobe Commerce’s search, backed by real-time product master data from their ERP. Orders now validate against the ERP’s part number database before submission, catching mismatches at the point of entry rather than during fulfillment.
The workshop also surfaced a requirement for “order on behalf of” functionality, so sales reps could place orders for customers who called in, using the same validated workflow. That single feature eliminated the parallel phone-order process that had been generating most of the correction volume.
Need Help Implementing This?
Running a cross-functional requirements workshop is straightforward in concept, but configuring Adobe Commerce to reflect those requirements accurately for B2B manufacturing businesses is where complexity compounds. Contract pricing rules, approval chains, ERP-driven inventory visibility, and bulk ordering workflows all need to work together without manual workarounds. HumCommerce specializes in exactly this type of implementation for manufacturers and distributors running Epicor, NetSuite, or SAP Business One-connected B2B ecommerce. Our approach starts with the requirements workshop itself, ensuring that what gets documented actually translates into platform configuration that matches your operations. One recent engagement reduced quote turnaround time from 3-5 days to just hours by automating quote capture, approvals, and ERP/CPQ checks during the implementation phase.
Talk to a HumCommerce consultant about your B2B ecommerce requirements gathering setup.
