Maximizing Agility and Control in B2B Commerce with Shopware

SAP Commerce Cloud and the Agent at the Door

Author

Brent Peterson
July 23, 2026

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The Talk Commerce Podcast Newsletter

Who have we been talking to lately? Focusing on conversations about eCommerce, AI, Entrepreneurship, and Marketing.

This Week's Featured Article: SAP's Quiet Play for Agentic Commerce

When you picture agentic commerce, you don't picture SAP. Yet at NRF in January, SAP showed up with one of the more credible agentic plays in enterprise commerce — and barely anyone noticed.

SAP Commerce Cloud (formerly hybris, acquired in 2013) spent the last decade decoupling its front end from its monolithic core, first with Spartacus and now the Composable Storefront. That groundwork, done for other reasons, is paying off now. Clean APIs are exactly what agents need.

The announcement: a Storefront MCP server targeting Q2 2026 GA, exposing catalog, pricing, inventory, and promotions to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude. Already shipping: a Shopping Agent and Digital Service Agent via Joule. Plus a Google Cloud partnership wiring Gemini into brand shopping assistants.

SAP's edge is gravity, not agility. While Shopify wins speed and commercetools wins architecture, SAP owns the ERP backbone — the negotiated prices, contract terms, and inventory truth an agent needs to be right. For B2B especially, that's decisive.

The catch: most capability is roadmap through 2026, the core stays monolithic, and every merchant must deploy the MCP server themselves. SAP built the door. Customers still have to open it.

Our Latest Episodes:

Maximizing Agility and Control in B2B Commerce with Shopware

How do modern merchants navigate the rapidly shifting rules of enterprise B2B e-commerce?

Shopware General Manager Jason Nyhus to address the critical challenges facing digital commerce. They discuss the newly released B2B report, co-authored by Brent, emphasizing that real-world insight from system integrators must replace biased software sales pitches.

A major highlight of the conversation covers the severe risks of platform lock-in. With proprietary, closed SaaS systems recently pulling the plug on legal but high-risk categories like vapes, merchants in regulated industries are waking up to their business continuity risks. Jason explains how Shopware preserves operational safety by remaining platform-neutral on hosting and payment providers.

The Next Trillion Dollar Commerce Opportunity Is Local with Chaitra Vedullapalli

What if the future of commerce isn't about going bigger, but going local?

Coming up next!

Get ready for eTail Boston 

August 10-12

Hosts Brent Peterson and Isaac Morey sit down with Chaitra Vedullapalli, Co-Founder and President of Women in Cloud, to discuss why the next trillion-dollar commerce opportunity is local.

Chaitra explains how geopolitical shifts, tariffs, and consumer fatigue are redirecting business strategy back to communities. Consumers want trusted local discovery, meaningful savings, and real human connection. Fortune brands that partner with local businesses through ecosystem orchestration will define the next era of commerce.

The conversation also tackles AI's role in business. Chaitra argues that while AI is a powerful tool, it looks backward and pushes sideways. It won't provoke, inspire, or challenge the way humans do. Trust will become infrastructure, and human-in-the-loop will become the standard for responsible AI in commerce.

How to Build True Market Authority with Long Form Thought Leadership

Want your brand to become the name buyers repeat in every boardroom?

Generic blog posts and AI-generated filler have flooded the internet, drowning out brands trying to build real authority. Winning buyer trust now requires depth, not volume.

At Content Cucumber, we transform your operational expertise into premium, authoritative assets. Our team crafts high-impact industry reports, in-depth competitor comparisons, and rich case studies that showcase what only you know.

We write for humans first, structuring your insights so buyers, analysts, and answer engines point to your brand as the definitive source. Skip the generic noise and build a content library that shapes major purchasing decisions in your favor.

Your creative brief is due Friday. Viktor wrote it Tuesday.

Tell him the campaign. Viktor pulls last quarter's performance from Meta and TikTok, scrapes competitor ads, drafts the brief, posts it for review. You edit, he ships the creative requests to your designer. Inside Slack.

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