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Our products are too complex for e-commerce—is an all-too-common refrain that comes up whenever digital sales are discussed in industrial manufacturing.

This belief can seem especially justified in segments dealing with large, engineered-to-order systems such as high‑power electric motors and drives. Configurations run into dozens of parameters, project scope spans multiple business units and countries, and the commercial process is tightly intertwined with engineering.

Yet market dynamics are shifting faster than legacy beliefs. Customers, including sophisticated system integrators, increasingly want to research, select, configure, and even purchase highly complex equipment without waiting for a salesperson. In many cases, they are confident they know their own requirements better than the supplier’s representative does. At the same time, not everything can or should be digital—some industrial assets are physically enormous, technically unique, and require intensive collaboration to engineer and deliver.

This defines the next frontier of industrial e-commerce, moving beyond a narrow focus on the buy button towards a digitally enabled sales journey that creates value long before order placement, and continues long after. 

At E-Connect Europe Business Platform 2026 – Power of 50, Maurice Bernards, Global Product Portfolio Manager at ABB Motion, explored how success can be achieved within a multi-billion-dollar motion business division that delivers complex electric motors and frequency converters worldwide.

Redefining Complexity: Product vs. Process

A recurring obstacle in industrial digitalisation is an undifferentiated notion of complexity. Products may indeed be complex, but commercial processes often are unnecessarily complex as well. Treating these as the same thing can stall progress.

A critical distinction stands out:

• Product complexity: The technical sophistication of what is being sold, for example, a high‑power motor several metres high, or a drive with 50–60 parameters to specify. Product complexity is inherent and often essential to performance.
• Process complexity: How difficult it is for customers and internal teams to navigate selection, configuration, pricing, quoting, ordering, and order tracking. Process complexity is frequently self‑inflicted and therefore addressable.

When organisations claim they are too complex for e-commerce, they often conflate the two. The more important question is whether customers find it too complex to buy, not whether the product itself is complex. Even for large, heavy-duty drives that span several metres, some customers explicitly ask to manage the entire journey themselves, to select, configure, request a quote, order, and track, without sales involvement.

This challenges two entrenched beliefs:

• We must always be at the customer’s table. In many industrial sectors, customer intimacy has been equated with physical presence in every decision. However, customers increasingly want the option to self‑serve for many tasks, and they may already understand their own technical requirements better than any external salesperson.
• Complex products cannot be sold digitally. In practice, digitising the upstream steps, such as selection, configuration, pricing visibility, and quotation, is more valuable than automating the final order. Even when final contracts are signed offline, especially for very large machines, significant parts of the journey can be simplified and accelerated online.

Leaders who separate product complexity from process complexity open the door to targeted digitalisation, preserving necessary technical depth while removing avoidable commercial friction.

From E‑Commerce Site to Connected Digital Ecosystem

Once complexity is reframed, the focus shifts to how the digital sales environment should be designed. Expanding beyond a single commerce site, the model evolves into a connected digital ecosystem aligned with the industrial buying journey—one that enables customers to move seamlessly from discovery and entry, through product selection and configuration, to pricing, quotation, and ultimately order placement and tracking.

Designing around this journey requires an architecture built from several integrated components.

A central digital entry point

A cross‑divisional e-commerce platform is the primary point of entry, effectively a customer portal rather than a webshop. Customers increasingly request to just send them there and expect to access everything from that hub, including product information, configuration tools, quotations, and orders.

Specialised configurators

For complex motors and drives, modern configurators are critical. These tools support advanced selection and configuration with dozens of technical parameters, often supported by 3D visualisation. Unlike static catalogues, configurators embed engineering logic and guide users to valid, application‑appropriate setups. Opening configurators to customers unlocks significant value, as the configuration phase is where users spend most of their time. Allowing technically capable customers to self‑serve reduces cycle times and frees internal experts to focus on higher‑value engineering instead of repetitive specification work.

A common quotation platform

Industrial projects often involve more than one product family or business unit. No single configurator can handle every combination required in a complex RFQ. To bridge this, a common quotation platform aggregates configurable products and other items into one coherent offer, producing a unified quotation for the customer.

The platform can be used by sales teams to assemble offers for cross‑divisional or mixed portfolios, while still integrating output from the specialist configurators. The outcome is a consistent quotation process and document, even when multiple internal silos are involved.

A dual‑layer model for customers and sales

The ecosystem is deliberately designed with two interconnected but distinct layers:

• Self‑service layer: For customers who want to work independently, the full journey, from exploration to configuration, pricing, and order conversion, can be completed digitally, without human intervention. The objective is to serve customers the way they choose to be served.
• Assisted sales layer: Internal sales teams follow a very similar journey, but with tools optimised for their efficiency. Sales can configure on behalf of customers, assemble quotations across portfolios, and convert opportunities into orders more rapidly.

Design priorities differ. The top layer is driven by customer choice and experience. The bottom layer is driven by internal productivity. Organisations that conflate the two risk building tools that satisfy neither.

Defining and Demonstrating Value: From Speed to Strategic Outcomes

Digital commerce and sales tools are often justified with vague promises of better customer experience or modernisation. That is rarely sufficient for senior leaders managing billion‑dollar portfolios. What ultimately matters is growth and cost savings.

Operational improvements can be turned into strategic outcomes through a value logic built on three primary drivers.

Speed

Speed is defined as time-to-serve, particularly time to quote and time from quote to order. For complex industrial offerings, quoting can be a major bottleneck.

Evidence from the Motion Business Area shows a strong link:

• Faster quotation response can support higher prices;  
• Faster responses increase win rates;  
• Both combine to drive more orders and revenue growth;

Investing in sales digitalisation to reduce quote time is directly tied to pricing power and hit rates. However, sensitivity to speed varies, as smaller and medium‑sized customers are typically highly responsive to faster turnaround, while large accounts may move slowly regardless of supplier responsiveness.

Efficiency

Efficiency is framed primarily as sales productivity, more sales per salesperson, and more engineering output per engineer. Digital tools are evaluated on their ability to:

• Reduce manual administrative tasks (e.g., rekeying specifications, repetitive document preparation);  
• Minimise non‑value‑adding time in sales and engineering;  
• Shift internal focus toward high‑value activities like solution design, customer engagement, and complex deal structuring.

Efficiency gains free capacity to win and deliver more business with the same headcount.

Resilience

Resilience relates to the ability to meet evolving customer needs and remain relevant in changing markets. A digitally enabled sales journey helps industrial suppliers:

• Offer multiple engagement models, such as full self‑service, assisted, or hybrid;  
• Maintain continuity when physical access is limited or organisational structures change;  
• Adapt faster to new customer expectations, especially as younger, digitally native engineers and buyers enter the workforce.

When organisations can show how digital solutions enhance speed, efficiency, and resilience, and explicitly link these to growth and cost outcomes, they move the discussion from tools to strategy.

Change Management: Carrot, Stick, and Accountability

No digital platform, however well designed, will deliver value without adoption. Technology is the smaller part of the equation. People, incentives, and accountability determine whether a digital sales transformation scales.

Achieving adoption requires two critical and complementary forces: the pull and push.

Pull: Awareness, training, and engagement

On the pull side, organisations must:

• Build awareness of why change is needed and how it benefits individuals and teams; 
• Provide structured training, so users know how to achieve their targets using new tools;  
• Bring development teams closer to both customers and front‑line sales, minimising layers and misalignment;
• Continuously communicate progress, share success stories, and involve users in improving the tools.

This soft side of change is essential to reduce resistance and equip people for new ways of working.

Push: Targets, incentives, and consequences

Without measurable targets, digital channels risk remaining peripheral, underused, or treated as optional. Therefore, accountability must be embedded directly into the organisation. This can include linking a portion of managerial variable compensation to digital adoption or commercial outcomes, defining role-specific digital KPIs at different levels, and ensuring that ownership of digital transformation targets is clearly assigned within each unit.

Push and pull must work together. Imposing targets without equipping teams leads to frustration and superficial compliance, while building enthusiasm without accountability rarely scales beyond early adopters. Significant impact comes from combining both: engagement supported by clear expectations and consequences.

For senior leaders, this makes governance, incentives, and change management core elements of digital programmes from the outset, rather than additions introduced after the tools are in place.

AI in Industrial Sales: Useful or Merely Funny?

Artificial intelligence is now an unavoidable theme in any conversation about digital transformation. However, there’s a sharp line between experiments that entertain and deployments that create measurable value.

For example, some industrial buyers perceive current chatbot implementations as funny but not reliable. Competitors may introduce front‑end AI chat for customer support or sales, only to withdraw it later because it cannot consistently provide accurate, trustworthy answers.

In complex industrial contexts, AI is not yet mature enough to serve as the primary interface for customers’ technical or commercial queries. Reliability is non‑negotiable when specifications are safety‑critical, capital-intensive, and often project‑defining.

However, AI is already delivering substantial value in internal efficiency, particularly for processing complex RFQs and specifications.

One example is the specifier upload capability:

• Industrial RFQs often arrive as large, dense documents with extensive technical and commercial requirements.  
• In the past, salespeople might spend days just reading, interpreting, and extracting what was relevant for their offering.  
• With AI‑powered analysis, the RFQ document can be uploaded and processed in seconds, surfacing the key information relevant for the supplier’s products.  
• The extracted requirements can then be passed directly into configurators, reducing manual effort and cycle time.

In this case, AI is applied behind the scenes to augment sales teams rather than replace them. What previously took days or even weeks of manual work can be compressed into seconds, accelerating responses and increasing sales capacity.

The broader lesson for industrial leaders is to prioritise AI use cases that:

• Operate in controlled, internal environments where imperfect output can be validated and corrected;
• Directly attack major bottlenecks in the sales and engineering process;  
• Are evaluated in terms of productivity gains and cycle‑time reduction, not just novelty.

AI should be deployed where it is reliably useful, not where it risks becoming a fragile customer‑facing façade.

Staying Digitally Close to the Customer

Industrial culture equates proximity with physical presence: being at the table, on‑site, in the meeting. Digital transformation challenges this assumption.

Customer proximity in a digital age means:

• Listening carefully to how customers actually want to work, including those who explicitly request to self‑serve for complex configurations and ordering.  
• Reducing organisational layers between those building digital tools and those using them, internally and externally.
• Using real customer feedback to counter internal myths, such as our customers don’t want this, by presenting concrete cases that show the opposite.  
• Recognising that for some segments and use cases, the most customer‑centric action is enabling independence, not insisting on direct involvement.

This does not diminish the importance of human relationships, especially for large, strategic, or highly customised projects. It does, however, require organisations to broaden their understanding of intimacy, being reachable and responsive through the channels and modes customers prefer, whether that is a technical meeting in person or a fully digital configurator accessed at any time.

An Iterative, Long-Horizon Journey

Building a robust e-commerce platform and connected ecosystem can take several years, from establishing the core technology plumbing to progressive roll‑out across dozens of countries. In some markets, the shift from manual and legacy systems to the new platform can increase online order shares up to 90%.

Progress is cumulative and non‑linear:

• Early years are often infrastructure‑heavy, focused on integration, master data, and architecture.  
• Once the foundation is in place and adoption starts to grow, traction can be rapid, but success brings new complexity as more countries, products, and units demand inclusion.  
• Maintaining focus becomes harder as digital success increases, because the organisation pulls the programme in multiple directions.

Leaders are therefore advised to prioritise the highest‑value journeys first, stay disciplined on scope, and accept that digital sales transformation is a long‑term, iterative process rather than a one‑off project.

Designing for the Full Journey, Not Just the Transaction

Industrial companies operating in complex fields are proving that e-commerce is not limited to spare parts and commodity components. They are expanding the scope from a narrow focus on the transaction to the entire buying and selling journey.

For organisations seeking to move in this direction:

• Separate product complexity from process complexity. Preserve technical depth where needed, but simplify how customers and sales teams navigate the commercial process.
• Build a connected digital ecosystem, not an isolated webshop. Integrate portals, configurators, and common quotation platforms around real customer journeys, for both self‑service and assisted models.
• Anchor the business case in speed, efficiency, and resilience, and explicitly link these to growth and cost outcomes. Time‑to‑quote and quote‑to‑order are powerful levers.
• Treat change management as a pull and push. Combine awareness, training, and engagement with clear targets, incentives, and accountability across the organisation.
• Use AI where it is reliably useful today, in internal efficiency, RFQ processing, and sales support, rather than fragile, customer‑facing front ends that cannot guarantee the needed reliability.
• Redefine customer proximity for a digital era. Being close to customers increasingly means enabling the autonomy they ask for, supported by tools that reflect their level of technical sophistication.

Going beyond e-commerce in industrial markets is about respecting the true complexity of the products while refusing to accept unnecessary complexity in how they are bought and sold. Organisations that master this balance will not only improve customer experience but also unlock material gains in growth, productivity, and resilience across their global operations.