The hidden cost of manual B2B order intake
B2B purchasing may have become increasingly digital, but it doesn’t always begin with a digital storefront. Buyers often send purchase orders by email, attach spreadsheets, upload PDFs or simply list what they need in a message. For many manufacturers, distributors and wholesalers, these requests trigger a familiar cycle of manual work that impacts productivity and efficiency:
- Sales and customer service teams must identify the customer in the CRM system and create an opportunity.
- Manually look up each product in a separate ERP system and match it to the catalog, potentially cross-checking with a warehouse or inventory management system for quantities and pricing.
- Build the quote line by line (potentially in a separate system or manually).
- Cross-check all of this with that customer’s specific pricing and catalog entitlements.
- And then enter every line into commerce systems before a quote or cart is ready.
A 50-line purchase order can mean dozens of repetitive lookups and data-entry steps. This can take anywhere from 30 minutes to a few days, depending on the complexity of the incoming request and the internal systems involved. And the more complex the catalog, customer-specific pricing and purchasing requirements, the more difficult it becomes to keep track of all requests, let alone ensuring that all data is accurate.
This is the offline-to-order problem: Buyers use the channels that work for them, even if they mean unstructured data, but businesses must manually translate those requests into structured commerce transactions.
An AI-enabled solution doesn’t necessarily force every buyer into a new purchasing process, but it can help automate the work that happens behind the scenes.
Meet commercetools Intake: From unstructured requests to structured commerce
Intake is an AI-powered, API-first solution that converts unstructured buyer requests into structured commerce objects — quotes, cards and shopping lists — in seconds. Available through commercetools’ Merchant Center, our business tooling, and APIs, it helps B2B businesses capture orders from the channels their customers already use.
When buyers send requests through emails, PDFs, spreadsheets and free text, Intake undertakes the following steps:
- Extracts the relevant information.
- Maps products to the commercetools catalog.
- Identifies the customer and relevant business context.
- Generates an editable output for review, which can be a cart, a frozen cart, a quote request or a shopping list.
Key capabilities include:
- Multi-format ingestion: Process free text, emails, spreadsheets and PDF purchase orders.
- Automated product and customer mapping: Resolve SKUs, customer or business unit identity, and store or channel context.
- Editable drafts: Review and correct extracted line items, with flagged SKU errors to help resolve mismatches.
- Flexible commerce outputs: Generate carts, freeze cart pricing and related commercial details, initiate quote requests or create shopping lists.
- API-first integration: Connect Intake to customer portals, support systems and enterprise applications to automate workflows across channels.
Intake is also evolving beyond one-off document processing. Shopping Lists are now supported in both Merchant Center and the API, including natural-language list generation and the ability to query carts created through Intake.
What does Intake look like in practice?
Consider a sales representative receiving an email containing 23 medical supply SKUs and a reference to a framework agreement.
Instead of entering every line manually, the representative pastes the request into Intake in the Merchant Center. Intake extracts the products and quantities, matches them against the catalog and presents an editable cart draft. The representative resolves any flagged items, checks the commercial details and creates a quote with a defined validity period.
The customer can then review the quote and accept, decline or renegotiate it.
In another scenario, a distributor receives a multi-page PDF purchase order. Intake extracts the line items and generates a cart. The sales representative reviews the result, applies any negotiated pricing overrides and freezes the cart to lock its commercial details before notifying the customer to review and check out.
For customers without an EDI connection, this offers another way to digitize purchasing requests without requiring changes to how they submit orders.
From order intake to AI-assisted procurement
Automating document processing is an important first step, but the broader opportunity is connecting purchasing activities that have traditionally been fragmented across channels and systems.
As B2B organizations explore AI-assisted procurement and agentic commerce, they need ways to translate human requests into structured, actionable commerce data. They also need integrations that connect AI capabilities to existing business rules, catalogs and enterprise workflows.
Intake supports this direction in five ways:
When buyers can submit orders through familiar channels and businesses can turn those requests into carts, quotes and shopping lists, more purchasing activity can be captured directly in the commerce platform.
This is especially valuable for complex B2B organizations where email and purchase orders remain central to customer relationships, but cause mayhem to internal productivity.
Because Intake is API-first, developers can connect it to upstream and downstream systems, including CRMs, ERPs, CPQs and customer support platforms.
For example:
- A support ticket in Zendesk could trigger an intake workflow that creates a quote request.
- A customer portal could use the API to turn an uploaded CSV into a shopping list.
- A sales team could convert buyer emails into carts without manually re-entering every line.
The commercetools Intake Skill, part of our commercetools for Builders library, makes these integrations easier to build. Available through AI coding tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code with Copilot and Codex, it provides developers with ready-made guidance for connecting unstructured customer input to Intake, including email and Zendesk workflows.
This reduces the effort required to build custom integrations and helps businesses connect AI-assisted intake to the tools their teams already use.
B2B catalogs and purchasing conventions vary considerably. A book retailer might identify products by ISBN-13, while an industrial distributor may rely on manufacturer part numbers or industry-specific reference codes.
Intake supports self-serve configuration in the Merchant Center, helping administrators define custom instructions that guide Intake’s interpretation of incoming requests and configure up to 3 custom product search attributes.
This allows businesses to adapt Intake to their catalogs and ordering conventions without waiting for a customer-specific code change. It also helps organizations maintain more consistent product matching as their catalogs evolve.
Intake is designed to integrate seamlessly into complex enterprise environments. It can connect with ERP systems for inventory and fulfillment data, CRMs for customer context, pricing engines, procurement workflows and custom SKU mapping logic, enabling businesses to automate highly specialized B2B processes with the technologies they already have in place, without extensive replatforming or brittle custom solutions.
It’s also worth noting that Intake works natively within commercetools’ unified commerce ecosystem, mapping unstructured inputs directly to catalog data, business units, customer-specific pricing, entitlements and discounts without requiring separate orchestration layers or custom middleware, and without the need for an MCP server.
By harmonizing products, customer accounts, pricing, business rules and organizational structures in a single platform, the agent can accurately interpret and convert complex intake requests into actionable carts and orders with minimal human intervention.
Intake supports the realities of enterprise B2B commerce, including large catalogs, negotiated pricing, customer-specific assortments and multi-business-unit purchasing structures. By embedding AI-driven intake directly into commerce operations, organizations can improve speed, reduce order-entry errors and increase sales team productivity while maintaining governance, accuracy and operational control.
The benefits Intake brings to B2B procurement
The immediate value of Intake is practical: Less repetitive work, faster processing and a more scalable way to handle buyer requests.
- For sales and service teams, it reduces the time spent re-keying orders, looking up SKUs and preparing carts or quotes. Representatives can focus more on customer relationships and commercial decisions rather than administrative tasks.
- For buyers, it offers a smoother path from a purchase request to a ready-to-review cart, quote or shopping list, without requiring every order to begin in a storefront.
- For enterprise organizations, configurable behavior and API-based integrations make it easier to adapt intake to different catalogs, customer channels and operational processes.
For instance, Mirion Technologies, a B2B manufacturer of nuclear measurement solutions for radiation safety, uses Intake to automate parts of its Cart Assist process and support customers throughout the quoting journey across its technology and medical business lines.
Turning buyer requests into business opportunities
B2B purchasing won’t always start in a storefront, and it doesn’t have to. With Intake, manufacturers, distributors and wholesalers can turn the emails, PDFs and spreadsheets they already receive into structured carts, quotes and shopping lists, reducing manual work and helping sales teams respond faster.
By combining an order intake agent with self-serve configuration and API-first integrations, commercetools Intake helps businesses connect existing purchasing processes to their digital commerce operations. It’s a practical step toward AI-assisted procurement today and a foundation for more connected, increasingly automated B2B buying experiences tomorrow.
The opportunity is simple: Spend less time processing orders manually and more time helping customers buy. As businesses continue to explore agentic commerce, Intake helps make that transition tangible, one buyer request at a time.
Ready to explore the B2B Intake Agent?Contact us for more information.
FAQs
commercetools Intake is an AI-powered, API-first solution that converts unstructured B2B buyer requests, including emails, PDFs, spreadsheets and free text, into structured commerce objects such as carts, quote requests and shopping lists.
Intake extracts product information and quantities from incoming requests, matches products to the commercetools catalog, resolves relevant customer and business context, and creates an editable commerce draft. Sales teams can review flagged items and adjust commercial details before proceeding.
Intake supports carts, frozen carts, quote requests and shopping lists. Shopping list creation is available through both Merchant Center and the API.
Yes. Intake is API-first and can be integrated with enterprise systems and customer-facing applications. Developers can use the commercetools Intake Skill with AI coding tools to help build integrations, including workflows involving email and Zendesk.
Yes. Organization administrators can configure custom agent instructions and up to three custom product search attributes in Merchant Center. This helps Intake interpret business-specific order formats and match products using fields such as ISBNs or manufacturer part numbers.
Intake converts buyer requests into structured commerce data for downstream systems and workflows. By connecting this capability to customer portals, enterprise systems and other applications, businesses can automate more of the purchasing journey. Intake provides a foundation for these workflows; broader autonomous purchasing depends on the integrations and controls implemented around it.
Manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers and other B2B businesses can benefit, particularly those handling high volumes of purchase orders, customer-specific product codes, negotiated pricing or requests submitted outside digital storefronts.
Businesses can explore Intake through the commercetools Merchant Center and APIs, configure it for their catalogs, and integrate it into their existing sales, support and procurement workflows.
