The commercebuild Story: 20 Years of ERP-First eCommerce
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Twenty years is a long time in technology. Platforms change, customer expectations evolve, new technologies emerge, and entire categories can transform almost overnight. Through all of that change, commercebuild has remained focused on an idea that has been with us from the beginning: eCommerce works better when it is deeply connected to the ERP at the heart of the business.
In July 2026, commercebuild turned 20. It’s a milestone that gives us an opportunity to look back at where we started, recognize the people, customers, and partners who helped us get here, and reflect on how everything we’ve learned over the past two decades is influencing where we go next.
The commercebuild of today looks very different from the company that began in New Zealand 20 years ago. Our products have evolved, our team has grown and changed, and the ERP ecosystems we support have expanded. But the fundamental idea behind what we do has remained remarkably consistent. In many ways, commercebuild has been ERP-first from the beginning.
The Idea That Started commercebuild
The commercebuild story actually begins before the company itself. Blair Watkins, Co-Founder and CTO of commercebuild, founded a hosting and internet company while at university. As that business grew, he created his own content management system and online ordering portal and began integrating it with the systems behind major businesses.
That work eventually included integrations for McDonald’s, Nestlé, and Coca-Cola, connecting his online ordering platform with their third-party logistics warehouses. Seeing those integrations in action taught Blair something that would ultimately shape commercebuild: the real opportunity wasn’t simply creating an online ordering system. It was making the systems behind the business communicate properly.
Believing there was a larger opportunity, Blair began looking for a major ERP platform to connect the ordering technology to. The research kept pointing to Sage Accpac, now Sage 300. With more than 40,000 installations at the time, a global footprint, and an established partner network, it provided an opportunity to take the integration model they had already proven and build something much bigger around it.
The first product was named Oxygen, accompanied by a tagline that captured exactly what the team wanted to accomplish:
“Breathe life into your ERP.”
With that, the foundation for commercebuild was established.
From New Zealand to a Global Business
The early company wasn’t backed by outside investment. For its first four years, it was entirely self-funded, with the team building the business one customer at a time. Target Furniture, a large furniture retailer in New Zealand, became the first customer, followed by Micro Scooters. Momentum gradually built, and before long, approximately 30 customers across New Zealand and Australia were using the technology.
Then an email arrived that would change the trajectory of the business. It came from a group in North America with an opportunity to bring Oxygen to a new market. After a Skype call, Blair and the team found themselves preparing to introduce what they had built in New Zealand to customers and partners on the other side of the world.
That journey took them to a trade show in Denver, an event Blair still remembers as one of the defining moments in commercebuild’s history. The team demonstrated Oxygen to the North American Sage community, established relationships that would help open the market, and landed commercebuild’s first North American customer. What had begun as a New Zealand company was becoming a global one.
Paul Stacey, now VP of Client Success at commercebuild, was part of those formative North American years. He joined XM Developments, the original company name behind commercebuild, in July 2010 as its first North American employee. Paul met Blair at Sage Insights in Denver that summer, where the team proudly demonstrated XM Oxygen to Sage Accpac users.
Being part of a small team meant wearing many hats. Paul handled pre-sales, implementations, and support for North American customers and prospects, but he remembers being confident about the company’s potential from the beginning:
“We had a great product at the right time, a small but mighty experienced team of people, and we built upon the belief that success was ours to enjoy as we expanded to support Sage X3, and later, Microsoft Business Central.”
Twenty Years Built by People
A lot has changed since the early days of XM Developments and the launch of Oxygen. The company became commercebuild, the technology continued to evolve, and the business expanded into new markets and ERP ecosystems. But when the people who have experienced different parts of those 20 years reflect on what has allowed the company to endure, the conversation quickly moves beyond technology.
For Blair, the defining factor has always been the people who were willing to believe in the company and contribute to it. He remembers the colleagues who took a chance during commercebuild’s earliest years, the partners who helped open doors in North America, and the many people who have brought their talent, expertise, and energy to the company since.
“Products can be rebuilt and markets can shift, but the people who choose to believe in something before it’s proven, they’re what a company is really made of.”
Blair sums it up simply:
“commercebuild is the sum of all those people.”
Paul has experienced that culture over 16 years with the company. He describes teamwork as one of the constants throughout commercebuild’s evolution: colleagues willing to help one another, share what they know, and bring new ideas to the business. Looking back through old company photographs now, he sees team members who have come and gone, each leaving something behind that contributed to what commercebuild became.
Chris de Visser, CEO of commercebuild, believes the company continues to benefit from that combination of experience and new thinking today:
“What I’m most proud of isn’t any single feature or release, it’s the mix of people who’ve made that possible. We’ve got folks who’ve been here since the beginning, and folks who joined last year, and somehow that combination is what keeps us moving forward.”
For Chris, long-standing team members bring history and hard-won lessons, while newer employees bring fresh perspectives and challenge the company to continue evolving. Blair shares that confidence in the current team, describing it as the strongest in commercebuild’s history. Twenty years may give commercebuild experience, but it is the ability to combine that experience with new ideas that keeps the company moving.
Customers at the Heart of the Journey
The people inside commercebuild are only part of the 20-year story. The other major part belongs to the businesses that have trusted commercebuild and the partners who have worked alongside us. Perhaps one of the strongest signs of those relationships is that some of the customers who joined commercebuild during its early years remain customers today.
For Paul, those long-standing relationships are a source of particular pride:
“Many of the customers we signed up back in those early days remain with us today, and that makes me smile!”
Over the years, Paul has met customers face-to-face at events such as Sage Insights and Sage Summit, while other relationships were built over phone calls and, later, video meetings. Some of those relationships have continued for well over a decade. He believes customers stay not only because the product continues to evolve around their needs, but because of the expertise and service of the people they work with across commercebuild.
That expertise comes from many different backgrounds. Some commercebuild team members have worked within businesses as eCommerce users themselves. Others bring deep technical expertise or years of experience working with ERP systems. Others specialize in understanding customers and building the relationships that help businesses get more from their technology. Together, those different perspectives have influenced how commercebuild approaches both its platform and customer success.
Few people represent that connection between customer and company better than Donavon Yelton, WooCommerce Product Manager at commercebuild, who first experienced commercebuild as a customer before eventually joining the team.
“I first experienced commercebuild as a customer, so I’ve always looked at the platform through the lens of the day-to-day problems customers are actually trying to solve.”
That perspective stayed with him after joining commercebuild and gave him a deeper appreciation for the people working behind the platform.
“What has kept me connected to commercebuild is the mix of customer focus, technical problem-solving, and a team that genuinely wants to keep improving what we do.”
His journey from customer to colleague is also a reminder that technology has never been the end goal. The measure of the platform has always been whether it helps customers solve real business problems.
ERP-First From the Beginning
The eCommerce industry of 2026 bears little resemblance to the one commercebuild entered 20 years ago. Since then, eCommerce has continued through recessions, economic booms and busts, major technological shifts, and dramatic changes in how businesses and customers buy.
commercebuild has changed alongside that world, but Chris believes one of the reasons the company has endured is that it never tried to become everything to everyone:
“Twenty years is a long time in tech, most companies in our space don’t make it this far, let alone stay focused on one thing the whole way through. What’s kept commercebuild going is that we never tried to be everything to everyone. We found our niche in ERP-first eCommerce early on and just kept getting better at it, year after year.”
That focus has expanded across different ERP ecosystems as the company has grown. What began around Sage Accpac evolved to include Sage X3, Sage Intacct and later Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. The platform itself has changed dramatically as well, but the philosophy behind it remains closely connected to what Blair and the original team were trying to accomplish with Oxygen.
The ERP already sits at the heart of so many of the processes that make a business run. Products, pricing, inventory, customer information, orders, and other critical business data live there. commercebuild’s focus has been on extending that foundation into eCommerce, helping businesses create online experiences that remain connected to the systems and data they depend on every day.
The technology used to accomplish that today would be almost unrecognizable to the team that built Oxygen, but the thinking behind it would not.
Building on 20 Years of Experience
When Blair reflects on the past 20 years, one idea stands out: none of that experience has been wasted. Every customer won and lost, every problem solved, every late night, every technical challenge, and every hard lesson has contributed to the knowledge commercebuild carries today. The same is true of every person who has played a role in the company’s journey.
At its peak, commercebuild employed more than 70 people, a remarkable evolution for a company that began self-funded in New Zealand. For Blair, however, the significance of those years isn’t simply how large the company became. It is that the work and experience accumulated along the way continue to form the foundation of what commercebuild is building today.
That experience is now shaping Composer, our next-generation eCommerce platform. Built on 20 years of experience in ERP-first eCommerce, Composer represents a significant evolution in what commercebuild can offer customers and partners. Completely re-architected around the latest technologies, Composer brings together an advanced CMS, AI-powered site management and maintenance, and AI-powered extensions for customization, creating new possibilities for how businesses build, manage, and evolve their eCommerce experiences.
Composer isn’t a break from the previous 20 years. It is the result of them. The lessons accumulated across thousands of customer conversations, implementations, support requests, product decisions, and technical challenges continue to shape what commercebuild can build today.
The technology may look very different from the Oxygen platform demonstrated in Denver all those years ago, but the idea behind it remains remarkably familiar: deeply connect eCommerce with the ERP and make it easier for businesses to do more.
Twenty years of experience have created the foundation for commercebuild’s next chapter, and Composer is an important part of where that experience is taking us next.
Celebrating 20 Years Together
Reaching 20 years is something we are incredibly proud of, but commercebuild didn’t reach this milestone because of one founder, one leadership team, one product, or one defining moment. It happened one customer, one partner, one employee, one implementation, one problem solved, and one relationship at a time.
To the customers who took a chance on Oxygen in the early days and those who have joined us throughout the years, thank you for trusting us with your businesses. To the ERP partners who opened doors, shared opportunities, challenged us, and worked alongside us, thank you for helping commercebuild grow from a New Zealand company into the global business it is today.
And to everyone who has worked at commercebuild over the past two decades, thank you for the ideas, expertise, hard work, and part of your lives that you contributed to this company. The commercebuild we are celebrating today was built from all of it, and the experience accumulated over those 20 years continues to influence what we are creating now.
As Blair reflects on the milestone:
“I’m super excited and proud of what everyone has achieved in this company over the years.”
Twenty years after Oxygen first set out to “breathe life into your ERP,” that original belief in connected, ERP-first eCommerce remains at the heart of commercebuild. What has grown around it is two decades of experience, relationships, people, and lessons that will continue to shape the company for years to come.
To every customer, partner, and team member who has been part of that journey, thank you for helping make these first 20 years possible.
