Consumer e-commerce can get away with mediocre search because browsing is part of the experience. Nobody browses an industrial supply catalog for fun.
In B2B, your buyer knows what they need. They need to find it fast, confirm it's right, and order it. If your search can't do that in under 30 seconds, they're calling your sales desk or going to a competitor.
This means search in B2B distribution needs to handle: part number lookups (exact and partial), cross-reference matching, spec-based filtering, natural language queries from field techs who describe problems not products, and UOM variations.
Most out-of-the-box search engines handle maybe two of those well. The rest requires investment — in configuration, in data normalization, in testing against real query logs.
If you're building a digital commerce platform and search isn't getting disproportionate attention, you're building the wrong thing first.