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B2B Commerce

B2B commerce is not retail with a login. Price depends on who is asking, the person buying often cannot approve the spend, and the catalogue a customer sees is a subset of the one you sell.

Diagnosis first

What makes B2B different

Four assumptions baked into every retail storefront stop being true the moment you sell to businesses.

  1. Price is not a property of the product

    It depends on the account, the contract, the volume and sometimes the date. A single price field cannot express that, and bolting discounts on top does not either.

  2. The buyer is not the payer

    Someone raises a basket, someone else approves it, finance pays on terms. A checkout that ends at a card form does not describe this transaction.

  3. Customers see different catalogues

    Contracted lines, restricted products, customer-specific SKUs and part numbers that differ from yours. Visibility is a rule, not a flag.

  4. Reordering is the main job

    Most B2B revenue is repeat. Order history, saved lists, CSV upload and quick-order by part number matter more than merchandising.

Start with how you actually price

B2B projects tend to begin with a brief about the storefront and discover, several weeks in, that nobody has written down how pricing actually works.

Not the official version — the real one. Which customers are on which contract, what happens when a contract lapses, who can authorise an exception, and whether the number in the ERP is the number that gets invoiced. Until that is explicit, no storefront can display a price with confidence.

That mapping is the first phase for a reason. It is also the part that tends to be genuinely useful to the business regardless of what gets built afterwards.

The portal is the product

For repeat B2B customers the storefront is not a shop window. It is an operational tool they use weekly, and they judge it the way they judge any tool: can I find the thing I bought last time, is the price right, when will it arrive, and where is my invoice.

Merchandising matters far less than it does in retail. Reordering, order history, saved lists and self-serve invoices matter far more. Designing a B2B site like a D2C site is the most common and most expensive mistake in this category.

Where this sits

This is a specialisation of eCommerce development rather than a separate discipline, and it depends heavily on integration work because the pricing authority is nearly always the ERP. If you are moving from a legacy B2B platform, the sequence is covered under platform migration.

Platforms

Where we build.

Integrations

Where B2B lives or dies

The storefront is the visible part. These four connections decide whether it is usable.

  • ERP as the pricing authority

    Contract prices, credit limits and account terms read from the system that owns them. Duplicating them into the storefront guarantees they will diverge.

  • Stock and lead times by account

    Allocated stock, backorder rules and realistic lead times, because a B2B buyer plans around dates rather than browsing for alternatives.

  • Customer part numbers

    Buyers search their own codes, not yours. Mapping those to your SKUs is a small feature with a disproportionate effect on adoption.

  • Invoicing and reconciliation

    Orders, POs and payments flowing to finance automatically, so terms-based selling does not create manual work on every order.

More on integration work

Your sales team is the system you are replacing

In most B2B businesses the pricing rules, the approval etiquette and the customer's preferred ordering habits live in the heads of a handful of account managers. The hard part of a B2B build is getting that out of their heads and into something explicit — and doing it in a way that makes their job easier rather than appearing to threaten it.

Talk through your model

Scope

What a build includes.

  • Company accounts with real hierarchy

    Parent companies, locations, buyers and approvers, with permissions that reflect how the customer's organisation actually works.

  • Contract pricing and price lists

    Account-specific pricing, volume breaks and negotiated rates, resolved from the system that owns them rather than duplicated into the storefront.

  • Quote and approval flows

    Request a quote, negotiate, convert to order. Approval chains where the buyer's own organisation requires them, with the audit trail finance will ask for.

  • Purchase orders and payment terms

    PO numbers, invoicing, credit limits and net terms, reconciled against your ERP rather than tracked in a spreadsheet.

  • Reordering built for volume

    Order history, saved lists, quick order by SKU or customer part number, and CSV upload for buyers working from their own systems.

  • A self-serve customer portal

    Invoices, order status, returns, users and addresses — so routine questions stop arriving as phone calls to your sales team.

How it runs

From first call to live.

  1. Commercial model 2–3 weeks

    How pricing is actually agreed, who approves what, which systems hold the contracts. This is a business mapping exercise before it is a technical one.

  2. Platform decision 1–2 weeks

    Shopify Plus B2B covers a good deal natively now. Adobe Commerce B2B covers more. Some requirements always need building. We decide on your rules, not a feature matrix.

  3. Build 12–20 weeks

    Accounts, pricing, quoting and the ERP connection in parallel. B2B builds run longer than D2C almost entirely because of pricing and integration complexity.

  4. Pilot with real accounts 3–4 weeks

    A handful of customers using it for genuine orders before anyone else is migrated. B2B buyers have habits, and the first ones will tell you what the brief missed.

  5. Roll out Ongoing

    Accounts onboarded in waves, with your sales team briefed on what customers can now do without them.

Frequently asked questions

Is Shopify Plus good enough for B2B?

For a large share of B2B, yes. Company accounts, price lists, payment terms and buyer permissions are native now, and the total cost of ownership is considerably lower than the alternatives. Where it struggles is very complex configurable products, deeply conditional pricing and sophisticated quote negotiation — which is where Adobe Commerce B2B earns its cost.

Can we sell B2B and D2C from the same store?

Yes, and often you should. The decision is whether they share one storefront with account-based pricing and catalogue visibility, or run as separate storefronts on one platform and one catalogue. Shared operations with separate experiences is the common answer; which is right depends on how different the two propositions are.

How do contract prices stay in sync with our ERP?

The ERP stays the authority and the storefront reads from it, either live at the point of display or on a scheduled sync with a cache. Live is more accurate and more fragile; cached is more robust and can be briefly stale. Which fits depends on how often your prices change and how your ERP handles load.

Do buyers actually use self-serve, or do they still phone?

Both, and that is fine. Adoption is highest for reordering and order status — the repetitive things buyers would rather not phone about. Complex or first-time orders often still involve a person. The goal is removing the routine calls, not removing your sales team.

What about customers who order by spreadsheet?

Support it. CSV upload and quick-order by part number are usually the difference between a B2B portal being adopted and being ignored, because they fit how procurement teams already work rather than asking them to change.

Want to talk through B2B Commerce for your store?

Tell us where it hurts. We will tell you honestly whether we are the right people for it.

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