B2B ecommerce agency for distributors and manufacturers.

What a B2B ecommerce build includes#

A retail store shows one price to everyone. A trade store shows each account its own price, to buyers who already know the part number and expect to pay on terms. B2B ecommerce website development is the work of closing that gap.

Trade buyers already order electronically. The Census Bureau's 2024 figures, released in September 2026, put e-commerce at $4,649.4 billion of US manufacturers' shipments (66.6 percent) and $4,224.1 billion of merchant wholesale sales (38.3 percent), against $1,182.9 billion (16.6 percent) in retail. Census counts orders placed over EDI networks, extranets and email as e-commerce too, so the website is one ordering channel among several, and a B2B build has to serve all of them.

What trade buyers expect, and what we build:

• Company accounts and buyer roles. One company, many buyers: who can order, who approves, who pays the invoices.
• Customer-specific catalogs and price lists. Contract prices, quantity breaks and the products each account is allowed to see.
• Quotes and approvals. Buyers request a price, sales negotiates, and an accepted quote becomes an order without re-keying.
• Net terms and credit. Pay on account against a credit limit the ERP enforces.
• Quick order and reorder. SKU entry, saved lists, and last month's order again without hunting for it.
• Punchout and EDI. For buyers whose procurement system won't let them shop your website directly.

Every item on that list reads from or writes to the ERP, which is why our B2B ecommerce development services start with the sync, not the storefront.

Which platform fits your B2B catalog#

Start with the line in Shopify's help center that matters most for B2B. Shopify B2B is available on the Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus plans, but below Plus you can assign up to 3 active catalogs across all your B2B markets; unlimited catalogs and direct assignment to companies and locations are Plus features. A distributor with contract pricing per account is a Plus conversation from the start.

The five columns, briefly:

• Adobe Commerce B2B ships company accounts, shared catalogs, negotiable quotes, purchase-order approvals, requisition lists, Quick Order and Pay on Account in one extension, which Adobe supports on Adobe Commerce only, cloud or on-premises.
• Magento Open Source plus extensions starts from customer groups, catalog price rules, configurable and bundle products and the same asynchronous APIs, then adds company accounts, quotes and quick order through extensions or custom modules. More code to own, and more control over it.
• Shopify B2B suits a few price tiers, net terms and buyers who reorder from a known list. Its quick order list works across one product's variants, so a cross-catalog SKU pad is app or custom work.
• BigCommerce B2B Edition brings a Buyer Portal with quote requests, invoices, shopping lists and ordering by SKU, and handles company pricing through price lists on customer groups. BigCommerce prices the edition on request.
• Custom wins when the pricing logic or the configurator is the business, and every platform's model would have to be fought rather than configured. When only the storefront needs that freedom, a headless storefront for a B2B catalog keeps one of the platforms above as the back end.

Three rows no vendor covers out of the box. Punchout isn't in Adobe's, Shopify's or BigCommerce's B2B feature lists, configure-to-order rules beyond pre-built variants are custom on every platform, and the ERP sync is an integration project everywhere. So read the matrix by rows: mark the ones your buyers can't work without, then see which column covers them natively and what the rest takes to build.

Leaning Magento? Our page on Magento B2B: Open Source plus extensions or Adobe Commerce B2B goes row by row. Leaning Shopify? We do Shopify B2B builds, and we'll say early if your catalog count means Plus.

The ERP is the source of truth#

In a B2B store the website is a window onto the ERP. Price, stock, credit and the customer record usually live there; the store displays them and sends orders back. When two systems both think they own a price, the buyer sees the wrong one and the invoice disagrees with the checkout.

So we write the ownership table before any code: every record, the system that owns it, the direction it syncs and what breaks when it drifts. The version on this page is where we start; every ERP adds rows of its own.

The failures that cost money are the quiet ones. A timeout drops an order and nobody notices until the customer calls. A retry sends it twice and the warehouse ships both. A price-list update half-applies overnight and the morning's orders go out at the old prices. We build every sync through a queue with idempotency keys, so a retried message is recognized instead of creating a duplicate, and every message lands in a log a person can read. A new sync runs in shadow beside the old one until the numbers match; then we cut over.

Proof: ERP syncs made several times faster, with silent data loss eliminated.

We work in NetSuite over REST, SuiteQL and SuiteScript, and connect Sage, QuickBooks, Dynamics 365 Business Central and other ERPs with an API the same way. The method in full is on our ERP integration page.

Quotes, CPQ and configure-to-order#

CPQ stands for configure, price, quote. In a B2B store it means the buyer builds the product they need, sees a real price and lead time, and gets a quote sales can stand behind, without an email thread.

Simple quoting is built into Adobe Commerce B2B and BigCommerce B2B Edition, and an extension or app adds it on Magento Open Source and Shopify: the buyer asks, a rep adjusts the price, the accepted quote converts to an order. Configure-to-order is harder, because everything depends on the rules that say which options work together. Most rule sets we inherit are maintained by hand, exception by exception, and every new option makes them worse.

How CPQ for B2B ecommerce works when we build it:

1. Only valid builds. The rules decide which options can combine, so a buyer can't configure, and sales can't quote, a product that can't be made.
2. Live price and lead time. Price comes from the buyer's own price list, and lead time from the stock and components behind the build, both read from the ERP.
3. Quote to order to ERP. An accepted quote becomes an order with the full configuration attached, and the ERP receives a sales order nobody has to re-key.

The rules live in data, each constraint written once and tested like code. That's the difference between CPQ ecommerce your sales team trusts and a configurator they quietly work around.

Proof: Sprawling hand-maintained configurator rule sets replaced by a small declarative rules engine.

Ecommerce for distributors#

Distributors sell other people's products, often a long tail of them, to buyers who search by part number and leave when the first search fails. B2B ecommerce for distributors comes down to five jobs:

• Part-number search. Your SKU, the manufacturer's part number and the cross-references buyers actually type should all land on the same product, with dashes, spaces and case ignored, so "ABC-123" finds "abc123".
• Large attribute sets. Filters only work on clean data: one unit per attribute, one spelling per value. Most distributor catalogs we see arrive with neither, so attribute cleanup and SKU reconciliation are part of the build, not an afterthought.
• Units of measure. Buyers order by the case, the price list quotes per each, and the ERP stocks by the box. The store has to convert all three the same way the ERP does, or totals stop matching invoices.
• Contract pricing. Each account's prices and quantity breaks come from the ERP, show after login and hold at checkout.
• Dealer and rep channels. Sales reps order on behalf of their accounts and see what each one bought; dealers buy at their own tier.

Platform vendors' guides to choosing an ecommerce platform for distributors each recommend their own. We don't sell a platform, so our answer is the matrix on this page: count the rows your accounts need natively, and the shortlist writes itself.

Ecommerce for manufacturers#

Ecommerce for manufacturers adds a problem distributors don't have: your dealers are your customers and, once you sell direct, your competition. A dealer portal gives them their pricing, stock and order history; a direct store sells to end buyers. Channel conflict is a pricing and routing decision before it is a website feature. Decide which orders stay with the dealer, which ship direct and which price each audience sees, then make the store enforce it with dealer locators, territory rules and a price list per channel.

Configurable products are the other half: build-to-order items, where the configure-to-order rules above apply. Our B2B portal development usually starts with the dealer portal, because dealers already order by phone and email and moving them online changes nobody's margin. Dealer and direct orders then land in the same ERP with the channel recorded.

Punchout and EDI for procurement buyers#

Some buyers can't shop your website at all: every order starts and ends in their e-procurement system.

• Punchout. The buyer clicks through from their procurement system, builds a cart at their contract prices and sends it back for approval. It runs on cXML, whose own site calls PunchOut "widely-used", or on SAP's Open Catalog Interface (OCI) for SAP-based buyers. With cXML the approved purchase order usually comes back as a cXML order; OCI returns only the cart, so that order reaches you separately, by EDI, email or cXML.
• EDI. Larger trading partners exchange documents instead of carts: X12 850 purchase orders in; 855 acknowledgments, 856 ship notices and 810 invoices out.

Either way, those orders should land in the ERP against the same price list as web orders. Punchout orders usually come through the store's order queue. EDI often runs through an EDI provider straight into the ERP; sending it through the store's queue instead is a per-project design choice.

B2B ecommerce consulting and replatforming#

B2B ecommerce consulting, the way we run it, produces documents you keep whether or not we build: your requirements as matrix rows, ranked; the data-ownership table for your ERP; an RFP any agency can answer; and a platform recommendation with the reasons written down. If the honest answer is to stay on your current platform and fix the data, the recommendation says so.

A B2B replatform has two things to lose: customer pricing and rankings. Pricing survives when price lists, account mappings and terms migrate from the ERP rather than the old store, and every account's prices are checked against an ERP export before cutover. For rankings, what we control is the map: every old URL, part-number pages included, gets a permanent redirect to its new address, as Google's site-move guidance recommends, and Google still says to expect some movement while it recrawls. We test every redirect on staging and crawl again after launch.

More on replatforming a B2B store without losing customer pricing, and on how an engagement runs.