B2B Magento agency for catalogs that need more than a cart.

Open Source plus extensions, or Adobe Commerce B2B?#

If your must-haves are company accounts, contract pricing and quick order, Open Source plus focused modules can cover them; need most rows natively, and Adobe Commerce B2B earns its license.

Adobe's extensions page, not its B2B feature list, labels B2B "Adobe Commerce only, requires a separate license" and says: "For provisioning, contact your Adobe Account Representative." Its modules aren't in the Open Source codebase.

Every Native cell comes in Adobe's one B2B license; every Extension or Custom cell is code you'd add and maintain.

Magento Open Source ships under the Open Software License 3.0 and the Academic Free License 3.0, both "royalty-free." Adobe Commerce is licensed from Adobe, on the terms of your Adobe sales order.

Magento B2B development: what we build#

Magento B2B store development comes down to eight jobs, on either edition. As a Magento B2B agency, we build them around how your buyers already order:

• Company accounts and roles. One account per customer, with buyers, approvers and invoice payers, each tied to the ERP's customer number.
• Customer-specific catalogs and price lists. Shared catalogs on Adobe Commerce B2B, or category permissions by customer group on Adobe Commerce alone. On Open Source, core customer groups and catalog price rules, plus a module for per-company assortments.
• Tier and contract pricing. Quantity breaks on the core's tier prices; contract prices from the ERP, by price group or per account.
• Quick order and reorder. A SKU pad, pasted lists and file upload, plus reorder from order history, which Open Source already ships.
• Purchase-order approvals. Spending limits and approvers set per buying company, so a big order waits for the right person.
• Payment on account and credit. Pay on Account against the credit limit the ERP holds. Open Source's core has a purchase order payment method, but no credit line.
• Net terms. Each account's terms read from the ERP, shown at checkout and carried onto the order.
• Sales-rep ordering. Reps order on behalf of their accounts, built on the core's Login as Customer module and the ERP's rep assignments.

Our Magento B2B developers write the account and pricing model before the storefront, because every item above reads from it. Storefront speed comes next: Hyvä, once every B2B module you rely on has a Hyvä-compatible version. For Adobe's B2B modules, Hyvä's compatibility layer is Hyvä Enterprise, "a stand-alone commercial product" licensed on top of Hyvä Commerce or Hyvä Checkout, whose B2B package needs 2.4.6 or later and B2B 1.4.0 or later. The rest of the platform work sits on our Magento development page.

Magento quotes and configure-to-order#

Adobe Commerce B2B handles the simple quote. The buyer requests one from the cart, or, from B2B 1.4.0, a sales rep starts one on the buyer's behalf; the two sides negotiate, and an accepted quote goes to checkout at the negotiated price, with no further discounts and shipping locked. On Open Source, an extension or custom module supplies the workflow.

Quotes don't always start in the store. A rep may build one in the ERP or CRM; we decide per project where quotes begin, and an accepted one always ends as an ERP sales order.

Configure-to-order is a different animal: the rules are the product. When we build one, it does three things:

1. Impossible builds can't be chosen. The rules engine checks each choice against the others as the buyer configures, so carts and quotes only ever hold buildable products.
2. Contract price and ship date while configuring. As options change, Magento asks the ERP for the account's contract price and a ship date based on component stock.
3. A negotiable quote, then a sales order. The finished build travels in a Magento negotiable quote, which Adobe's B2B modules allow for configurable and bundle products; once accepted, it lands in the ERP as the sales order.

We keep the rules as versioned data with tests, so a new option is one more rule, not another pile of exceptions.

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

Magento and your ERP: who owns price, credit and stock#

Your ERP usually holds each account's prices, credit and stock; Magento should read them, not keep a drifting copy. We set direction record by record:

• ERP to Magento: contract prices (synced, or looked up live when the account-by-SKU matrix is too big to sync), stock (from the ERP or WMS), credit limits and open balances, invoice status.
• Magento to ERP: orders, new account registrations for approval, and accepted quotes as sales orders.
• Magento only: buyer logins, roles and approval rules.

Prices and credit land through documented Magento interfaces: shared catalog prices through the REST-enabled SharedCatalog module, quantity breaks through the core's tier-price storage, and balances through the REST-enabled CompanyCredit module. Wire credit first: Adobe's credit guide says "when customers make payments, administrators update credit information in the Admin." Our sync takes that job.

Bulk writes use Magento's asynchronous endpoints (core module WebapiAsync), which queue each request with a trackable bulk UUID, so failures surface. NetSuite is where we go deepest, over SuiteTalk REST and SuiteQL; our ERP integration page has the full method. The complete ownership table is on B2B ecommerce on any platform.

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

Punchout and EDI on Magento#

Some trade buyers may only order through their own procurement system. Punchout isn't on Adobe's B2B feature list, so on either edition it's an extension, middleware or a custom build.

• Punchout. The session should drop the buyer into their own Magento company account, so the cart carries their shared-catalog or ERP contract prices, not the public list. The protocols: cXML ("the widely-used PunchOut feature," per its site) and SAP's Open Catalog Interface, which "transfers the product data back." A cXML buyer's approved order usually returns as a cXML purchase order; an OCI buyer's arrives separately, by EDI, email or cXML, since OCI hands back only the cart.
• EDI. Trading partners transmit X12 850 purchase orders and receive 855 acknowledgments, 856 ship notices and 810 invoices in reply. We decide per partner whether those orders also post to the buyer's Magento order history.

Where Magento B2B projects go wrong#

B2B Magento development rarely fails on features. It fails in four places, three of them in Adobe's own docs:

What drives the cost of Magento B2B#

We don't publish prices. Licenses come first: none for Open Source itself, though B2B extensions may carry their own; for Adobe Commerce B2B, Adobe's license on your sales order's terms plus the separate B2B license; and, for Adobe B2B on Hyvä, Hyvä Enterprise on top of Hyvä Commerce or Hyvä Checkout. Then the build:

• Native versus built: how many table rows you need, and how you get each.
• ERP and pricing complexity: price groups, contract prices, credit rules and sync directions.
• Catalog size and data quality: SKUs, attributes and part-number cross-references.
• Punchout or EDI partners, each connected and tested.
• Customizations: configure-to-order rules, approval chains, anything the modules don't do.
• Your team: who owns the data, testing and sign-off.

Ask each bidder which rows their quote builds, which it buys as extensions and which it assumes Adobe covers. What the market typically charges, with sources, is in our Magento cost guide.