For decades, B2B ordering ran on relationships and paperwork. Customers called their rep, emailed a purchase order, or faxed in a form that someone keyed into the ERP. It worked, more or less, because everyone did it that way.
That era is ending faster than most distributors and manufacturers expected. The buyers cutting purchase orders today grew up shopping online. They check pricing at 9 pm, they reorder from their phone, and they quietly resent having to call someone to find out whether an item is in stock. Study after study says the same thing: a large majority of B2B buyers now prefer self-service for routine purchases, and a growing share will switch suppliers over a bad digital experience.
The good news is that building a serious B2B store no longer requires the seven-figure custom platforms of the 2000s. BigCommerce has invested heavily in B2B, and it has become one of the strongest platforms for wholesalers and manufacturers who want enterprise-grade capability without enterprise-grade overhead. Here is what you should know before you build.
Why B2B Is Different (and Why It Is Harder Than B2C)
A B2C store sells one product at one price to one person paying by card. B2B breaks every one of those assumptions.
Your customers are companies, not individuals, and a single account might have five buyers, an approver, and an accounts payable contact, each needing different permissions. Pricing is negotiated: the same SKU sells at different prices to different customers, often with quantity breaks layered on top. Payment happens on terms, against credit limits, or by purchase order rather than by credit card. Orders are big, repetitive, and SKU-driven; nobody browses lifestyle imagery to reorder two hundred fittings they buy every month. And some transactions simply do not fit a cart at all, which is why quoting still matters.
Any platform you choose has to handle this reality natively. Bolting B2B behavior onto a B2C platform with duct tape and plugins is how companies end up with stores their customers politely ignore.
What BigCommerce B2B Edition Actually Gives You
BigCommerce’s answer is B2B Edition, a layer of wholesale functionality built on top of an already open, API-first platform. The features that matter most in practice:
Company accounts with buyer roles. Customers register as companies, with multiple users under one account, role-based permissions, and shared visibility into orders and invoices. The purchasing manager, the field buyer, and the AP clerk each see what they should.
Customer-specific pricing through price lists. This is the heart of B2B commerce. You can assign entire price lists to customer groups, so each logged-in buyer sees their negotiated pricing, their currency, and their quantity breaks. Combined with login-gated catalogs, you can also hide pricing or entire product ranges from the public and show them only to approved accounts, which matters to manufacturers protecting channel pricing.
Quote management. Buyers can build a cart and request a quote instead of checking out; your sales team adjusts pricing and terms and sends it back for one-click conversion to an order. Instead of replacing your reps, the store becomes their fastest tool.
Payment terms and flexible checkout. Net terms, purchase order numbers, and corporate payment methods sit alongside standard card and digital payments, so the checkout matches how your customers actually buy.
Buyer conveniences that drive adoption. Shared shopping lists, fast reordering from order history, and a quick-order experience where buyers enter or paste SKUs and quantities directly. These features sound small and are usually the difference between a B2B store customers use and one they bypass by emailing their rep out of habit.
Designing the Experience Around How B2B Buyers Work
Platform features are necessary but not sufficient. The stores that win adoption are designed around buyer workflows rather than around a template.
Search has to be excellent, because B2B buyers navigate by part number, spec, and application, not by browsing. Product pages should lead with the data sheet information a professional buyer needs: specs, compatibility, packaging quantities, and real-time availability. If you serve contractors or industrial buyers, showing stock by location can be a genuine competitive weapon.
Above all, respect the reorder. For most wholesale businesses, the overwhelming majority of order lines are repeat purchases. If reordering last month’s exact basket takes three clicks, your store will get used. If it takes fifteen minutes of searching, your phone will keep ringing.
Extending the Platform: Apps First, Then Custom
One of the practical advantages of building on a major platform is the ecosystem around it. Before writing custom code for a requirement, it is worth checking the marketplace of BigCommerce apps, because mature solutions already exist for a huge share of common B2B needs: advanced search and merchandising, sales tax automation, freight and LTL shipping quotes, punchout for customers with procurement systems, customer-specific catalogs, and marketing automation. Apps get you capability in days, with the vendor carrying the maintenance burden.
That said, most serious B2B builds eventually hit requirements that no app covers cleanly, because the requirement is your business. A configurator for made-to-order products. Contract pricing logic with more dimensions than price lists support. A dealer locator wired to your territory rules. A customer portal that blends orders, invoices, and warranty claims into one view. This is where experienced BigCommerce development services earn their keep, whether that means theme-level customization on Stencil or a fully headless build on top of BigCommerce’s APIs for companies with ambitious front-end plans. The platform’s open architecture is precisely what makes this kind of tailoring possible without forking away from a supported core.
The discipline that keeps budgets sane: configure first, install second, build third. Custom code is a permanent commitment, so spend it only where off-the-shelf genuinely cannot follow.
Do Not Forget the Back Office
A B2B storefront is only half the system. Availability, customer-specific pricing, terms, and order status all originate in your ERP, and a store that cannot see that data in real time will show wrong stock and stale pricing, which destroys buyer trust faster than having no store at all.
Plan the ERP integration as part of the initial project, not as a phase two afterthought. For NetSuite-run businesses in particular, the BigCommerce pairing is well worn and well supported, and designing the catalog, customer groups, and pricing structures with the integration in mind from day one will save you an expensive rework later.
A Sensible Roadmap
You do not have to launch everything at once, and the most successful projects usually do not. A phased approach that works:
Phase one: core catalog, company accounts, customer-specific pricing, and payment terms, launched to a pilot group of friendly customers. Phase two: quoting, quick order, shared lists, and the app-driven capabilities like freight quoting and tax automation. Phase three: the differentiators, meaning the custom features and deeper automation that make your store harder for competitors to copy.
Each phase delivers value on its own, and the pilot feedback from real buyers will reshape your priorities in ways no internal planning session can.
How to Know It Is Working
Set success metrics before launch, because “we have a store now” is not a goal. The number we watch most closely is digital adoption: the percentage of eligible orders and order lines flowing through the store instead of through phone and email. Healthy B2B launches often start in the ten to twenty percent range with a pilot group and climb steadily as buyers build the habit.
Around that headline number, track reorder rate through the portal, quote-to-order conversion, average time from login to submitted order, and the change in order-entry workload on your customer service team. Watch for the quiet wins too: fewer pricing disputes because buyers see their contract price up front, and fewer status calls because tracking is self-service.
And put a name on adoption itself. Stores do not market themselves to a customer base with twenty years of phone-order habits. Your reps need talking points, incentives help, and the first invoice that goes out with a portal login attached will do more than any banner ad.
The Bottom Line
Your B2B customers are already buying this way from someone. The distributors and manufacturers investing in a real digital channel are not just cutting order-entry costs; they are becoming easier to buy from, and in wholesale, easy to buy from wins.
BigCommerce gives mid-market B2B companies a rare combination: genuine wholesale functionality out of the box, an app ecosystem for the common needs, and open APIs for the uncommon ones. Pair that with a well-planned ERP connection and a design built around how your buyers actually work, and you get a channel that grows revenue while your competitors are still asking customers to fax things.
