B2B Shop: Guide, Features, Systems & Costs

A B2B shop (business-to-business) is an online platform on which companies sell products or services to other companies. Unlike a classic B2C shop, which targets end consumers, a B2B shop serves the specific requirements of business customers – meaning buyers, resellers, industrial customers, or chain stores.

These customers typically order higher volumes, expect individually negotiated prices, need payment on account or other flexible payment models, and want to integrate their orders efficiently into existing processes. A good B2B shop reflects this complexity without sacrificing usability.

B2B Shop vs. B2C Shop

At first glance, B2B and B2C shops look similar – both display products, both have a cart and a checkout. In detail, however, they differ fundamentally:

You can find more background on B2C in our article on B2C in e-commerce.

What Types of B2B Shops Are There?

Not every B2B shop follows the same business model. Depending on your company's role in the value chain, different variations emerge:

• Manufacturer shop: Producers sell directly to commercial buyers – often as part of a D2C strategy that targets end customers in parallel.
• Wholesale shop: The classic distributor sells to retailers, gastronomy, or processing businesses.
• Reseller and dealer portal: A closed area for contractual partners with centralized access to terms, catalogs, and marketing materials.
• Procurement platform: A specialized purchasing shop, often with OCI integration into the ERP systems of large customers.
• Hybrid shop: A combination of B2B and B2C in the same system – customers see different assortments and prices depending on their login.

A successful B2B shop must meet three dimensions of requirements at the same time: functional, technical, and legal. Anyone who underestimates one of these layers builds a system that quickly hits its limits in practice.

Functional Requirements

This is where it's decided whether your shop truly reflects the daily needs of your buyers:

• Customer-specific and tiered prices: Every customer sees their individually negotiated conditions.
• Quick order: Direct entry of product numbers or CSV upload for bulk orders.
• Reorders: Order history with a "reorder" function.
• Quote management: Quote requests, negotiation process, and transfer into checkout.
• Multi-user accounts: Multiple employees per customer account with different roles and rights.
• Approval workflows: Budget limits, approval chains, and dual control for larger orders.
• Customer-specific assortments: Product visibility by customer group, region, or contract.
• Self-service area: View and trigger invoices, delivery notes, returns, and service tickets independently.

Technical Requirements

A B2B shop rarely stands alone – it has to integrate seamlessly into your existing system landscape:

• ERP integration: Stock levels, prices, customer data, and orders flow bidirectionally between shop and ERP (for example SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, Sage).
• PIM integration: Centralized maintenance of all product information in a PIM system such as Akeneo.
• DAM integration: Images, datasheets, videos, and documents come from a centralized DAM system such as TESSA.
• API-first architecture: Open interfaces for marketplaces, logistics, accounting, and third-party systems.
• Performance and scalability: Stable and fast even with thousands of products and concurrent user sessions.
• Mobile first: Field sales and buyers increasingly work on the go – the shop must work flawlessly on smartphones and tablets.

To make sure these integrations work cleanly, we often deploy our own Oskar Middleware in projects, where it acts as the central hub between systems.

Legal Requirements

Different rules apply in the B2B environment than in the end-consumer business – starting with price display and ending with archiving:

• Net price display: Business customers see prices net by default, often only after login.
• Proof of business: Registration with verification of VAT ID or commercial register extract.
• Audit-proof document archiving: Store invoices and order confirmations compliant with applicable retention rules.
• No statutory right of withdrawal: In B2B, the statutory right of withdrawal does not apply – the terms and conditions must regulate this cleanly.
• Data protection and compliance: GDPR compliance even with extensive customer data and field-sales access.

Let's take a closer look at the core features – because this is where it's decided whether your shop is a tool or an obstacle for buyers.

Personalized Prices and Customer Groups

In B2B, there's rarely just one price. Instead, most companies work with customer-specific conditions, framework contracts, and special agreements. A modern B2B shop must be able to reflect this complexity – ideally directly from the ERP. After logging in, every customer sees exactly the prices that apply to them. Tiered prices, promotional prices, and campaign-based discounts must also be controllable per customer group.

Quick Order and Reorders

Business customers don't want to click – they want to order. Anyone who already knows the products and quantities should be able to enter them directly: by product number, barcode scan, CSV upload, or through the order history. A well-implemented quick order reduces ordering time to a fraction and turns the shop into a real efficiency tool.

Quote Management (Quote-to-Cash)

Larger B2B orders often don't originate directly in the shopping cart but through a negotiation process. The customer requests a quote, sales calculates the offer, the quote may go back and forth several times – and in the end, the finalized quote should be converted into an order with a single click. Your shop should reflect this quote-to-cash process seamlessly.

Multi-User and Approval Workflows

In companies, ordering is rarely done by a single person. Instead, purchasing, the technical department, and management work together. A good B2B shop allows you to set up multiple users under one customer account, assign them different roles (orderer, approver, admin), and route orders above certain amounts through an approval process.

Self-Service Portal

The more your customers can handle themselves, the fewer inquiries end up with your back office. Downloading invoices, viewing delivery notes, registering returns, opening service tickets, updating master data – all of this belongs in a modern customer area. This saves you personnel costs and increases customer satisfaction at the same time.

Choosing the right shop system is one of the most important decisions in your project. It determines functional scope, flexibility, cost, and ultimately the speed at which you go to market. We introduce the six most relevant systems for the B2B sector.

Shopware 6

As a certified Shopware agency, Shopware is our preferred system for mid-sized B2B projects. With the B2B Suite and the Rule Builder engine, Shopware offers all key features out of the box: customer-specific prices, tiered discounts, quick order, quote management, multi-user accounts, and approval workflows. The platform is API-first, integrates deeply with ERP, PIM, and DAM, and is available both self-hosted and in the cloud. Particularly convincing: the mature ecosystem of plugins and the active partner network.

Adobe Commerce (Magento)

Adobe Commerce, formerly Magento, is an established enterprise platform with a broad feature set and global reach. In the B2B space, Adobe Commerce delivers a solid standard with features such as company accounts, quote management, and shared catalogs. License and hosting costs are significantly higher than Shopware, however, and implementation effort is substantial. Adobe Commerce is particularly suitable for international corporations with large IT budgets.

Spryker

Spryker is a headless commerce platform from Germany, developed specifically for complex B2B and marketplace scenarios. The modular architecture allows maximum flexibility but also requires correspondingly high development effort. Spryker is used primarily by large enterprises that have very specific requirements and a strong IT team.

Commercetools

Commercetools is a cloud-native, headless commerce platform with MACH architecture (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, Headless). It targets companies that want to fully design their own customer experience and build their own frontend for it. Its strength lies in scalability and internationalization. Anyone looking to go live quickly with a manageable budget is usually in the wrong place here.

Shopify Plus B2B

Shopify has significantly expanded its B2B offering in recent years. With Shopify Plus, B2B features such as company accounts, customer-specific prices, net payment terms, and quick order are now available. The big advantage: extremely fast time-to-market and ease of use. The limits become apparent as soon as complex ERP integrations, individual processes, or high requirements for self-hosted setups come into play. We covered this topic in detail in our article Shopware vs. Shopify.

SAP Commerce Cloud

SAP Commerce Cloud (formerly Hybris) is the enterprise platform for SAP customers with a tightly integrated ERP landscape. If you're already deep in the SAP world, this is the obvious choice – including the corresponding license and operating costs. For mid-sized projects, SAP Commerce is usually oversized.

Shop Systems at a Glance

The following overview helps you make a first assessment:

For an extended overview of additional B2B shop systems, see the B2B shop system comparison by OMR.

There's no universal answer – costs depend heavily on the functional scope, the chosen system, the number of integrations, and the level of customization. Generally, we distinguish between one-time initial costs and ongoing operating costs.

One-Time Costs

One-time costs include:

• License costs: Shopware charges annual license fees depending on the edition, while Adobe Commerce or SAP Commerce licenses are significantly higher. Open-source editions such as Shopware Community or Magento Open Source are license-free.
• Concept and design: UX concept, wireframes, screen design, and style guide typically cost between €10,000 and €40,000.
• Implementation and development: Setting up the shop, customizations, B2B features, individual functions.
• Integrations: Connections to ERP, PIM, DAM, CRM, logistics – a significant cost block depending on system and complexity.
• Data migration: Migrating product, customer, and order data from legacy systems.
• Testing and go-live support: Quality assurance, load tests, and soft launch.

Ongoing Costs

During operation, the following costs apply, among others:

• Hosting and infrastructure: Servers, CDN, backups, monitoring.
• Licenses and SaaS fees: Annual fees for shop system, plugins, external services.
• Maintenance and updates: Security updates, patches, version migrations.
• Continued development: New features, A/B tests, optimizations – usually 10–20% of the initial budget per year.
• Support and hosting contract: Response times, SLA, 24/7 availability.

Three Typical Budget Scenarios

To give you a ballpark, here are three realistic budget ranges from our projects:

These numbers are guidelines. In an initial consultation, we'll look at your specific needs and give you a reliable budget range.

A B2B shop is only as good as the data it displays. Business customers base their buying decisions on technical specifications, datasheets, certificates, and precise product information. Anyone working with incomplete or outdated data loses orders – often to competitors whose product quality is no better, but who simply have their data under control.

A PIM system (Product Information Management) such as Akeneo centralizes the maintenance of all product-related data: descriptions, attributes, categorizations, translations, and classification standards such as ETIM or eCl@ss. From there, this data flows automatically into the shop, into marketplaces, into print catalogs, and into all other channels.

A DAM system (Digital Asset Management) such as TESSA manages all media assets: product images, technical drawings, datasheets as PDFs, application videos, certificates. The shop accesses the right version, in the right format, at the right resolution – without anyone having to upload files manually.

The combination of B2B shop, PIM, and DAM is the most important lever for sustainable success in our projects. You can find more on this in our articles on the PIM agency and the DAM agency.

A B2B shop project isn't a sprint – it's a structured process. Anyone who works through the individual phases cleanly avoids the typical pitfalls that end up costing serious money in many projects.

Phase 1 – Requirements Analysis

At the beginning is the question: What must the shop be able to do – and what not? Workshops with sales, purchasing, IT, and management define which processes will be digitized, which systems need to be integrated, and which customer needs take priority. The result is a requirements catalog that forms the foundation for everything that follows.

Phase 2 – System Selection

Based on the requirements, the right shop system is selected. Key criteria are functional scope, integration capability, scalability, total cost of ownership, and the availability of partners and expertise. In this phase, decisions on PIM, DAM, ERP integration, and hosting are also made.

Phase 3 – Concept and Design

UX concept, information architecture, wireframes, and screen design take shape. This is where it's defined how buyers move through the shop, how quickly they can place an order, and how the self-service area is built. The design follows B2B-specific requirements – meaning less marketing aesthetic, more efficiency and clarity.

Phase 4 – Implementation and Integration

Now the building starts: setting up the shop, implementing templates, configuring B2B features, developing custom functionality, establishing integrations with ERP, PIM, DAM, and other systems. Data migration and tests run in parallel. This is the longest phase – but also the one where good preliminary work from the earlier phases pays off.

Phase 5 – Go-Live and Continuous Optimization

After extensive testing, load tests, and a soft launch phase, the shop goes live. With the go-live, however, the actual work only begins: performance monitoring, conversion optimization, new features, A/B tests, extensions. A B2B shop is never "finished" – it continues to develop.

From numerous B2B shop projects, a few patterns of success have emerged that we want to share with you:

• Start with an MVP, not the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink version: Better to go live in six months with 80% of the features than in two years with 100%. You'll get to know the missing 20% better in real operation anyway.
• Data first, shop second: Anyone starting with messy product data is building on sand. Set up PIM and DAM first, then build the shop on top.
• Let buyers test: Involve real business customers in usability tests early on. What marketing finds beautiful is often impractical in everyday purchasing.
• Prioritize quick order: The most frequent activity in a B2B shop is reordering known items – this function must work smoothly.
• Bring sales and field service along: The shop isn't a replacement for relationship building, it's a tool for sales. Anyone who pits field service against the shop loses both.
• Performance is mandatory: B2B buyers have no patience. Load times over three seconds are a conversion killer.
• Mobile first applies in B2B too: Field reps order on tablets, workshop managers on smartphones. Anyone thinking only of desktop is thinking too narrowly.

Just as important as the best practices are the anti-patterns – the typical pitfalls that slow projects down or cause them to fail entirely:

• Misusing a B2C shop for B2B purposes: A consumer shop with a "business customer login" is not a B2B shop. The requirements are fundamentally different.
• Underestimating the requirements: "How complex can it really be?" – very complex, actually. Anyone starting without a clean requirements analysis builds past the actual need.
• Postponing ERP integration: Anyone who starts "without ERP integration for now" is building expensive duplicate work into their future.
• Neglecting data maintenance: Incomplete product data, missing images, wrong prices – this immediately costs trust and therefore revenue.
• Ignoring your own sales team: If field and inside sales perceive the shop as a threat, they will sabotage it actively or passively.
• Too many custom requests: Every customization costs twice – once in development and once with every update. Use the standard wherever possible.
• No vision for ongoing development: A B2B shop that sits idle after go-live quickly loses relevance. Plan budget for continuous optimization.