What it is, how it differs from B2C ecommerce, what features matter, and how to choose a platform. Written for wholesalers, manufacturers, and brands evaluating B2B ecommerce.
Updated June 2026 · In one sentence
A B2B storefront is a self-serve portal where business buyers — wholesalers, retailers, distributors — sign in, see their account-specific pricing and catalogue, and place orders that flow straight into the supplier’s ERP. The right platform replaces hours of sales-rep order entry per day.
01 / Definition
It looks like a webshop because that is what it is — but it works for the way wholesale, distribution and manufacturing actually sell. The catalogue, the prices, the credit terms and the order rules all change per customer. The buyer signs in, sees the assortment and pricing for their account, places the order, and the order flows straight into your ERP. No sales rep retyping it. No email back-and-forth. No PDF.
The point of a B2B storefront is not to look modern. The point is to stop spending people-hours on order entry, while giving your customers a way to buy any time, on their own.
The companies that get the most out of a B2B storefront are the ones whose customers reorder often, whose pricing varies by account, and whose order desk is becoming a bottleneck. Typically:
The visible difference is usually a login wall. The real difference is everything behind it: customer-specific pricing, MOQs, payment terms, approval flows, repeat-order patterns, and a checkout that respects how procurement actually works. We go deeper on that comparison in the next section.
02 / B2B vs B2C ecommerce
Most B2B ecommerce projects underestimate this. A B2B storefront looks like a webshop, so teams start by evaluating webshop platforms. The problem is that almost every assumption baked into a B2C webshop — anonymous shoppers, one price, payment at checkout, one buyer per order — is wrong in B2B. The table below summarises the seven structural differences that decide which kind of platform you actually need.
| Aspect | B2C ecommerce | B2B storefront |
|---|---|---|
| Buyer identity | Anonymous shoppers. Anyone can land and buy. | Authenticated accounts. Pricing depends on who’s logged in. |
| Price visibility | One price visible to everyone. | Customer-specific price lists, contract pricing, volume tiers. |
| Payment | Up front, by card. | Invoice with net terms (14, 30, 60 days). Credit limits enforced. |
| Decision structure | One buyer, one decision, instant checkout. | Approval chains. Multi-buyer accounts. Weeks of cycle time. |
| Order pattern | Mostly first-time and occasional purchases. | Mostly repeat orders — same SKUs every week. |
| What gets optimised | Conversion rate, average order value. | Customer lifetime value, repeat-order velocity, cost-to-serve. |
| Where the work lives | Marketing-led: discovery, conversion, retention. | Operations-led: catalogues, MOQs, ERP sync, fulfilment. |
This is why retrofitting a B2C platform with B2B plugins almost never holds — the underlying assumptions fight you on every customer-specific rule. A real B2B storefront has these mechanics built into its foundations.
03 / Capabilities that matter
These are the mechanics that decide whether a storefront actually replaces sales-rep order entry, or just adds a portal on top of it. When evaluating platforms, these are the questions to ask in the first thirty minutes.
Per-account price lists, contract pricing, volume tiers, currency overrides. The catalogue shows each buyer what they actually pay — not a list price they have to negotiate against.
Minimum order quantities by SKU, by customer, or by total order value. Case-pack rounding. Inner/outer/master unit conversions. Real B2B catalogues are built around these rules.
Pay-by-invoice with net terms (14, 30, 60). Credit limits enforced at checkout. Integration with your finance system so invoices and payments stay in one place.
One customer, many buyers. Orders above a threshold route to a manager for approval. Sub-users with restricted catalogues, budget caps, or order-only-no-pay roles.
Order history, one-click reorder, saved order templates, CSV upload, SKU-and-quantity quick entry. Most B2B sessions are reorders — the storefront has to make that fast.
Each account sees only the SKUs available to them. New launches surface to selected customers first. Discontinued lines disappear without breaking links.
Currency and tax rules per region. Stock and lead-times per warehouse. Routing logic so orders land at the right fulfilment location automatically.
Orders sync into your ERP as structured sales orders — customer record, prices, SKUs, terms, all mapped. Stock, prices and customer data flow back. No retyping in either direction.
If a platform handles the first four well but treats the next four as “coming soon”, you are evaluating a B2C webshop with a B2B skin. That is a fine starting point for a small wholesale operation — but it stops scaling somewhere between your tenth and fiftieth account.
04 / But a storefront isn’t enough
The hardest truth about B2B ecommerce is also the one most platforms won’t tell you: a storefront only captures the orders from customers willing to log in. The rest — often your largest accounts — will keep ordering the way they always have.
The buyers at large procurement-driven accounts have purchasing flows that work for them — ERP-integrated requisitions, approval chains, EDI requirements, buyers placing repeat orders from spreadsheets. They are not going to change those flows just because you launched a portal. And the smaller customers who never adopt the webshop will still send the same Excel sheet they have sent for years.
So the storefront stays central — it is the right channel for the customers who will use it. But it has to sit inside a complete ordering layer that also captures email, PDF, Excel, EDI and phone orders. Otherwise the work just moves from one inbox to another, and you still need an order desk to translate everything into structured sales orders.
This is the positioning shift that decides whether B2B ecommerce actually delivers operational leverage. We wrote a separate guide on it: meet customers where they already order.
05 / How to choose
These are the eight questions to put on the table in the first hour of every platform evaluation call. They cut through the demo gloss and surface the real differences between platforms.
If per-account pricing requires a third-party app, scope creep is on your roadmap. Native pricing tables, contract rates and volume tiers should configure in the admin, not in code.
Pay-by-invoice with net terms, credit-limit enforcement at checkout, and a clean two-way sync with your accounting or ERP. Watch out for “coming soon” on this one.
Min-order rules per SKU, per customer or per order. Case-pack rounding. Inner/outer/master unit conversions. These should not require custom logic per product line.
Multiple buyers on one customer account, with budget caps, restricted catalogues and approval routing. If this means a developer ticket per customer, the cost will outpace the benefit.
The pre-built integration with your ERP (or accounting platform) should be on the spec sheet. If “integration” means a partner SOW, you are signing up for a separate project on top of the storefront.
Even if you only sell in one region today, the platform should handle the second one without re-architecting. Currency, tax, stock and lead-time logic per region matters when the day comes.
Platform-led implementation tends to be faster, more predictable, and avoids the partner-fees scope-creep cycle. Ask who runs your go-live, and how many real customers they brought live in the last six months.
Because some customers will keep emailing PDFs and some will need EDI, the platform that captures every channel — not just the portal — protects your investment as the operation scales.
One specific decision deserves attention: should you run your B2B storefront on a blended platform (a B2C platform with B2B features bolted on, like Shopify Plus or BigCommerce B2B) or a dedicated B2B platform built for wholesale from the ground up?
The honest answer depends on volume and complexity. A blended platform can work if your B2B account base is small, your pricing rules are simple, and your customers behave like consumers with login walls. Once you have customer-specific contract pricing, multi-buyer accounts, EDI requirements, and a real ERP behind the catalogue, a dedicated B2B platform usually pays back the difference inside the first year — mostly by eliminating the order-entry team that a blended setup quietly requires.
We wrote a side-by-side comparison for one of the most common blended choices: Turis vs Shopify Plus for B2B.
06 / Implementation reality
The honest answer ranges from six weeks to nine months. The variance has very little to do with the platform you pick and almost everything to do with two things: how much of the work is configuration versus custom development, and whether the implementation runs through a partner queue or directly with the platform team.
The most realistic timeline for a typical wholesale or manufacturing business with a modern ERP is under eight weeks to first real customer. We wrote a longer piece on what actually drives that: going live fast — when speed matters and the date can’t slip.
07 / In practice
Three teams — very different businesses — describing what a B2B storefront changed for their customers and their order desk.
“By introducing Turis, our customers placed more orders simply because it was much easier for them.”
“Using AI in Turis to set up dynamic discounts has blown my mind. I have just set up a promotion for all Heal’s brand products (around 40,000 items) and it was flawless. A complete game changer.”
“We spent months evaluating Shopify Plus for a B2B portal. It couldn’t handle our pricing requirements, even with plugins. Turis had it built in from day one.”
08 / Frequently asked
A B2B storefront sits behind a login wall and shows each buyer the catalogue, pricing, MOQs and payment terms that apply to their specific account. A B2C webshop shows one price to everyone, takes payment up front, and is built around anonymous, one-off purchases. The visible UI looks similar; the mechanics behind it are completely different.
Yes, for small or simple wholesale operations. The challenge appears when you need true customer-specific pricing, credit terms, MOQs, approval flows, multi-buyer accounts and ERP-grade integration — those mechanics tend to require plugins, partner builds, or workarounds on blended platforms. For mid-to-large B2B operations, a dedicated B2B platform usually pays back the cost difference in the first year by eliminating the manual order-desk work the blended setup quietly requires.
B2B storefront pricing varies significantly. Blended B2C platforms with B2B add-ons typically start under $1,000/month, but the real cost includes plugins, partner development, and the operational overhead of working around platform limits. Dedicated B2B platforms usually start higher but bundle the mechanics natively. Turis pricing scales with order volume and modules.
Realistic timelines range from six weeks (for configuration-led setups with standard ERP integrations) to nine months (for partner-led implementations with deep custom integrations or “big bang” rollouts). The biggest predictor is whether the implementation is configuration or custom development. More on what drives go-live speed.
Smaller and mid-tier customers usually adopt the portal quickly — especially if it makes reordering faster than the alternative. Large procurement-driven accounts often will not, because they have entrenched purchasing workflows that work for them. The honest answer is that a B2B storefront captures the orders from customers willing to use it, and you need a complementary order-capture approach for the customers who will not.
No. Customers using EDI have procurement systems that automate the requisition-to-order flow, and they generally cannot or will not switch to a portal. The right approach is to run native EDI alongside the storefront — the same platform should handle both, so orders from EDI and orders from the storefront end up in the same structured pipeline. More on EDI onboarding.
It should — that is the entire point. A real B2B storefront syncs customers, prices, stock and orders with your ERP automatically. Look for pre-built integrations with your specific ERP (Business Central, NetSuite, SAP, Acumatica, Odoo, etc.) rather than partner-built bridges, which add cost and ongoing maintenance burden.
No, and they should not be able to. The login wall is the structural feature that lets you show each buyer their own pricing, catalogue and terms. Some B2B storefronts let you publish a public landing or category browse that shows list prices to drive registration, but the actual buyer-specific pricing only appears after authentication.
Yes. A real B2B storefront supports multiple sub-users on one customer account, each with their own login, permissions and approval routing. Common patterns: a junior buyer drafts the order, a senior buyer approves; a regional buyer sees only their location’s catalogue; finance gets read-only access to order history. If a platform requires shared logins for this, you are looking at a B2C product.
Most B2B storefronts handle the common rules (per-customer price lists, contract pricing, volume tiers, currency overrides) natively. For unusual rules — rebates, allowance schemes, complex bundles, dynamic discounts — a platform with a programmable pricing layer is essential. We have seen teams configure surprisingly complex pricing rules without a single line of code, but it is worth testing on your specific scenarios during evaluation.
09 / Where to go next
30 minutes. Walk us through your catalogue, pricing rules, ERP and channel mix — we’ll show you how a real B2B storefront fits, what it costs, and what go-live looks like.
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