What is B2B? Meaning, Examples, and B2B Platforms Explained

What does B2B mean?

B2B stands for business-to-business. It describes transactions, relationships and marketing between two businesses, as distinct from B2C (business-to-consumer), where a company sells directly to individual end users.

In practice, when people say “B2B” they usually mean one of three things:

• B2B as a business model. A company whose customers are other businesses. A wholesaler selling to retailers; a manufacturer selling to wholesalers; a software company selling to other companies.
• B2B as a transaction type. A single sale between two businesses — a purchase order, an invoice, a quote, a contract.
• B2B as a category of commerce. The broader space of how businesses buy and sell from each other, including the platforms, integrations, and processes that make it work.

The simplest mental model: if the buyer is buying for their business — to resell, to use in producing something else, or to operate the business — the transaction is B2B. If the buyer is buying for themselves, it’s B2C.

What are the types of B2B? (Examples)

B2B isn’t one shape. It spans several models that look quite different in practice. The most common:

Manufacturer to wholesaler

The factory making the products sells in bulk to wholesalers who distribute regionally. A brewery selling pallets to a beverage wholesaler; a furniture manufacturer selling containers to a regional distributor. Volumes are large, order frequency is steady, pricing is contract-based.

Wholesaler to retailer

The wholesaler holding inventory sells in case packs or pallets to the retail stores who sell to end consumers. A specialty food wholesaler shipping weekly to a chain of delis; a fashion distributor sending seasonal collections to boutique retailers. Order frequency is often weekly, catalogues are seasonal, and pricing varies by account size.

Brand or manufacturer direct to retail

Some brands skip the wholesaler entirely and sell direct to retail chains, hospitality, or specialty stores. The brand keeps margin and control of brand presentation, but takes on the work of managing many retail accounts directly — pricing, terms, fulfilment, customer service.

Distributors and importers

Distributors sit between brands and retailers, often handling import, customs, regional warehousing, and local sales. They aggregate catalogues from many brands and resell to retailers in their territory. The distributor’s value is logistics and local relationships, not the products themselves.

B2B2C

A business sells to another business that then sells to consumers — but the original brand stays visible to the end consumer. A coffee roaster selling beans to a cafe chain where the roaster’s logo appears on the menu; a software platform sold to retailers but branded to consumers. The relationship is B2B; the end experience is consumer-facing.

Service B2B

Not all B2B involves physical products. A SaaS company selling software, an advertising agency selling campaigns, a consulting firm selling strategy, a logistics provider selling shipping — all B2B. The commerce mechanics differ from product B2B (contracts and retainers instead of catalogues and orders), but the principle is the same: businesses transacting with businesses.

How is B2B different from B2C?

The surface of a B2B and B2C transaction can look similar — products, prices, a checkout. The mechanics underneath are very different. The table below summarises the seven structural differences that decide which kind of platform you need.

Aspect	B2C ecommerce	B2B ecommerce
Buyer identity	Anonymous shoppers. Anyone can land and buy.	Authenticated accounts. Pricing and catalogue depend 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.	Buyer + approver + finance + procurement. Multi-buyer accounts. Weeks of cycle time.
Order pattern	Mostly first-time and occasional purchases.	Mostly repeat orders. Same SKUs every week or month.
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, account management.

This is why B2C platforms (like Shopify or BigCommerce) and B2B platforms (like Turis) tend to be built around different assumptions even when they look superficially similar — the mechanics in the foundations are different. Retrofitting a B2C platform with B2B plugins works to a point, but eventually the underlying assumptions push back.

What is a B2B platform?

A B2B platform is the software a business uses to handle commerce with its business customers — ordering, pricing, invoicing, fulfilment, and integration with the rest of the business’s operations.

It’s easy to confuse a B2B platform with a few adjacent things, so worth being precise:

• A B2B platform is not a B2B marketplace. A marketplace (like Alibaba or Faire) is a third-party site where many sellers list and many buyers shop. A B2B platform is software your own business runs to handle its own commerce — your catalogue, your customers, your pricing.
• A B2B platform is not a CRM. A CRM (like Salesforce or HubSpot) manages the sales pipeline and customer relationship data. A B2B platform handles the actual transactions — orders, invoices, fulfilment.
• A B2B platform is not just a webshop. A B2B storefront is one channel within a B2B platform; the platform itself also handles orders that come in by EDI, email, PDF, Excel, or phone — because business buyers rarely all use the same channel.

The simplest way to think about it: a B2B platform is what sits between your customers’ orders and your ERP, regardless of how those orders arrive. Its job is to make wholesale ordering structured, repeatable, and self-serve where possible — without the order desk becoming the bottleneck.

What does a B2B platform do?

The core capabilities of a modern B2B platform fall into five buckets. A platform that handles these well replaces a substantial amount of manual sales-rep work; one that handles them poorly just shifts the work somewhere else.

Order capture across every channel

A real B2B platform captures orders wherever they come from. A self-serve storefront for the customers who’ll log in. AI-driven capture of PDF, email and Excel orders for the customers who won’t. Native EDI for the procurement-driven accounts. All of them feed the same structured sales-order pipeline. In practice, 30–80% of orders at most wholesale businesses arrive outside the webshop — the platform has to handle those too.

Customer-specific pricing and catalogues

Per-account price lists, contract pricing, volume tiers, currency overrides. Each buyer sees the catalogue, MOQs and prices that apply to their account. New product launches surface to selected customers first; discontinued lines disappear without breaking links. None of this should require a developer.

Credit, terms and approval flows

Pay-by-invoice with net terms, credit-limit enforcement at checkout, multi-buyer accounts with sub-user roles and approval routing. The buying experience respects how procurement actually works inside the customer’s organisation.

ERP and accounting integration

Orders sync into the ERP as structured sales orders. Customers, prices and stock flow back. The platform sits between the buying experience and the back-office systems — not on top of them, not next to them.

Reporting and customer activation

The platform sees every order. That means it can tell you which customers haven’t ordered in 90 days, which SKUs are selling, where margin is leaking. The best B2B platforms also automate the activation — reminders, restock prompts, win-back campaigns — without needing a marketing team to write them.

Who needs a B2B platform?

The honest signal that you’ve outgrown spreadsheets and email is usually one of three things:

• Order entry is consuming sales-rep time. Reps are spending material parts of their day typing emailed orders into the ERP. That’s an order intake problem, not a sales problem.
• Pricing complexity is multiplying. Each new customer comes with their own price list, terms, MOQs. The team is maintaining all of this in spreadsheets and the inevitable mistakes have started landing in invoices.
• Channels are diverging. Some customers email PDFs, some send Excel, some use EDI, some now want a portal. Each new channel adds another seam where orders can fall through.

Conversely: if you have a handful of customers, one price list, and all orders arrive the same way, a platform is overhead you don’t need yet. Most businesses with fewer than around 20 active wholesale accounts can operate well on a spreadsheet and an inbox — the operational gain from a platform only compounds at scale.

For everyone in between — growing wholesale operations, brands selling to retailers, manufacturers selling to distributors — a B2B platform usually pays back the cost in the first year, mostly by eliminating order-desk hours rather than by directly generating new revenue. Customer stories here show the shape this takes in practice.

Frequently asked questions

Where to go next

If you’re evaluating B2B platforms for your own business, the practical next steps:

• Read the longer guide on B2B storefronts — what they are and how to choose one.
• See how multi-channel ordering works in practice — storefront plus Vision plus EDI in one ordering layer.
• Compare Turis vs Shopify Plus for B2B specifically.
• See pricing for the Turis platform.
• Or book a 30-minute call — tell us how your customers buy and we’ll show you what a platform fit looks like for your business.