Consumer eCommerce is built on a simple idea: one product, one price, pay now. Business-to-business trade rarely works like that. A wholesaler might have hundreds of accounts, each on negotiated terms that have built up over years of phone calls and handshakes.
When those businesses move online, they often choose a platform built for consumers and then discover how much of their trade model it cannot express.
- Account-specific prices, or price bands assigned to groups of customers
- Volume breaks that change the unit price at set quantities
- Minimum order quantities and pack sizes
- Credit terms and payment on account, not just card payment
- Different product ranges visible to different customers
- Quick reordering of regular lines and large orders by product code
Where off-the-shelf carts break
Most mainstream platforms can handle one or two of these through plugins and discount rules. The trouble starts when they combine. An account with its own price list, a volume break on top, and a credit limit to check at checkout can end up relying on several extensions that were never designed to work together.
The symptoms are familiar: prices that are right on the product page and wrong in the basket, discount rules that conflict, a checkout that can only take card payments, and staff re-keying orders into the accounts system by hand.
If your team is correcting online orders before they can be processed, the platform is not doing the job.
Decide where the price is calculated
In most trade businesses, the true price already lives somewhere: the ERP or accounts system. The most reliable approach is usually to let that system remain the source of truth and have the website ask it, rather than maintaining a second copy of every account's terms in the shop.
That means integration work, and it needs designing properly, including what happens when the back-office system is slow or unavailable. But it removes the most common cause of pricing errors, which is two systems quietly disagreeing.
Design for how trade customers buy
A trade buyer ordering forty lines they order every month does not want to browse. They want a fast order pad, their previous orders, product codes they recognise and a clear view of their account. Build those first. The browsing experience matters less than it does for consumers.
Questions to ask any platform
- Can it show each account its own prices without a separate site per customer?
- Can it take orders on account and respect credit limits?
- How does it get prices and stock from our back-office system, and how often?
- What happens to an order if that system is unavailable?
