What is BigCommerce B2B Edition?

B2B Edition is BigCommerce's wholesale layer: the standard platform plus a React-based Buyer Portal and a set of B2B primitives — company accounts, tiered pricing, quoting, and payment terms. It's sold on the Performance plan (the tier formerly called Enterprise) with custom pricing, not on the self-serve plans. If a rep quotes you B2B Edition on a $105/month plan, ask again.

What you get out of the box

  • Company accounts with hierarchy. A company profile with multiple buyers, roles, and permissions — purchasing agents who can order, juniors who can only build carts, admins who see everything. Parent/sub-account structures cover multi-location customers with central billing.
  • Price lists + customer groups. Contract pricing per segment: your Tier-2 wholesale accounts log in and see their prices, not retail. This is the backbone feature — and it works well, right up until the price data has to come from somewhere else (see below).
  • Quoting. Buyers build a cart and submit it as a quote; your team adjusts pricing and sends it back for one-click conversion to an order. Good fit for negotiated, high-ticket B2B.
  • Buyer Portal. Order history, reorder, quote management, invoices, address books, shared shopping lists, and CSV quick-order for buyers who purchase from spreadsheets. It's a React app, open-sourced, with feature toggles and brandable styling.
  • Sales-rep masquerade. Reps log in as their accounts to place orders on a customer's behalf — the feature that quietly replaces a phone-and-fax order desk.
  • Payment terms. NET-30/60/90 style terms and invoice payment flows, gated per company account.

Where the built-in features stop

The line is data and process. B2B Edition gives you the storefront primitives; it does not know about your ERP, your freight carriers, or your tax-exemption paperwork. In practice, the mid-market builds we ship almost always add engineering in four places:

  1. ERP price and inventory sync. Price lists are only as good as what's in them. When 14,802 SKUs and 18 price tiers live in NetSuite, you need a real-time sync pipeline, not a weekly CSV upload. That was the center of the Lifting.com build and the Advanced Automation engagement.
  2. Real freight quoting. B2B carts ship LTL — FedEx Freight, R+L, SAIA — and buyers expect live pallet rates at checkout, not "we'll call you." That's carrier API integration work.
  3. Tax exemption workflows. Resale and exemption certificates are the friction point of B2B onboarding. We built a self-serve Avalara CertCapture app because the manual version — email a PDF, wait two days — kills conversion on new wholesale accounts.
  4. Buyer Portal customization. The portal is open source, which is the good news. The other news: meaningful changes to buyer workflows are frontend engineering on a React codebase, not theme settings.

Who B2B Edition is right for

Distributors, manufacturers, and wholesalers with real catalog depth, negotiated pricing, and repeat buyers — the businesses where a portal login replaces a sales call. If your "B2B" is a single wholesale price tier and a form, standard BigCommerce with customer groups covers it without the Performance-plan contract. If your buyers order weekly from price lists that live in an ERP, B2B Edition plus integration engineering is the honest scope.

The evaluation questions that matter

  • Where does pricing truth live — BigCommerce or the ERP? If ERP, budget for the sync before the theme.
  • How do buyers order today — search and browse, or SKU lists and spreadsheets? The answer decides whether quick-order UX is a nice-to-have or the whole point.
  • What percentage of orders ship freight? Live LTL quoting changes checkout architecture.
  • How many tax-exempt accounts do you onboard a month? That's the certificate-automation ROI math.

We scope this in one call, with numbers. Start with the BigCommerce development service or go straight to a conversation about your catalog.