B2B ecommerce platform — what it is, how it differs from B2C and how to roll it out

A B2B ecommerce platform is an online store where the buyer is a company, not a private individual — and that changes almost everything about it. The buyer logs into a company account, sees their own prices and discounts, orders within a credit limit, and pays by bank transfer against an invoice due date. Behind a single account there are usually several people: one places the order, another approves it, a third downloads the invoices. And the data the store runs on — prices, stock, payment terms — usually already lives in an ERP system.

This article explains what B2B means and how large a share of EU online trade is business-to-business (there is no equivalent official split for the Swiss market, which this article flags rather than papers over), how a B2B platform differs from an ordinary store, why a rollout starts with data rather than looks, how to compare SaaS, open source and a custom build using Swiss-franc pricing where it exists, what order to launch a wholesale store in, and what Swiss B2B invoicing actually involves when there is no national e-invoicing mandate. Market figures come from Eurostat; prices come from vendor price pages read on 30 September 2026. You won't find invented customer stories here, or promises like "save 70% of your time."

B2B — what it is and what it means in online sales

B2B is short for business-to-business: sales between companies. Eurostat, which collects e-commerce data across the whole EU, defines it this way: "Web sales to other businesses are called B2B (business-to-business) sales and those to consumers are called B2C (business-to-consumer) sales" (Eurostat, "Digital economy and society").

Statistics use a third abbreviation too: B2G (business-to-government), sales to public administration. Eurostat groups it together with B2B into a single category it describes as sales "to other enterprises and public authorities (B2BG)" (Eurostat, "E-commerce statistics").

In practice the three models differ like this:

• B2C — the customer is a private individual, there is one price shown to everyone, payment happens immediately, and the seller is bound by consumer-protection rules;
• B2B — the customer is a company, the price depends on that customer's own agreement, payment often happens on an invoice due date, and the same orders repeat;
• B2G — the customer is a public body, with that body's own procurement procedures layered on top — outside the scope of this article.

What does B2B ecommerce mean for a store in practice? That the buyer isn't acting on impulse — they're fulfilling a need of their own business: restocking a warehouse, ordering materials for a job, buying goods to resell. They come back regularly, know their product codes, and want to order fast. That's why B2B ecommerce isn't a B2C store with a login form bolted on — it's a tool for serving regular trade customers. Many businesses simply call it a wholesale portal or B2B wholesale store.

One more term is worth knowing: EDI. Eurostat describes this kind of order as one "automatically placed and processed using computer-to-computer communication, based on a standard data exchange format" (Eurostat). EDI is also B2B, but without a storefront: the customer's purchasing system talks directly to the seller's system.

How big is B2B ecommerce — and why Switzerland has no official answer

The best split between B2B and B2C online sales is published by Eurostat for the EU, not for Switzerland. It is drawn from a survey of EU enterprises with 10 or more employees, and the e-sales questions ask about the previous calendar year — so figures in the "2025" column describe sales made in 2024 (Eurostat metadata).

In the isoc_ec_evaln2 dataset (updated 27.02.2026), Eurostat splits the value of sales made through websites and apps (marketplaces included) by EU enterprises into two parts. Across the EU in 2024, sales to businesses and public administration (B2B and B2G) made up 51.78% of that value, and sales to consumers (B2C) made up 48.20% (Eurostat, isoc_ec_evaln2). We could not find a published Swiss equivalent of this split — the figure below is EU context, not a Swiss statistic, and we say so rather than implying otherwise.

What we do have for Switzerland is a general online-shopping figure, not a B2B/B2C split: 85.5% of individuals aged 16–74 bought something online in the 12 months before the 2025 survey, up from 83.42% in 2023 (Eurostat, isoc_ec_ib20, data supplied by the Swiss Federal Statistical Office, FSO). That number describes overall consumer online shopping, not the share of trade sold B2B — we're not implying otherwise by placing it near the EU B2B figure above.

A second EU data point for context: 13.80% of EU enterprises made sales to businesses and public administration through a website or app in 2024 (Eurostat, isoc_ec_eseln2) — so in the EU a relatively small group of enterprises accounts for more than half of the value of all web sales. For a Swiss business currently selling wholesale over the phone and by email, the honest conclusion is narrower: we can't give you a Swiss B2B share, and EU figures don't transfer automatically to a non-EU market. What does transfer is the mechanism — online B2B sales are concentrated among the suppliers that have actually built an ordering channel for their trade customers. A B2B store isn't an exotic niche, but it isn't yet the default every supplier's customers expect either.

How a B2B platform differs from a B2C store

The most common assumption on a first project is "let's build a store like for retail customers, just with a login." That holds up right until the first trade customer who has a different discount, a different payment term, and three people authorised to place orders. Below are the features that separate a B2B platform from a B2C store — worth checking against any vendor's offer.

Account-specific price lists and discounts

In a B2C store there's one price. In a B2B store, the price depends on who's logged in. In practice, prices get structured on three levels:

• group price lists — wholesale, partner, distributor tiers, changed for the whole group at once;
• individual prices — negotiated with a specific account, for selected products or the whole catalogue;
• order-based discounts — by quantity, basket value, or a turnover threshold.

Where those prices are calculated matters. If a sales rep sets a discount in the ERP while the store keeps its own copy of the price list, the price on the site and on the invoice will eventually drift apart. So the question "does the platform support per-customer pricing" needs a second half: "can it pull that pricing from the ERP."

Credit limits and deferred payment

Companies rarely pay by card at checkout. They buy on an invoice with a payment term, within a credit limit set by finance. A B2B platform therefore needs to know the account's limit and current outstanding balance, block or route to approval any order that would exceed it, and show the customer their own invoices, due dates and account statement. Online payment still has its place — for new customers, orders above the limit, or prepayments — but it's one method among several, not the only one.

Repeat orders and fast ordering

A wholesale customer already knows what they need. They don't browse categories — they type in product codes. That's why, in a B2B store, these matter more than the look of the product card:

• fast ordering by product code or EAN, with quantity entered directly in the row;
• basket import from a file — the customer pastes a list from their own system;
• one-click reorder from order history;
• saved shopping lists on the company account;
• units and multiples — case, pallet, minimum order quantity.

Company accounts, users and permissions

In B2B the customer is an organisation, and several people act on its behalf. A typical set of roles on a company account looks like this:

• account administrator — manages users and company data, sees everything;
• buyer — builds baskets and places orders, sometimes only up to a set amount;
• approver — authorises orders that exceed the buyer's limit;
• finance — sees invoices, payments and account statements, but doesn't order;
• logistics — checks delivery status and dispatch documents.

Roles bring order approval with them: the buyer prepares a basket, the system routes it to their manager, and only an approved order goes to fulfilment. Not every business needs this, but the decision about account structure has to be made early. Adding roles later means changing how orders and invoices are tied to people and companies after the fact.

Integration with ERP and the warehouse

In a B2C store, products and prices are often entered by hand in an admin panel. In B2B they almost always already exist in an ERP, together with the customer master data, commercial terms and stock levels. Integrating the ERP with the store isn't an add-on — it's the condition for the store showing the truth. More on this in the next section.

Invoices in Swiss B2B: no e-invoicing mandate, the QR-bill instead

This is where B2B differs from B2C legally, too — and Switzerland, outside the EU, is not on the ViDA timeline that applies across the EU (cross-border B2B digital reporting from 1 July 2030). In the sources we checked we found no Swiss mandate for structured B2B e-invoicing either: no rule requiring businesses to issue B2B invoices in a prescribed electronic format or to report them to a central platform in real time.

What a Swiss invoice does carry, if it includes a payment slip, is the QR-bill. The national standard, operated by SIX, has been "in circulation since June 2020" and "definitively replaced Swiss payment slips on 1 October 2022", with new requirements applying since 22 November 2025 (SIX). It's worth being precise about what the QR-bill is and isn't: it standardises how a Swiss invoice is paid — the structured reference, the scannable payment slip — not how it's reported to a tax authority.

The practical consequence for a B2B store selling from Switzerland: your invoices (usually raised in an ERP or accounting system, not the storefront) should carry a QR-bill if you want them paid the way Swiss business customers are used to paying, and the store's job is to pass the order to that system with complete customer data and show the invoice reference afterwards. Nor is there a central tax-authority platform that the invoice has to be reported to. If your store also sells to business customers in the EU, whether ViDA's e-invoicing and reporting rules reach you depends on your VAT position in the EU — check it with a tax adviser; they don't apply to a purely domestic Swiss sale.

Data first, storefront second: ERP as the single source of truth

The most expensive mistake in a B2B platform rollout is the sequence "let's build the store first, add the integration later." A store without integration shows prices and stock levels someone has to type in by hand — and in B2B, where every customer has different prices, there's many times more of that data than in B2C.

The single-source-of-truth principle

Every type of data should have one system of record that the rest pull from. A typical split:

• ERP — products, prices and customer price lists, accounts, credit limits, invoices;
• warehouse management system (WMS), if one exists — stock and reservations; if there isn't one, stock comes from the ERP too;
• CRM — contact history and sales opportunities;
• the B2B platform — presents the data, takes orders, and sends them back to the ERP.

When every system is "sort of" a source of truth, the same customer ends up existing in three versions, and the same price in two. Before choosing a platform, write down which data flows in which direction and how often: prices and stock to the store, orders and new users to the ERP, statuses and invoices back to the store.

How the store technically connects to the ERP

Integration means exchanging data through an API (the interface programs use to pass data to each other), files, or ready-made connectors supplied by the platform or ERP vendor. From a B2B store's point of view, three questions matter:

• does the ERP have an API or a ready-made connector for the chosen platform — this decides whether the integration gets configured or coded;
• how often does the data need to refresh — stock on every order, price lists once a day or only on change;
• what happens when the ERP doesn't respond — does the store accept the order and send it later, or block the customer.

The over-integration trap

The opposite failure mode happens too: every department adds its own connection, each with its own connector and its own schedule, and a year later someone has to keep checking whether all the automations still work. The answer is the same ownership principle: ERP owns prices and documents, the warehouse owns stock, CRM owns relationships, the store owns presentation and order intake. Every new connection should have an owner who knows what breaks when it fails.

SaaS, open source or a custom build — how to choose a B2B platform

You choose a platform model the same way as for any store — the general comparison is in our article comparing ecommerce platforms. In B2B, though, extra criteria join the list that are secondary for a retail store: per-customer pricing, credit limits, accounts with roles, and integration with your own ERP.

A SaaS platform for B2B

In SaaS you pay a subscription, and the vendor keeps the servers, updates and security running. What you gain and what you hand to the vendor in that model is covered in our guide to SaaS. Not every subscription store platform treats B2B the same way: some include it in every plan, others hold the more advanced pieces back for their top tier. Shopify B2B is a good example of the second pattern. Shopify's help centre says "You can use Shopify B2B on the Basic, Grow, Advanced, and Shopify Plus plans", but outside Plus a store is limited to three active B2B market catalogs; assigning catalogs directly to individual companies and company locations (true customer-level pricing), as well as deposits, partial payments and payment requests per fulfilment, are Plus-only (Shopify Help Center, "Shopify B2B features by plan", read 01.10.2026). For a wholesaler with individually negotiated prices, that distinction matters more than the headline "B2B included".

On the Swiss pricing side: Shopify's Swiss page lists Basic at CHF 29/21 per month (billed monthly/annually), Grow at CHF 79/59, and Advanced at CHF 359/269, with Plus "Ab 2.100 € EUR/Monat" (from EUR 2,100 a month) — Plus is priced in euros even on the Swiss page, which we report as stated rather than converting (read 30.09.2026). The Swiss pages exist in German, French and Italian only; there is no Swiss English version.

Whichever SaaS vendor you're looking at, check:

• which B2B features are included in the subscription, and which sit behind paid add-ons or a higher plan — per-customer pricing, credit limits, multi-user accounts, fast ordering;
• whether a ready-made connector to your ERP exists, and who pays to maintain it;
• what leaving the platform looks like. Vendors describe data export to CSV files: Shopify documents exporting customers, orders and products (customers, orders, products). These descriptions don't cover individual price lists or company-account structures, so ask the vendor how you'd export those specifically. If the ERP is the source of the pricing, this problem shrinks — another argument for the "data first" principle;
• what the vendor commits to on availability. A B2B store that customers use to order production materials is a critical channel — check what the vendor's SLA actually promises on uptime and response times before you rely on it.

A SaaS platform is a single application serving many merchants at once, so the way your data is kept separate from everyone else's (multi-tenant architecture) is also worth understanding before you commit.

Open source: Shopware, Magento, WooCommerce

Open-source software runs on your own server or a partner's, and you can extend it freely — the price is taking on responsibility for hosting, updates and security yourself. None of the three vendors below publish Swiss-franc pricing, so the figures stay in the vendor's own currency rather than being converted.

• Shopware — the vendor's pricing page lists a free Community Edition under the MIT licence, and paid plans: Rise "From €600/month" and Evolve "From €2,400/month" (excl. VAT), priced "based on your gross merchandise value (GMV) and further individual factors" — in other words, by store turnover (read 30.09.2026). For B2B the plan matters: the vendor's comparison table marks B2B Components — customer-specific pricing, quick ordering, shopping lists, quote management, enhanced roles and permissions management — as available in Evolve and Beyond only, not in Rise or the Community Edition (read 01.10.2026).
• Magento Open Source — the code is published under the OSL-3.0 licence (magento/magento2 repository). The paid version, Adobe Commerce, is priced individually by Adobe; nothing in the material we could access lists a figure, so we don't quote one.
• WooCommerce — the vendor describes it as "the free, open-source ecommerce platform for WordPress" with no platform fee and no revenue share; what costs money is hosting (the vendor's own estimate: "$25 – $350/month for most stores") and extensions ($29–$299/year each) — these figures are in US dollars on the vendor's own pricing page (woocommerce.com/pricing). B2B features get added through extensions, so each one is one more thing to keep updated.

A custom build or headless

A platform built to order is the right choice when the sales process doesn't fit a ready-made system: unusual price lists, product configurators, several markets, B2B and B2C selling from one back end. This often takes the shape of a headless architecture — your own storefront connected by API to a commerce engine and an ERP. When that's worth it, and when it's a premature investment, is the subject of our article headless commerce. How we approach these projects is on our headless store page.

The choice between the three models in B2B comes down to one question: how much of your sales process will a ready-made platform handle without working around its limits? If almost all of it — SaaS. If you need a handful of significant changes and have a team or partner to maintain them — open source. If the process is unusual and the store is your main sales channel — a custom build.

Step-by-step plan for a B2B store rollout

Order matters more than speed here. Every step depends on data from the one before it, so you start at the back end and finish with the customers.

1. Data and integration

Clean up the data in the ERP: product codes, names, units, multiples, price groups, customer master data with credit limits. Decide which system is the source of truth for what, and get data flowing between the ERP and the platform. At this stage nobody sees a storefront yet — which is deliberate, because every data error costs the least here.

2. Catalogue and pricing

Only once data is flowing do you build the catalogue: categories, descriptions, images, filterable attributes. Test pricing against a handful of real accounts — does a customer with a group discount and one with an individual price see exactly what a sales rep would show them from the ERP?

3. Accounts and roles

Set up company accounts for the first customers, with users and permissions. Decide whether you need order approval, or whether an administrator and a buyer role are enough to start.

4. Ordering

Turn on the basket, fast ordering by product code, list import, one-click reorder from history, and order hand-off to the ERP. Test an order that exceeds the credit limit and one with a quantity that doesn't match the required multiple.

5. Payments and invoices

Configure payment methods — term-based bank transfer for regular customers, online payment for new ones — and the document flow: an invoice raised in the ERP, carrying a QR-bill, with the reference shown afterwards in the customer's account alongside the payment due date.

6. Pilot with a few customers

Before opening the platform to everyone, invite a handful of regular accounts who order often and are willing to say what's broken. Let them place real orders for a few weeks while a sales rep collects feedback. Measure what you can actually count: how many orders came through the store, how many needed a manual fix, how many questions customers asked the sales rep instead. Only move further customers across once the pilot is done.

Mistakes that delay a rollout

Most problems in a B2B platform rollout come from organisation, not technology:

• no project owner — when the store is "a bit of sales, a bit of IT, a bit of logistics," decisions stall; appoint one person who understands both the customers and the buying process;
• feature bloat — the first version has to handle an order, an invoice, a payment and a status; configurators, PIM or elaborate automations can wait until the pilot shows what's actually missing;
• no control over running costs — licences, hosting, add-ons and connectors are billed every month; review them regularly;
• no testing after changes — after every platform or ERP update, check login, pricing, the basket, order hand-off and invoicing, ideally on a test environment first;
• underestimated support — when something breaks, the B2B customer calls the sales rep; prepare customer instructions and a clear technical contact point.

How much does a B2B platform cost

The cost of a B2B platform is the sum of three things: the licence or subscription, the rollout (where ERP integration is usually the single largest line item), and maintenance in the years that follow.

Our report on Polish online store costs collects 108 publicly available price observations from 70 market sources (agencies, freelancers, SaaS price lists and others), gathered in the Polish market in March–May 2026. It's useful background on methodology — how the sample was built, what counts as a "dedicated B2B platform" — but it's a Polish-market report, and we don't quote its medians here as a benchmark for pricing a store sold in Switzerland, where currency, vendor rates and integration scope all differ.

Rather than chase a single figure, work out your own scope:

• the online store cost calculator lets you flag a platform, ERP integration and B2B features;
• the ecommerce TCO calculator compares what running the store costs over several years — subscriptions, add-ons, fees and support;
• the full cost breakdown for a store is covered in our article on what an online store costs.

When comparing offers, ask every vendor the same questions: what's included in the subscription or licence price, who builds and maintains the ERP connector, what a post-launch change costs, and what the exit terms are. If a platform stops being enough, moving the store is a project of its own — how to run it is covered in our article on store migration. The rest of our platform-selection articles are in the ecommerce platforms section.