B2B Ecommerce Development Services

Agencies with a verified published price

How a B2B ecommerce build should be run

1. Discovery against your real order flow. Before any platform is chosen, the partner should map how orders actually reach you today, including the phone calls, emails and spreadsheets, and which of those you intend to move online first. A build scoped without that map will miss the exceptions that make up most of your volume.
2. Platform and integration decision. The choice between a hosted commerce platform, a headless build and an ERP-native storefront is driven by your pricing complexity and integration needs, not by fashion. Ask for the reasoning in writing, with the constraints each option imposes named honestly.
3. Build the catalogue and pricing engine first. Customer-specific price lists, contract pricing, quantity breaks and unit-of-measure handling are the foundation. Getting them right early prevents the rebuild that happens when they are treated as a late configuration task rather than as core logic.
4. Migrate, test with real customers, then launch in phases. Move a pilot group of accounts first, with their real price lists and real orders, and fix what breaks before the wider rollout. A big-bang launch across a whole customer base is how a distributor loses a quarter of orders in a fortnight.

What moves the price

Integration depth is the largest single driver. A storefront that reads a static price list is a fraction of the cost of one that queries the ERP live for customer-specific pricing, available inventory across warehouses and credit status. Catalogue complexity is next: configurable products, unit-of-measure conversions, variants and technical attributes each multiply the data work, and dirty product data is the most common reason a project runs long. Account structure matters too, because multi-user buying organisations need roles, approval chains, budgets and order histories that consumer platforms do not provide out of the box.

Then there is the front end. A design system built specifically for repeat buyers, meaning fast reordering, saved lists, quick order by part number and clean quote requests, costs more than a template and earns it back in adoption. Ongoing costs deserve equal attention at the quoting stage: platform licensing, hosting, support hours and the retainer for the changes you will inevitably want in year one. Ask for the five-year cost of ownership rather than the build price alone, because the cheapest build frequently carries the most expensive maintenance.

How to vet a development partner

Ask for two or three live B2B storefronts the partner built, and ask specifically what it integrated them with. A portfolio of consumer stores tells you very little about whether a team can handle contract pricing and ERP synchronisation. Ask to speak to a client whose project went badly, or at least ask what went wrong on the last engagement and how it was handled, because every real integration project has a bad month and the useful signal is how the team behaved during it.

Settle ownership and continuity before signing. The code should be in a repository you own, the documentation should be written as the work proceeds rather than promised at the end, and the contract should name who holds the platform accounts and the hosting. Ask how search visibility is handled, since B2B catalogues frequently generate large numbers of near-duplicate URLs and faceted pages, and Google's own documentation on crawling and indexing is the standard the build should be held to. Published rates and disclosed minimums, where a firm offers them, let you compare on something firmer than a proposal, and the index records them with the page and date they came from.

Questions people actually ask

Should we use a B2B platform or extend our consumer store?

It depends on your pricing complexity. If every customer sees the same price, extending an existing store is often the cheaper route. Once you have contract pricing, credit terms, approval chains and multi-warehouse inventory, a platform built for those requirements, or a headless build against your ERP, usually costs less over five years than repeatedly forcing a consumer platform to behave.

How long does a B2B ecommerce build take?

Most substantial builds run several months rather than weeks, with the integration and data preparation, not the design, consuming the majority of the calendar. Phased launches are the norm: a pilot group of accounts, then progressive rollout. Be wary of a proposal that promises a full ERP-integrated storefront in a few weeks.

Who should own the product data work?

You should, with help. Cleaning attributes, units, images and descriptions requires knowledge only your team has, and no agency can invent it. The partner can supply structure, tooling and a data model, but a project where the client assumes the agency will magically produce a clean catalogue is a project that will overrun.

Does a B2B storefront need SEO work?

Yes, and it is easier than in consumer retail because the queries are specific: part numbers, specifications and applications. The technical side matters most, ensuring category and product pages are crawlable, that faceted navigation does not generate endless duplicate URLs, and that the pages carry the attributes buyers actually search on.

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