What B2B Commerce Features to Look for in a Platform

The B2B eCommerce features that matter most connect your website to the way you already sell: customer-specific pricing from your ERP, account terms and credit limits, quotes and approvals, ordering through sales reps, EDI and punchout, and a buyer portal that shows each customer their orders, invoices and statements. 

Product data, B2B search, reporting and integrations decide whether buyers use it.

In many B2B businesses, a large share of orders still comes in by phone, email, EDI or through sales reps. A B2B eCommerce platform has to work with those channels and with the ERP behind them, or buyers keep calling. No platform covers all of this on its own. 

Some features are built in; others depend on how well the platform connects to the ERP, EDI software, procurement systems and product data you already run. This guide covers the 16 B2B commerce features to look for, a checklist of questions for vendors, and how to choose a platform.

What is a B2B eCommerce platform?

A B2B eCommerce platform lets a manufacturer, distributor or wholesaler sell online to business customers, with the prices, payment terms and approvals those customers buy under. Buyers log in to a company account, see their own catalog and prices, and order on account or against a quote, often with several people from one company sharing the account.

B2C platforms share the catalog and the checkout. What a B2B commerce solution adds is the account layer and the back office: it reads customer-specific prices, credit limits and order history from the ERP, and sends orders back to it. Platforms that serve both run B2B and B2C buyers from one catalog, with customer groups deciding what each buyer sees and pays.

What are the top B2B commerce features?

The 16 features below run from pricing and accounts, through the channels orders come in by, to catalog, fulfillment and the platform underneath. Each one ends with the questions to ask vendors.

1. Customer-specific pricing from your ERP

Most B2B suppliers price each customer differently: contract prices, volume breaks, price lists by customer group or region. The pricing engine usually lives in the ERP, so the website has to show the price the ERP would calculate for each logged-in buyer.

The question is how current that price is. Many sites sync prices hourly or overnight, which works until a price changes during the day and an order is invoiced at a different price from the one the buyer saw. A real-time lookup avoids that, but depends on how fast the ERP can answer. See how a B2B pricing engine handles contract, volume and regional pricing, and why many mid-market distributors still run without one.

Ask vendors

• Can the platform show ERP-calculated prices for each customer?
• Are those prices live, cached or synced in batches?
• What happens at checkout if the ERP doesn't respond?

2. Account status, credit limits and payment terms

Trade customers buy on account. At login and at checkout, the platform needs to know whether an account is active, on hold or over its credit limit, and which payment terms apply, such as Net 30. Buyers also need to enter purchase order numbers, and customers without an account need card payment.

Ask vendors

• Where do credit limits and account holds come from?
• Can an order over the limit be blocked, held for review or switched to card payment?
• Can buyers add a PO number and attach the PO?

3. Quotes and approval workflows

Large or unusual orders start as quotes. A buyer requests a quote online, a sales rep adjusts prices within agreed limits, a manager approves anything over a set value, and the accepted quote becomes an order without being keyed in again. On the buyer's side, an order over a budget may need sign-off from someone else in their company. Core dna's quote-to-order flow shows one way this runs.

Ask vendors

• Does an accepted quote convert to an order, or to a recurring order, at the quoted price?
• Can approval rules be set by order value, role or product, for both your team and the buyer's?
• Is every step logged?

4. Product configuration for made-to-order products

Manufacturers that sell configurable products, such as machinery, fixtures or cut-to-size materials, need buyers to choose options online and end up with a valid product, price and lead time. Rules decide which options go together, the price builds up from the choices, and the result carries through to the quote, the order and the ERP as a configured item or bill of materials.

Simple variants such as size, color or pack quantity are part of the catalog. Rule-based configuration with its own pricing is a bigger job, often handled by a configure-price-quote (CPQ) tool connected to the store.

Ask vendors

• Can option rules and option pricing be set up without code?
• Does a configured product flow into the quote and the ERP?
• Which CPQ tools have you connected to?

5. Ordering on behalf of customers

Sales reps and customer service teams still place a large share of B2B orders, by phone, by email or during site visits. They need to find a customer, see that customer's prices, stock and credit status, and place the order as them, with the order recorded against both the customer account and the rep. V-ZUG's service team, for example, orders for walk-in and phone customers through the same portal its technicians and trade agents use.

Rep tools also cover quotes started by the rep, carts the customer can finish online, and a view of each account's orders and open quotes.

Ask vendors

• Can a rep order for a customer with that customer's prices and terms?
• Is the rep recorded on the order for commission and reporting?
• Can reps see account history from the ERP and CRM in one place?

6. EDI orders and invoices alongside online ordering

Electronic data interchange (EDI) lets large customers send orders from their own systems straight into yours. A typical exchange runs from an 850 purchase order to an 855 acknowledgment, an 856 advance ship notice and an 810 invoice, using the US X12 numbering. Smaller trade customers increasingly want the same for price files, invoices and statements, delivered into their accounting software. In Australia, invoices can also travel over the Peppol eInvoicing network, which the ATO governs through the Australian Peppol Authority.

EDI orders and online orders should land in the same order record, against the same customer account and prices, so the buyer portal and your reports show every order.

Ask vendors

• Is EDI built in, delivered through a named EDI provider, or custom work?
• Do EDI orders appear in the buyer portal and in reporting?
• Can price files and invoices go out automatically, per customer?

7. Punchout to your customers' procurement systems

Large buyers often shop from inside a procurement system such as SAP Ariba, Coupa or Jaggaer. Punchout lets them open your site from that system, browse at their contract prices and send the cart back for internal approval. The approved purchase order then comes to you. Most procurement systems use the cXML protocol; SAP environments often use OCI.

Ask vendors

• Is punchout built in, a paid add-on or a third-party app?
• Which protocols and procurement systems are supported?
• Does the returned cart carry the commodity codes and units the buyer's system expects?

8. A buyer portal with users, roles and permissions

The buyer portal is where trade customers manage their account: order history, open orders, invoices, statements, quotes, shipment tracking and saved lists for reordering.

Several people usually buy for one company, so the portal needs company accounts with users and roles: who can order, who approves, who only sees invoices. Security has to match: role-based access, audit logs of who did what, secure sign-in such as passkeys or single sign-on, and encrypted account data. See B2B buyer portals.

Ask vendors

• Does order and invoice history come from the ERP, including orders placed offline?
• Can a customer's admin manage their own users?
• What is logged, and who can see the logs?

9. Repeat orders, contracts and subscriptions

Much of B2B buying is the same order again. Buyers need quick reorder from order history, saved lists, bulk entry by part number or spreadsheet upload, and scheduled repeat orders for consumables. Some suppliers also sell service plans or supply contracts that bill on a cycle, on account or by card.

Ask vendors

• Can a buyer reorder part of a past order?
• Can a quote become a recurring order at the quoted price?
• Can recurring orders bill on account terms?

10. Product data, spec sheets and industry standards

Trade buyers choose on specifications. Each product needs structured attributes, spec sheets, installation guides and compliance documents, usually managed in a product information management system (PIM) and published to the site.

Industry classification standards keep that data consistent between manufacturers, distributors and customers. ETIM covers electrical, HVAC and plumbing products. ECLASS covers products and services across industries. UNSPSC is widely used in US procurement, and GS1 standards cover product identifiers such as GTINs. Classified data drives filters and product comparisons, and the same codes travel with punchout carts and EDI orders.

Ask vendors

• Can product records hold your standard's classes and attributes?
• Can spec sheets be attached to products and found through search?
• Does product data come from your PIM, your ERP or both?

11. Search built for part numbers and trade terms

B2B buyers search by part number, supplier code, a competitor's code or the name the trade uses on site. Search needs exact matches on part numbers, synonyms and trade terms, typo tolerance, filters on technical attributes, and results limited to the products each customer can buy. RANDYS Worldwide's buyers, for example, narrow differential parts through several layers of vehicle and product filters.

Search can also use buying history, including orders placed offline and held in the ERP, to rank what each customer usually orders.

Ask vendors

• Can your marketing team manage synonyms and ranking without a developer?
• Does search respect customer-specific catalogs and prices?
• Can it use order history from the ERP?

12. Stock, freight and tax

Trade buyers need to know what's available, from where and when: stock by warehouse or branch, lead times for items out of stock, back orders, and the option to split a delivery or collect from a branch. Freight for bulky or heavy goods rarely fits flat-rate shipping; it depends on weight, dimensions, zones and the customer's agreed rates. Tax depends on where the goods go and who buys them, including tax-exempt customers, with sales tax in the US and GST in Australia.

V-ZUG lets selected agents order parts that are out of stock. The sales order is created, then held until the stock checks pass.

Ask vendors

• Is stock shown per location, and how often does it update from the ERP?
• Can freight be calculated from your own rates or a carrier's?
• How are back orders and tax exemptions handled?

13. Reporting and analytics

Sales teams and buyers need different reports. Internally: online share of orders per customer, quote conversion, average order value, searches with no results, and accounts that have stopped ordering. For buyers: spend by site or cost center, order and invoice history, and downloadable statements.

Reporting is only as complete as the data behind it. If EDI, phone and rep orders stay in the ERP, an online-only report covers a small share of the business.

Ask vendors

• Does reporting include orders from every channel?
• Can buyers download their own reports?
• Can the data flow to your BI tool?

14. ERP, PIM and CRM integrations

B2B eCommerce integration starts with the ERP (prices, stock, accounts, orders, invoices), then the PIM for product data and the CRM for sales reps, plus payments, freight and tax. Each connection can be a prebuilt connector, an integration platform such as MuleSoft or Celigo, or scheduled jobs and API endpoints configured in the commerce platform. Each option has a different cost, and a different owner when something breaks.

Ask vendors

• Which ERPs have you connected before, and for which customers?
• Is each data type synced in real time or in batches?
• Who monitors the integrations and fixes them when they fail?

15. Your website, storefronts and content on one platform

B2B buyers read before they buy: product guides, technical articles, case studies, dealer and branch locators. When the website and the store run on separate systems, product pages, content and customer accounts drift apart. Suppliers with several brands, regions or channels also need several storefronts, each with its own catalog, prices and design, managed from one admin. Core dna covers this under multi-site orchestration.

Ask vendors

• Do content and commerce share one product catalog and one customer record?
• Can a new brand or region launch as another storefront on the same platform?
• Can each storefront have its own price lists and catalog?

16. AI in B2B eCommerce

AI in B2B eCommerce works in two places. For buyers: search that understands what they mean, recommendations based on order history, and assistants that answer questions about orders, stock or specifications. For your team: AI agents that write and translate product content, enrich product data, build reports, and update catalogs and pages. A newer question is whether buyers' own AI agents can find your products and order from you, which depends on structured product data and open APIs.

Agents that change a live site need controls: permissions per user, changes saved as drafts for someone to approve, and a log of every action. Save a Life, a Core dna customer, used an AI agent to translate about 1,700 pages of clinical content into Spanish, with each page saved unpublished and approved by a medical advisor before it went live.

Ask vendors

• Which AI features are built in, and which need another tool?
• Can AI agents work on your catalog and content, and under which permissions?
• Can every AI change be reviewed before it goes live?

B2B eCommerce feature checklist

Use this checklist to compare how each vendor supports a feature: built in, configured on the platform, through an integration with a tool you already run, a paid add-on or custom development.

How to choose a B2B eCommerce platform

Choosing a B2B eCommerce platform starts with your ERP and the way orders arrive today. Features and vendors come after.

1. Start in your ERP. List what lives there: price rules, credit limits, stock by warehouse, order history, invoices. Check the data quality, and whether each can be read in real time or only in batches.
2. Map how orders arrive. Work out what share comes by phone, email, sales rep, EDI, punchout and online, and which customers use which channel. That sets what the platform must support at launch.
3. List the integrations and who will own them. ERP, PIM, CRM, search, payments, freight, tax and your EDI provider. For each one, decide between a connector, an integration platform or a configured job, and who fixes it when it fails.
4. Check who will run the platform. With a small internal team, customization that needs specialist developers becomes a long-term cost. Ask how much your team can configure without code, and what the vendor's team does after launch.
5. Prototype before you sign. A discovery phase that ends in a working prototype of your real flows (a quote, an order on account, a reorder) shows how each vendor handles your data. Use a request for proposal to collect every vendor's answers in the same format.

To see how eight vendors handle these features, read our comparison of the 8 best B2B eCommerce platforms of 2026.

How Core dna supports these B2B features

Core dna is a configurable SaaS platform for commerce, content and learning. Catalog, pricing, payments, inventory and returns are built in, and the rest of your B2B stack connects to it.

• Integrations: your ERP, EDI software, punchout provider, PIM and search tool connect through Orchestration endpoints and scheduled jobs.
• Configuration: your team adds custom fields, custom entities and workflows without code.
• AI agents: Claude and ChatGPT connect through MCP, off by default, and every change waits for approval.
• Delivery: projects start with a working prototype, and our developers can stay on to run the roadmap with you.

B2B eCommerce case studies: RANDYS Worldwide and V-ZUG

RANDYS Worldwide manufactures and distributes differential parts and has grown through acquisitions. Its previous WordPress site couldn't keep the ERP connection working, so wholesale customers went back to ordering by phone. On Core dna, RANDYS connected Microsoft Dynamics GP and its product data system, gave wholesale customers a portal for quotes, invoices, shipment tracking and saved items, and brought acquired brands onto the same platform. The account page became the site's 9th most viewed page, and online revenue grew from $250K to over $1M. Read the RANDYS Worldwide case study.

V-ZUG runs three types of buyer through one Core dna portal: its own technicians, independent agents who buy parts at trade prices on account, and a service team ordering for walk-in and phone customers. The login decides prices, payment options and visible products. Behind a short checkout, each order looks up or creates the customer in SAP, routes the sales order, reserves stock and hands off to logistics. A sales order that took about 15 minutes by hand now takes a couple of minutes. Read how V-ZUG runs its service operation on Core dna.

Features are one part of choosing well. For the complete picture, see our guide to B2B eCommerce.