Sell to businesses that buy as a company, not one person
A B2B ecommerce platform that models the customer as a company: several buyers under one account, the price you agreed with them, spending limits set per buyer role, and order history everyone in the company can see.
How a company buys, and where most platforms stop
Most ecommerce platforms model a customer as one person with one email address and one card. Your customer is a business. It has several buyers, a purchasing manager who signs off above a limit, a price agreed last year, and a finance team that pays on invoice thirty days later.
When the platform cannot hold that shape, the work does not disappear. It moves to your sales desk. Orders arrive by phone, email and PDF, someone re-keys them into the ERP, and the re-keying is where the errors come from.
A company account holds the buyers who work there, the roles they have, and the prices, addresses, payment methods and order history they share. A new starter is added to the company rather than set up from scratch. Included from the Starter plan.
Branches, departments and divisions sit as business units under one company account, each with its own addresses, assigned buyers and orders. Included from Growth.
Per-customer price lists and price rules, each with the date it starts and the date it stops applying. The buyer sees the price you gave them, not a list price with a discount code applied on top. Contract pricing is included from Scale.
Orders route through approval policies, so anything over a spending limit waits for the right person at the customer. Your team is not chasing a purchase order that was never raised. Order approvals are included from Scale.
A buyer asks for a price, you respond, and they accept, reject or convert it into an order without retyping anything. Quote requests are included from the Starter plan.
The buying rules, modelled rather than bolted on
Every capability below is part of a Vendure plan, under one commercial licence, with support from the Vendure team. There is no separate B2B module to buy, and no second system to keep in sync with the first.
Company accounts and roles
One account for a customer's whole business, with membership, roles and company-scoped commerce underneath it. Buyers at that company share the prices, addresses, payment methods and order history, and see what their role allows. From Starter.
Tax ID validation
Store and validate the tax identifiers a customer gives you. EU VAT numbers can be checked against VIES when the ID is created and re-checked on a schedule. From Starter.
Quotes, and the reply
A buyer requests a price, your team responds, and the accepted quote becomes an order with nothing retyped. From Starter. On Enterprise, buyers can request changes and your team sends revised versions, with comments, documents and internal approval.
Quick order and reorder
Buyers who already know what they want add many items at once by SKU, or rebuild a previous order in one click with anything now unavailable flagged before checkout. From Starter.
Shopping lists that belong to the company
Personal lists from Starter, and company-scoped lists your team shares and governs from Growth. A purchasing team works from the list the company agreed rather than from one buyer's saved basket.
Contract pricing with dates
Per-customer price lists and standard price rules, each carrying the period it applies for. Last year's agreement stops applying on the day it expires without anyone remembering to switch it off. From Scale.
Approvals and spending limits
Orders pass through approval policies before they are released, so anything over a limit waits for sign-off. Advanced routing and conditions for chains the standard policies cannot express are on Enterprise. From Scale.
Store credit and company payment methods
Hold a balance against an account and redeem it at checkout, for refunds, rebates and prepaid arrangements. Set which payment methods each company can use. From Starter.
An audit trail someone will ask for
A record of supported administration and commerce events: who changed what, and when. Administrators can sign in through your OpenID Connect provider. Both from Scale.
Included in your Vendure plan under one commercial licence, with support from the Vendure team and no separate add-on SKU. On open-source Vendure Core, this is a capability your team builds and maintains itself. See what's included.
A storefront your buyers can use on day one
The Vendure B2B Storefront is a production Next.js application, included from the Scale plan. Company accounts, quote-to-order, approvals, quick order and contract pricing are already wired to the backend.
It is a codebase your team owns and changes, with no template ceiling to work around. If you already run a frontend you like, connect it to the GraphQL Shop API instead and keep it.
Adapt the shipped application to your brand and your buying flows. The B2B surface is already built, so the work is presentation and the parts specific to your business.
Vendure is headless. Point an existing storefront, app or portal at the GraphQL Shop API and keep the frontend investment you have already made.
Connect the ERP you already run
Your ERP holds the stock, the customer master and the prices. Your finance team is not going to move off it, and they should not have to. Vendure ships no ERP connector. Your team connects the ERP through the GraphQL APIs and plugins, so orders go to the ERP and price and stock changes come back.
That is what removes the re-keying. Read more on ERP and integrations.
Teams building complex commerce with Vendure
What teams ask before moving B2B onto Vendure
The customer model. A B2B platform treats the customer as a company with several buyers, roles, an agreed price and an internal sign-off step, and it keeps one order history for the whole business. A B2C platform treats the customer as one person with one basket. Everything else, catalogue, checkout, payments, search, is shared between the two.
No. Company accounts, quotes, quick order, reorder and tax ID validation are included from the Starter plan. Contract pricing, order approvals, the audit trail and the included B2B storefront start at Scale. The pricing page lists which plan each capability starts on, so you can size it against what you actually sell today.
Yes, on Enterprise. PunchOut ecommerce lets a buyer start in their own procurement system, shop your catalogue, and send the basket back for approval there. PunchOut supports cXML. If your customers are large enough to mandate this, start at Enterprise.
No, and you should not run two. One catalogue, one order model and one customer record serve both, with company accounts and buying rules applied only to the business side. See B2B and B2C together.
When your customers are consumers buying one item on a card, most of what is on this page is weight you do not need, and a simpler hosted store will cost you less to run. Vendure earns its place when the customer is a company. If that is not your business, start at B2C commerce and decide from there.
Then the question is whether you can sign up and hit the limit later, or whether the limit is why you are reading. Prices an external engine calculates (Enterprise Advanced pricing calls it through a connector you build), approval routing beyond the standard policies, and ERP processes that need custom workflows belong on an architecture conversation. Start at Enterprise.
Put your buying rules on the platform
Put your buying rules on Vendure in a 14-day trial: who signs off, what price each customer is on, and what your sales desk still types by hand. Or compare the plans first.