B2B ecommerce for wholesalers, manufacturers, and aftermarket

What makes B2B ecommerce its own category

B2B ecommerce is not a separate technology. It is a commercial model where the buyer purchases on behalf of a company rather than themselves. That simple difference reshapes almost everything: which prices to display, which payment terms apply, how the order gets approved, and how it lands in the ERP. Litium's Nordic Digital Commerce in B2B 2025 report found that 83 percent of Nordic B2B companies use digital channels, but only 28 percent of their sales flow through them. The real challenge is closing the gap between "we have a webshop" and "customers actually buy there."

A consumer store often gets by on speed, design, and a smooth checkout. B2B demands more. The buyer returns every week, expects to see their agreement-level pricing, wants instant access to order history, needs to place a 40-line order in five minutes, and relies on the platform to pull credit limits, warehouse-specific stock, and delivery dates from the ERP. All of it has to work every time, without anyone re-keying data in the background.

Wholesalers, manufacturers, and aftermarket businesses live different B2B realities

The "B2B" label in a platform demo is rarely specific enough. Three typical cases dominate our customer base, and each places different demands on the ecommerce layer.

Wholesalers have broad catalogs with thousands of SKUs, several price lists per customer group, and repetitive order profiles. The key is fast access: quick-order forms by article number, saved carts, and reorder from history. For wholesalers, the value lies in freeing the sales team from order entry so they can focus on new business and upselling.

Manufacturers typically work with more complex product data (technical specifications, configurators, and spare-part trees). Catalog quality is decisive here. A buyer looking for a replacement part for a specific machine series needs filters, compatibility data, and clear hierarchy. PIM integration is often required to make the catalog usable. Our manufacturing ecommerce page covers this in more detail.

Aftermarket and spare-part businesses often serve both B2B and B2C traffic, which makes platform selection more demanding. The same product data has to work for the professional workshop and for the end consumer, with different pricing and sometimes different UX. Shopware and Norce handle this hybrid well. Shopify Plus can work when the pricing logic stays simple.

Pricing logic and account structure

The single function that most often becomes a tipping point in B2B projects is how price lists are handled. In a consumer store, price is a property of the product. In B2B, price is a property of the relationship between customer and product. It can vary per order depending on volume, campaign, or annual agreement.

The right architecture keeps pricing logic in the ERP and pulls the correct price into ecommerce at login. That assumes the customer structure in the ERP is clean: customers classified correctly, agreements linked to the right group, and price lists not scattered across fields or manual spreadsheets. A B2B project that starts with messy pricing data is always more expensive than one that begins with cleanup.

Account hierarchies are another recurring point. A buying organization may have several users under one master account (buyer, approver, finance lead) where permission structure determines who does what. Norce, Shopware, and Magento/Hyvä have native support for this. Shopify Plus handles simpler cases but requires more configuration for deep hierarchies.

The ERP is more often the bottleneck than the platform

In many B2B projects, the platform choice is not what dictates pace. The integration with the ERP does. The data that moves between the systems is the same in every project: articles, prices, stock, customers, orders, and invoice status. How it moves (real time, scheduled, one-way or two-way) varies widely depending on which ERP sits underneath.

The ERPs we see most often in B2B are Business Central, Visma.net, Monitor ERP, Pyramid, Jeeves, SAP Business One, and NetSuite. Through Junipeer there are pre-built connectors for several of them, but every project requires its own mapping of what syncs and how exceptions are handled in production. Our ERP integration guide walks through the data flows in detail.

Checkout, invoicing, and payment terms

B2B buyers usually pay on invoice, with net 30 terms and sometimes real-time credit checks. That shapes both the checkout flow and the integration. Briqpay is built specifically for B2B with support for invoice, installment, and credit check in the same flow. Svea and Walley also offer B2B invoice options. The checkout also needs to handle PO numbers, reference fields, and sometimes quote-to-order conversion.

Shipping differs from consumer commerce. Pallet freight, split deliveries to multiple addresses, and delivery windows tied to receiving hours are common requirements. nShift covers multi-carrier logic for most of these scenarios.

How Nordic Web Team works on B2B projects

We rarely start with the platform choice. We start with how you sell today: which customer groups, which price lists, which order flows, which roles are involved, and which ERP sits underneath. The platform decision follows from that. For some customers Norce is right. For others Shopware, Magento/Hyvä, or Shopify Plus fits better. We have experience with all four in real B2B contexts and can describe what each choice means in terms of development, maintenance, and cost.

Around the platform, we plan integration with the ERP, CRM through Dotdigital, Rule, or Klaviyo, payment, shipping, and content structure via Storyblok where it fits. For Norce-based solutions, Frntkey provides a headless frontend that cuts build time significantly.

Projects run in phases. A discovery sprint defines scope and budget. Architecture and integration design follow, then build with QA on real data, and finally launch against a pilot group before full rollout. That is how we work in any category. In B2B, phased launch matters more because each customer has critical daily flows that cannot break.

Sigma Imaging is one example of how we deliver B2B in practice. Read about the Sigma Imaging project to see the approach in a concrete case. Contact us if you are in the planning phase. We are happy to walk through your situation before anything is decided.