An industrial supplies distributor launched true B2B pricing on BigCommerce

Representative examplesEvery case study in this library is an illustrative composite of the kind of engagement we deliver — written to show our method and standards, not to name clients.

Where they started

For twenty years the distributor has supplied fasteners, fixings, and consumables to trades businesses, with a sales team that knows its customers by name. Pricing is relationship economics: each account negotiated its own rate card, volume breaks, and occasional overrides, all recorded in a legacy ERP that runs stock, invoicing, and nothing else. The website existed but showed one retail price list, so trade buyers — the entire book of business — rang or emailed instead. Orders arrived as phone calls and needed re-keying.

What it was costing

Trade customers phoned or emailed orders because the storefront showed retail prices to everyone. Account-specific pricing lived in a legacy ERP nobody had connected, and the sales team spent hours each week re-keying repeat orders.

What they could see

• Trade customers logged in and saw retail prices, so they phoned — the sales team re-keyed dozens of repeat orders into the ERP each week.
• Account-specific pricing existed only in the ERP, unreachable from the website no matter who was logged in.
• Quoting a volume break meant a call, a lookup, and an emailed PDF, often hours after the customer asked.
• Shared logins circulated between colleagues at customer companies, so order attribution and pricing history were guesswork.

The constraints we worked inside

• Customer price lists were confidential; the storefront had to prove it leaked nothing before the sales team would send customers.
• The ERP was the system of record for pricing and stock — the storefront had to follow it, not fork it.
• A loyal phone-order customer base meant the old route had to keep working during adoption.

What had been tried before

A previous developer built an ERP-to-website price sync that pushed a nightly CSV into the storefront's database.

The sync pushed totals but not rules — volume breaks and overrides flattened into static numbers that contradicted the ERP the moment anything changed mid-week.

The sales lead built an Excel price-list generator and emailed each account a personal catalog quarterly.

Prices moved between quarterlies; customers ordered from stale sheets, and the reconciliation landed back on the same sales team the spreadsheet was meant to unburden.

What we proposed

We proposed BigCommerce B2B Edition with the ERP as the single pricing authority: every customer group, discount rule, and volume break mapped from the ERP into native B2B price lists, then reconciled against real ERP quotes before a single customer saw the storefront. Company accounts with named users would replace shared logins. The reason for this shape: pricing truth stays where the sales team already trusts it, and the website follows rather than forks it. Phone ordering would stay live through a two-month adoption window, moved account by account, not switched off by decree.

Just as important is what we ruled out, and why:

• Publishing login-gated PDF price lists per account — It would have solved visibility without solving ordering — customers would still phone to place the order, and the sheets would go stale exactly as the quarterly ones had.
• A separate B2B portal alongside the existing site — Two storefronts meant two catalogs, two promotions, and split analytics; the distributor's small team would have run both forever instead of retiring one channel.

How the work ran

Delivered by the systems pod — 2 engineers + commerce lead over 12 weeks, with working increments reviewed with the client every week.

The stack, and the reasoning

BigCommerce B2B Edition

Native price lists, company accounts, and quote support meant the ERP's model had somewhere to land without the website inventing its own pricing logic.

GraphQL Storefront API

Price visibility had to be proven from the browser, not just the product page; GraphQL let us verify every surface customers and scripts can hit.

ERP integration

The ERP is the system of record, so the integration reads rules and stock from it on the ERP's terms rather than maintaining a parallel copy.

Stencil

Conditional price display by account had to sit deep in the theme; Stencil's server-side context kept leaks out of page source, not just off the screen.

What went wrong

How we worked together

Cadence

A Wednesday demo for the sales lead and operations manager each week, plus a monthly reconciliation report the finance owner signed off.

Client side

The sales lead owned account mapping; the operations manager owned the ERP side; the owner arbitrated anything touching customer relationships.

Decisions

Pricing-mapping disputes were settled against real ERP quotes — if the numbers matched a live quote, the mapping was right; otherwise the ERP team corrected it.

They provided

ERP export access with a named contact on their side, anonymized customer groups for testing, and sales-team time for account-by-account onboarding.

What changed

The headline: orders placed online (rather than phoned/emailed) across the first full quarter after rollout — 31% → 68%, read from ERP order-channel report. A second check: cross-account price leaks found in quarterly audits at 0.

The sales team's week changed shape: re-keying repeat orders is down to the stubborn minority, and quoting a volume break takes a link instead of an afternoon. Accounts moved online keep buying by phone when they want to, and the sales lead reports the calls that remain are about advice, not prices. Finance reconciles from one ERP report instead of three. The security review the sales team demanded — trying to see another account's pricing while logged in — became a story they now tell customers.

The result was read from ERP order-channel report against the pre-engagement baseline over the stated window, with a guardrail check on cross-account price leaks found in quarterly audits. Where platform-reported numbers and business outcomes differ, this record says which layer it is quoting.

What they own now

• The ERP-to-BigCommerce integration with its mapping documentation and structured override exports.
• The reconciliation sample pack used to verify price lists against live ERP quotes.
• Price-leak test scripts covering browser, API, and order-export surfaces, runnable before any pricing change.
• A company-account setup runbook for onboarding new customer organizations without us.
• Stencil theme source in the distributor's own repository with deployment notes.