B2B distribution is built on recurring wholesale orders with individual prices for each counterparty. While these orders go through a manager - by phone, email, or an Excel price list with “call for a price” - the company pays for each transaction in sales labor time and risks pricing errors. Adobe Commerce (Magento) includes a built-in B2B module that moves wholesale order approval and placement into buyer self-service. Below is an open breakdown of what can actually be built with this tool in distribution, with links to Adobe documentation and public reviews. This is not a KT.Team case study, but an example of the platform’s capabilities.
What business problem the portal solves
The goal is to remove the manager’s manual work from the cycle of “approved the price → placed the order.” In distribution, one customer may place dozens of repeat orders per month under its contract. If each one requires a manager to open the counterparty’s price list, check stock, calculate the discount, and create the order in the system, the sales department turns into data entry operators. Adobe Commerce addresses this with three connected mechanisms: company accounts (customer structure), shared catalogs (individual prices and visibility), and negotiable quotes (online quotes). All three are native to the platform, without third-party extensions (Atwix).
Company accounts: the customer as an organization, not a single login
A company account models how an organization actually buys: roles are created inside the company - purchaser, senior purchaser, approver, financial controller - with different permissions and limits (Adobe Experience League). Roles are tied not to job titles, but to purchasing policy. In one described rollout for a multi-region distributor, company account roles were mapped to cost centers in the ERP: purchasers build carts within their limit, and orders above the threshold are routed automatically to a finance approver. The business result: amount approval happens through a system rule, not via email threads and manual manager checks.
Shared catalogs: individual pricing without cloning storefronts
A shared catalog defines which products a specific company or customer group sees and at what prices - contract prices, regional tiers, volume discounts (Adobe). The key scaling principle is to segment by strategic dimensions (region, contract class, tier level) rather than create a separate catalog for every customer; otherwise, the model does not scale. In the production rollout described here, this pulled prices out of “tables sent out by region,” which created invoice adjustments, pricing disputes, and a flood of manual change requests, and centralized them in shared catalogs. For the buyer, that means they see their price immediately instead of “call for a price” - the pricing manager is removed from the specific order flow (Scandiweb).
Negotiable quotes: online wholesale order approval
An online quote is exactly the transfer of negotiation from email into the system. The buyer can initiate a quote from the cart, or a manager can do it from the admin panel on behalf of the client. After that, the parties exchange proposals - items, quantities, discounts, delivery - until they agree; at any given moment, only the side that is proposing terms can edit the quote. Every revision is logged. Once the buyer accepts the terms, the quote converts directly into an order, and at that stage no additional discounts can be added (Adobe Experience League).
The system tracks ten statuses that make negotiation transparent and keep the deal from getting lost in someone’s inbox: New, Draft, Open, Submitted, Client Reviewed, Updated, Ordered, Closed, Declined, Expired. That means the state of any deal is visible without calling the manager.
Repeat orders: requisition lists and quick order
The wholesale purchasing cycle is repetitive, so the platform also covers repeat-order routine. Requisition lists let users save and reuse lists of frequently ordered items - by supplier, project, or season. Quick order lets users add items to the cart by SKU or by pasting an entire list: for an order with forty lines, that cuts checkout from about twenty minutes to two - roughly 90% of the time a manager used to spend (Scandiweb). Company credit adds invoice payment with limit control from the admin panel, removing the need for the salesperson to collect payment for each transaction.
Measurable result
A public Macron (Scandiweb) case recorded, after implementing B2B functions, a 40% reduction in order creation time, 29.8% year-over-year revenue growth, and 14.1% transaction growth (Scandiweb). This illustrates the order of magnitude, not a guarantee - the numbers depend on the assortment and the client’s process maturity.
Architecture note
In the “minimal core modification” approach, business logic specific to a given integration (syncing prices and stock with ERP, processing payments, checking credit limits against external rules) should be moved into separate microservices next to Magento rather than patching the core. The B2B functionality itself - company accounts, shared catalogs, quotes - is used as shipped, as a mature international standard, which preserves platform upgradability and solution portability across teams.
Business process takeaway
The portal redesigns the process of “approving and placing a wholesale order” from synchronous (client → manager → price list → ERP → confirmation) into self-service with rules: price comes automatically from the shared catalog, negotiation happens in a negotiable quote with statuses and a revision log, limits and amount approvals are handled by company account roles, and repeat orders are covered by requisition lists and quick order. The manager joins only for non-standard deals, not every order - that is what eliminating manual work looks like as a metric.
