BigCommerce B2B Edition implementation, connected to your ERP.

ProjectThunder sets up BigCommerce B2B Edition for manufacturers and distributors. ProjectThunder is a California B2B ecommerce studio, founded in 2004 and a BigCommerce Partner, that builds Stencil and Catalyst storefronts, sets up B2B Edition and integrates BigCommerce with SAP, Microsoft Dynamics and Sage. We configure company accounts, buyer roles, price lists, quotes and the buyer portal, then connect them to your ERP so each company sees its own prices and terms.

For what B2B Edition does and does not do, feature by feature, read our BigCommerce B2B Edition deep dive. This page is about getting it set up and connected.

B2B Edition ships the features. The implementation decides how each one maps to the way your customers buy and to the records in your ERP. These are the six areas an implementation covers:

• Company accounts and roles. Each company is keyed on its ERP customer number, never a name. Parent and child companies, up to five layers deep, fit chains and customers with many locations. Buyers get one of the three built-in roles (Admin, Senior Buyer, Junior Buyer) or a custom role, such as view-only. Where one location must never ship to another's address, it becomes a child company with its own addresses and buyers.
• Price lists. Each company sits in a customer group with a price list: a price per variant and currency, with optional quantity tiers. The same customer group decides which categories that company can see, which gives each customer its own catalog on one storefront.
• Quotes. Buyers request a quote from the cart, sales reps edit and approve it, and the buyer checks out at the agreed prices. We set who receives requests, what reps can change, and how the converted order reaches the ERP.
• Shopping Lists. Shared lists for the SKUs a buyer orders every month, with an approval step when a Junior Buyer builds one. Buyers can also reorder from past orders and from Quick Order.
• Invoices and terms. Payment terms, Purchase Order as a payment method against a credit limit, and an invoices view with open and overdue balances and online payment. The terms, limits and invoices come from the ERP customer record, and the ERP stays the system of record.
• Buyer portal. Company-wide order history, invoices, and shipments with tracking, in the Buyer Portal as BigCommerce ships it, customized, or on Catalyst (more on that below).

Buyer sign-in through a customer's own identity provider (single sign-on) is a separate piece of work. B2B Edition supports it, but there is no built-in SAML switch, so we plan it as its own item when your buyers expect it.

B2B Edition does not ask your ERP for prices on its own. It stores price lists, and the integration keeps them current. A price list holds a set price per variant and currency, with optional quantity tiers, so formulas, contract rules and stacked discounts in the ERP are resolved into those prices before they arrive. There are two ways to do it, and the ERP's pricing decides which one fits:

• Scheduled sync. When ERP prices are lookups (price levels, contract price lists, quantity breaks), we resolve them into price lists and sync on a schedule or when a price changes, then reconcile on a schedule so drift gets caught before a customer finds it.
• Live call. When the ERP calculates price at order time, a projected price list is right for most customers and wrong for the exceptions. We sync price lists for browsing and ask the ERP for the cart price, cached per customer.

Either way, a few rules hold up in production:

• Key every sync on stable identifiers: the ERP customer number and the SKU, never names or addresses.
• Log what the ERP returned, so when a buyer says their price changed yesterday, you can show what the ERP said and when.
• No price means no add-to-cart. If the ERP holds no price for that customer and item, the store should not take an order that will fail downstream.
• Decide before launch what happens when the ERP is slow or offline, so checkout never stalls waiting for it.
• Plan around one platform limit: BigCommerce documents that the storefront price filter does not show when price lists are in use.

How this works for your ERP is on its own page: BigCommerce with SAP ECC and S/4HANA, BigCommerce with Business Central, BigCommerce with Dynamics GP and BigCommerce with Dynamics NAV and AX. Other ERPs, the connector options and what each B2B Edition feature needs from the ERP are on our BigCommerce ERP integration page.

Many distributors want buyers to see their own price but order nothing until someone reviews it. B2B Edition has the parts for that: a role that can request quotes and build Shopping Lists but cannot place orders (Junior Buyer, or a custom role), quotes that sales reps edit and approve, and Shopping Lists that wait for a Senior Buyer or Admin to approve them.

When the review happens in the ERP, the flow we build looks like this:

1. The buyer requests a quote from the cart or a Shopping List.
2. The quote goes to the ERP as a sales quote for review. Decide first which system owns the quote. If B2B Edition owns it, the ERP sees only the final order.
3. A rep reviews price, stock and credit, and the approved prices come back to the quote in the store.
4. The buyer checks out from the approved quote at the agreed prices.
5. The order posts to the ERP as a sales order at the quoted prices, and the ERP skips its own pricing engine for it. Check how a fixed-amount discount on the whole quote comes through, because B2B Edition does not fold it into the line prices.

A fully quote-only store usually needs theme work too, because hiding every cart button for a role is not one setting. Approval rules by order amount or cost center are custom work we build.

The Buyer Portal is where buyers see company order history (filterable by who placed each order), invoices with open and overdue balances, and each shipment with its tracking number. There are three ways to run it:

• Stock. The Buyer Portal as BigCommerce ships it, on a Stencil theme, configured through B2B Edition's settings and your buyer roles. Stencil has a more polished out-of-the-box B2B Edition integration than Catalyst, and this is the quickest route to launch.
• Customized. The same portal with changed screens, fields or steps. BigCommerce publishes the Buyer Portal's source code, so changes are built and hosted as your own copy, and each one is then yours to carry through BigCommerce's later portal releases. Keep the list of changes short for that reason.
• On Catalyst. Catalyst can run the same Buyer Portal, so quote management and masquerade (a sales rep shopping on a buyer's behalf) come with it. BigCommerce labels the Catalyst integration experimental and marks its B2B starter template alpha, and the team wires the login handoff, the portal startup and product page buttons such as "Add to quote" in the Catalyst codebase.

If B2B Edition is central to your launch and your team is small, start on Stencil. The wider trade-off is in BigCommerce Stencil vs Catalyst.