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Magento
Adobe’s own documentation tells you which checkbox to tick. It does not tell you whether the feature behind that checkbox will do what your buyers need.
That gap is where most Adobe Commerce B2B projects lose time. A team enables Company Accounts and Shared Catalogs, demos it to the sales side, and discovers the approval chain does not match how their dealers actually buy.
This is the decision-side version: all seven native Adobe Commerce B2B features, what each one covers, and the specific points where distributors end up commissioning custom development instead.
“Adobe Commerce B2B is an extension that adds seven native features to Magento: company accounts, company management hierarchies, shared catalogs with company-specific pricing, quick order, negotiable quotes, purchase order approvals, and requisition lists. It installs and enables separately from the core platform. It covers standard distributor buying well, but customer-specific shipping rules, complex approval chains and configurator-driven quoting typically need custom development.”
Key Takeaways
- Adobe Commerce B2B ships seven native features – it is a separate extension, not part of core Magento
- Enable Company switches on Shared Catalog and B2B Quotes automatically; Quick Order and Requisition Lists are separate toggles
- Shared catalogs handle per-company pricing, not contract pricing with expiry dates or volume break tiers
- Negotiable quotes cover back-and-forth on an existing cart, not configurator-driven or BOM-based quoting
- In a nine-week discovery on Magento 2.4.6-p6, native coverage of one distributor’s B2B requirements assessed at 90 percent – the remaining 10 percent took custom development
- Budget for the licence, the implementation, and the gap between native features and how your buyers actually order
What Is Magento B2B?
Magento B2B, now branded Adobe Commerce B2B, is an extension that adds business-to-business selling to a Magento storefront. It handles the things retail commerce assumes: multiple buyers inside one customer account, prices that differ by company, orders that need approval before they are placed, and repeat purchasing from a saved list.
The important structural point is that it is not part of core Magento. The B2B module installs and enables separately, which is why the question “does Magento do B2B” gets contradictory answers depending on who you ask and which licence they hold.
Once installed, B2B functionality is switched on per feature rather than all at once, from a single configuration panel. That granularity is useful – a distributor running quick order and requisition lists without company hierarchies is a perfectly reasonable setup, and a common starting point in B2B eCommerce development.
Adobe Commerce B2B Features List: What You Actually Get
Seven features ship natively. Here is what each one genuinely covers, and where the edge of it sits.
Company Accounts
Company accounts let multiple buyers operate under a single customer account, with roles and permissions controlling what each person can do. A purchasing assistant can build a cart while only a controller can submit it.
This is the foundation feature and most other B2B functionality depends on it being enabled. If your buyers are individuals rather than organisations, you may not need the rest of the module at all.
Company Management and Hierarchies
Company management builds hierarchies that mirror the customer’s own organisational structure, across multiple companies. A parent distributor with regional branches can be modelled as one tree rather than as separate unrelated accounts.
Where this gets tested is depth and edge cases. Franchise structures, buying groups, and customers who belong to two hierarchies at once tend to expose the limits quickly.
Shared Catalogs and Company-Specific Pricing
Shared catalogs assign custom pricing per product to different companies. You publish a catalog, attach it to companies, and those buyers see their own prices rather than list price.
The honest boundary: this is per-company pricing. Contract pricing that changes by date, by volume tier, or by negotiated line item usually sits outside what shared catalogs express cleanly, and that is a common trigger for a custom pricing layer.
Quick Order
Quick order reduces purchasing to a few clicks for logged-in customers, letting them order by SKU or product name without browsing categories.
For distributors whose buyers already work from part numbers and printed catalogs, it is often the single most-used B2B feature on the site.
Negotiable Quotes
Negotiable quotes let buyer and seller manage a price negotiation inside the platform. The buyer requests, the seller counters, and the agreed quote converts to an order.
The boundary here matters. This handles negotiation on an existing cart. Quoting that starts from a configurator, a bill of materials, or an engineering calculation is a different problem, covered further down.
Purchase Order Approvals
Purchase order approvals turn orders into POs that route through approval rules before they are placed. Rules are configured globally and then enabled per company.
Payment on Account supports buying against credit with configurable order total limits, which is the other half of how most distributors actually transact.
Requisition Lists
Requisition lists let customers save frequently purchased products and reorder from them directly.
For maintenance, repair and operations buyers reordering the same twenty items every month, requisition lists and quick order together carry most of the practical value. If you are still comparing platforms at this stage, our guide to choosing a B2B eCommerce platform covers the wider decision.
How to Enable B2B Features in Magento 2
Once the extension is installed, everything is switched on from one place: Stores > Settings > Configuration > General > B2B Features.
Three master toggles sit there:
- Enable Company – turns on company accounts, and automatically enables Shared Catalog, B2B Quotes, and the B2B payment and shipping methods
- Enable Quick Order – ordering by SKU or product name
- Enable Requisition List – saved reorder lists
That first behaviour surprises teams regularly. Switching on Company brings three other features with it, so a store that only wanted company accounts suddenly has quotes live on the storefront.
Two more settings sit in the same panel. Default B2B Payment Methods and Default B2B Shipping Methods let you restrict which options B2B buyers see, set to either all methods or a selected subset. Order Approval Configuration contains Enable Purchase Orders.
Purchase orders are also controlled per customer under Customers > Companies, where editing a company and expanding Advanced Settings exposes its own Enable Purchase Orders toggle.
Buying on credit needs one more step: Stores > Settings > Configuration > Sales > Payment Methods > Payment on Account, where you enable the offline method and set order total limits. Save Config applies to each change.
B2B Registration and Account Approval
New company registration is where B2B storefronts leak. An open registration form invites bot signups and consumer traffic pretending to be trade buyers, and every fake account costs someone manual review time.
Native company registration captures the applicant and holds them pending approval, which handles the basic case. What it does not do is validate the applicant. Checking a tax ID, a reseller certificate or a trade reference sits outside the module.
On the VC America build, secure registration to prevent bots and invalid accounts was called out as an explicit requirement during discovery, and it needed building rather than configuring.
Adobe Commerce vs Magento Open Source: Who Gets B2B?
This is the most confused question in the whole topic, and it deserves a careful answer rather than a confident one.
The B2B module is a separate extension requiring its own installation and enablement. It is not present in a default Magento install of any edition. Adobe’s documentation around services describes support spanning both Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source, but licensing terms for the B2B extension specifically have shifted across versions.
Verify against your own licence before planning a build. If you are on Open Source and a proposal assumes native B2B, confirm that assumption in writing with Adobe or your implementation partner before anyone estimates the work. Getting this wrong at the scoping stage is expensive.
What Adobe Commerce B2B Does Not Do – Where Custom Work Starts
Native features cover standard distributor buying well. The gap opens at the points where a business does something specific to itself, which for most established distributors is most of what makes them competitive.
Four areas come up repeatedly.
Approval chains that do not fit the rule model. Native purchase order approvals handle threshold-based rules. Approvals that branch by product category, by project code, or by which cost centre the buyer is charging tend to need custom workflow logic. On the VC America Electronics build, custom B2B approval workflows were designed to integrate directly into customer lifecycle management rather than using the native rule engine.
RFQ that is not cart negotiation. Negotiable quotes assume a cart exists and the argument is about price. Plenty of B2B selling does not work that way. Applied System Technologies needed quoting that began with a design, so we built a 3D and 2D builder into the storefront with a one-click Request Quote that packages the full project data – model snapshot, bill of materials, compressor calculation summary – and delivers it into Magento’s admin as a structured quote request. 78 percent of site visitors used the builder, quote requests rose 425 percent, and tool users converted at 5.2 percent against a 1.8 percent baseline. Manual quote preparation time dropped 60 percent and support tickets about design clarity fell 70 percent. See the Applied System Technologies build.
Shipping logic tied to the customer. Distributors routinely ship on the customer’s own carrier account, or apply freight rules that vary by account. Custom shipping logic tied to customer profiles was a named requirement on the VC America project, and it is not something the native B2B module expresses.
Pricing beyond per-company. Shared catalogs express company-level prices. Contract pricing with expiry dates, volume break tiers, or negotiated line-item overrides needs a pricing layer above the native model.
None of this argues against Adobe Commerce. It argues for scoping the gap deliberately instead of discovering it during user acceptance testing.
What Adobe Commerce B2B Costs
There are three cost lines, and teams routinely budget only the first.
Licence. Adobe Commerce is quoted on your order volume and revenue rather than published at a flat rate. Our own breakdown of Adobe Commerce pricing puts licence fees in the range of $22,000 to $125,000 a year, with all-in annual cost between $122,000 and $450,000 depending on business size and customisation.
Implementation of native features. Configuration is quick. Populating shared catalogs, modelling company hierarchies and migrating existing account structures is not. This is data work, and it scales with how messy the current customer records are.
The gap. The custom development between native features and how your buyers actually order. On VC America, a nine-week structured discovery across 15 validation calls put native functional coverage at 90 percent on Magento 2.4.6-p6. The remaining 10 percent – approval workflows, RFQ logic, shipping rules, secure registration – was the build. Read the discovery phase.
That 90/10 split is a reasonable planning assumption for a distributor with established processes. The 10 percent is rarely 10 percent of the budget.
Adobe Commerce B2B in Practice
VC America Electronics, the North American representative for Seiko NPC, sells high-precision positioning and timing components to engineers. We ran a nine-week discovery first, with 15 structured validation calls and five competitors benchmarked, and confirmed Magento 2 paired with Hyva could carry the requirements before committing to a build. The multi-storefront architecture runs on a shared backend with custom approval workflows, custom RFQ logic and profile-based shipping. Post-launch, sales rose 29 percent, orders 20 percent, gross sales 17 percent and conversion rate 8 percent. Read the VC America build.
Surplus Furniture and Mattress Warehouse, a Canadian retailer with close to 50 locations, is the ERP side of the same problem. We built a secure bi-directional API connecting Magento, Dynamics NAV and Moneris, along with a multi-step custom checkout and real-time stock synchronisation. Conversion rate rose 7.82 percent in the first month, order volume 18.21 percent in the first quarter, and average order value 15.76 percent. It is a retail build rather than a B2B one, but it makes the point that B2B features and back-office integration are the same project, not two. See the Surplus Furniture build.
Both projects sit on the same foundation work: a supported Magento version, a fast frontend, and a clean extension footprint. If your store is behind on either, start with upgrading Magento 2 and a review of your Hyva options before layering B2B on top.
For teams weighing what to build against what to buy, our roundup of Magento extensions and our guide to the Hyva theme for Magento 2 cover the two decisions that most often sit alongside a B2B project.
Frequently Asked Questions
Seven native features: company accounts, company management hierarchies, shared catalogs with company-specific pricing, quick order, negotiable quotes, purchase order approvals, and requisition lists. They arrive through the B2B extension, which installs separately from core Magento, and each can be enabled independently from the configuration panel.
Go to Stores > Settings > Configuration > General > B2B Features. Toggle Enable Company, Enable Quick Order and Enable Requisition List as needed, then Save Config. Note that Enable Company automatically switches on Shared Catalog, B2B Quotes and the B2B payment and shipping methods alongside it.
The B2B module is a separate extension and is not present in a default install of any edition. Licensing for it has varied across versions, so confirm entitlement against your specific licence with Adobe or your implementation partner before scoping a project. Assuming availability at the estimated stage is a costly mistake.
A saved list of frequently purchased products that customers can reorder from directly. It suits maintenance and operations buyers who reorder the same items on a regular cycle, and it pairs naturally with quick order for buyers who already know their SKUs.
A buyer requests a quote from their cart, then buyer and seller exchange proposals inside the platform until they agree, and the agreed quote converts to an order. It handles price negotiation on an existing cart. Quoting that starts from a configurator or bill of materials needs custom development.
Yes, through shared catalogs, which assign custom per-product pricing to specific companies. The boundary is that pricing is expressed at company level. Contract pricing with expiry dates, volume break tiers or negotiated line-item overrides typically requires a custom pricing layer above the native model.
A feature that lets logged-in customers order by entering SKUs or product names rather than browsing categories. For distributors whose buyers work from part numbers and printed catalogs, it is usually the most-used B2B feature on the site.
Orders can be created as purchase orders that route through approval rules before being placed. Enable it under Order Approval Configuration, then activate it per company under Customers > Companies > Advanced Settings. Buying against credit also needs Payment on Account enabled under Sales > Payment Methods.
Three cost lines: the Adobe Commerce licence, implementation of native features including catalog and hierarchy data work, and custom development for whatever your buying process needs beyond native. On one distributor engagement, native coverage was assessed at 90 percent, and the remaining 10 percent carried a disproportionate share of the build effort.
It suits distributors and manufacturers with established account structures, negotiated pricing and approval requirements, particularly where ERP integration is part of the picture. It is heavier than needed for a business selling a simple wholesale price list to a handful of accounts.
Find Out What You Would Actually Need to Build
The native feature list is the easy part. The question that decides your budget is which parts of your buying process the seven features cover and which they do not, and that answer is specific to how your customers order rather than to the platform.
WebDesk Solution is an Adobe Partner with 14+ years building B2B commerce, working with 500+ clients from our offices in New York and Toronto. We run structured discovery before recommending a build, because assessing coverage at 90 percent up front costs far less than finding the gap during user acceptance testing. See our Adobe Commerce development work, or the wider eCommerce development practice it sits inside.
