Trade and wholesale
B2B e-commerce for Australian suppliers
In retail, price is a property of the product. In B2B it is a property of the relationship — different for every customer, dependent on contract and volume, and often invisible until someone logs in. Almost everything that makes trade commerce hard follows from that one difference. We build for it: Bronson Safety, an Australian safety-equipment supplier we work with, runs a trade store with company accounts, quoting, quick order and 30-day terms.
What trade commerce actually requires
Pricing that follows the customer, not the product
Contract pricing, volume bands, customer-group rates and negotiated exceptions — with the rules held somewhere a person can change them, rather than buried in code a developer has to redeploy. This is the single largest source of B2B project overrun we see: pricing described as "a few tiers" during scoping that turns out to carry twenty years of accumulated exceptions.
Company accounts with real structure
A trade customer is rarely one person. It is a company, with buyers, approval limits and sometimes a parent organisation above it and sites below. Adobe Commerce models this natively through its B2B module, which is the strongest single argument for the platform in a trade context. Shopify Plus now covers a large share of the same ground more cheaply — the question is whether your hierarchy is deeper than it supports.
Quotes, not just carts
Plenty of trade orders are negotiated before they are placed. That means a quote a buyer can request, a salesperson can adjust, and a customer can convert to an order without re-keying — with the history retained. A checkout that only accepts a fixed price does not describe how these businesses actually sell, and bolting quoting on afterwards is consistently more expensive than choosing a platform that has it.
Reordering that respects how buyers work
Trade buyers do not browse. They order the same forty SKUs every month, often from a list or a printed code, and the fastest path from intent to order is a text field that accepts SKUs and quantities in bulk. Requisition lists, saved orders and quick order do more for trade conversion than any amount of storefront design, and they are routinely the last thing scoped.
Payment on account and credit terms
Purchase orders, payment on account and end-of-month terms, reconciled against whatever your finance team already uses. Trade customers rarely pay by card at checkout, and a store that insists on it will simply be bypassed by people phoning their orders through — which is the outcome the project was meant to prevent.
ERP as the source of truth
Most trade businesses hold pricing, stock and customer records in an ERP, and the website has to honour them rather than keep a second version. Nightly synchronisation is straightforward; real-time calls at page view are harder, slower and more fragile. Deciding which you genuinely need is worth doing before the platform is chosen. This is usually product information and integration work rather than storefront work.
Where B2B projects go wrong
Three failure modes we have inherited more than once, all of them cheaper to avoid than to fix.
The pricing rules were never fully written down
Scoping captures the tiers everyone remembers and misses the exceptions that live in one salesperson's head. Those surface during user acceptance testing, which is the most expensive moment to find them. Writing down the five strangest pricing rules before choosing a platform is an hour that repeatedly saves a quarter.
The catalogue was hidden, and the traffic went with it
Putting the entire catalogue behind a login protects negotiated pricing and removes every product page from search at the same time. Sometimes that trade is correct. It should be a decision someone made deliberately, not a default nobody questioned.
The store was built for browsing, not reordering
A beautiful storefront that makes a repeat buyer click through six screens to reorder a known SKU will lose to a phone call every time. If the business already runs on a system nobody uses, that is usually the reason.
The proof
Work we have shipped, not a capability deck.
- Aelia Duty FreeAdobe Commerce across seven airports in Australia and New Zealand — pricing that varies by location and traveller, real-time inventory and SAP integration. Retail rather than trade, but the same class of problem: prices that depend on who is buying and where.Read the case study
- LOOPAn e-gift card marketplace on Shopify where the buyers are partner brands, not consumers — they consume real-time sales and redemption data through a purpose-built plugin. The closest thing in our published work to a trade relationship running through a storefront.Read the case study
Commerce work we do
Magento & Adobe Commerce
Builds, replatforms, upgrades and performance rescue — including SAP integration.
Magento upgrades
Version upgrades and extension audits — and when the platform is not what needs the money.
Shopify & Shopify Plus
Storefronts, theme builds, app integration and headless front ends.
Shopify Plus
Checkout extensibility, B2B and D2C together, multi-storefront — and when the tier is not worth it.
E-commerce development
The whole practice: platform selection, build, integrate and run.
Headless commerce
Decoupled storefronts on Shopify and Adobe Commerce — and when a themed build is the better call.
Migration & replatforming
Moving between platforms without losing data, rankings or trading days.
Magento to Shopify
The specific route, and an honest view of when not to take it.
WooCommerce
WordPress commerce where the catalogue and the content live together.
E-commerce & retail
The sector view — what retail platforms are actually asked to do, and where they break.
Adelaide commerce
Adobe Commerce for South Australian retailers — including the duty free store trading at Adelaide Airport.
New Zealand commerce
GST, rural freight and trans-Tasman selling — and the duty free stores running across airports in both countries.
More on commerce
Two Thirds of Australian Retail's Page Weight Isn't Theirs
We measured 21 of Australia's largest online retailers. None scored above 44. The median site ships 7MB, and 62% of it is third-party code the retailer didn't write.
What Does a Shopify Plus Build Cost in Australia?
What Shopify Plus actually costs Australian retailers — the platform fee, the transaction economics nobody models, and what drives a build quote up or down.
ERP Integration for E-commerce: What It Actually Costs
Why ERP integration is the line item that blows e-commerce budgets, the four questions that decide the price, and how to tell real-time requirements from imagined ones.
Adobe Commerce vs Shopify Plus for Australian Retailers
Where Adobe Commerce genuinely beats Shopify Plus, where it does not, and the three questions that actually decide it — from a team that builds on both.
Adobe Has Patched StyleSmuggler. Patching Is Not the Whole Job.
Adobe has released APSB26-146 for CVE-2026-75650. Apply it now — but a patch does not clean a store that was already compromised. What to preserve before you patch, what to check after, and the disclosure clock most coverage skips.
Selling Into Australia and New Zealand From One Store
Whether to run one store or two across the Tasman, what actually differs between AU and NZ commerce — GST, freight, currency — and the duplication that costs more than it solves.
Ecommerce practice lead
Maxim Baibakov — Chief Technology Officer - Australia
Adobe Commerce and Shopify work here runs through a dedicated commerce team rather than being picked up by whoever is free.
Common questions
What makes B2B e-commerce different from a normal online store?
Price. In retail the price is a property of the product; in B2B it is a property of the relationship. The same item can carry a different price for every customer depending on contract, volume band and negotiated terms, and a buyer often cannot see a price at all until they log in. Everything else follows from that — company accounts with multiple buyers, approval limits, quotes that are negotiated rather than accepted, purchase orders instead of card payments, and credit terms rather than payment on checkout.
Does Adobe Commerce handle B2B natively?
Yes, and this is the strongest single argument for the platform. The B2B module covers company accounts with parent and child structures, buyer roles and approval limits, customer-specific catalogues and price lists, negotiable quotes, requisition lists and SKU-based quick ordering, and payment on account. Bronson Safety, an Australian safety-equipment supplier we work with, runs exactly this shape of store — trade accounts, quoting and quick order, with 30-day end-of-month terms.
Can Shopify Plus do B2B instead?
Increasingly well, and it is genuinely cheaper to run. Company accounts, customer-specific catalogues, price lists and payment terms are native rather than app-bolted. Where it still strains is deep account hierarchies and pricing that lives in an ERP and must be honoured in real time. The test that resolves this faster than any feature comparison: write down your five most unusual pricing rules and try to express them on Plus. If all five work, take the cheaper platform. We set the full comparison out in Adobe Commerce vs Shopify Plus.
Our prices live in an ERP. Can the website honour them?
This is the question that decides most B2B builds, and the answer depends on how fast the truth has to travel. Nightly price synchronisation is straightforward on either platform. Real-time pricing calls against an ERP at the moment a customer views a product are harder, slower and more fragile, and they are occasionally genuinely necessary. Most businesses that ask for real time need same-day. Establishing which of those you are is worth doing before the platform is chosen, not after.
Do we need to hide prices from customers who are not logged in?
Both platforms support it. Whether you should is a commercial decision with a real search cost: a catalogue behind a login cannot be indexed, so you lose the organic traffic that product pages would otherwise earn. A common middle route is to show indicative pricing publicly and contract pricing after login, which keeps the catalogue visible while protecting negotiated rates. We would rather have that conversation than quietly implement whichever you asked for.
Can B2B and retail run on the same store?
Usually yes, and it is normally the right call. Adobe Commerce scopes this through websites and customer groups; Shopify Plus does it with B2B alongside D2C on one plan. Separate stores earn their cost when the catalogues genuinely diverge, when different teams merchandise each channel, or when the trade business has obligations the retail one does not. Duplicating a storefront to change a price list doubles your maintenance for no gain.
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