Shopify Plus vs BigCommerce for B2B commerce
A technical comparison for B2B teams: company accounts, contract pricing, quoting, catalogue permissions, and where each platform requires custom work.
Both platforms now ship real B2B functionality rather than treating it as a DTC store with a wholesale discount bolted on. The differences are specific and worth understanding before committing, because the gaps are exactly where custom development budget goes.
This comparison assumes genuine B2B requirements: buyers who log in, prices that differ by customer, approval workflows, and catalogues that not everyone should see.
Company accounts and buyer hierarchy
Shopify's B2B functionality is built around companies with multiple locations, each carrying its own price list, payment terms, and tax configuration. Buyers are assigned to locations with defined permissions. This covers the common case well.
BigCommerce B2B Edition models company accounts with a buyer hierarchy, sub-accounts, and role-based permissions, and includes quoting and requisition lists natively. Its hierarchy handling tends to go a level deeper than Shopify's out of the box.
If your buying organisations are simple (one company, a handful of buyers) both are fine. If you have parent companies with subsidiaries that need separate catalogues but consolidated invoicing, look closely at BigCommerce first.
Pricing: where the real differences show
Shopify Plus handles B2B pricing through price lists attached to company locations, supporting fixed prices and percentage adjustments off the base catalogue. It is clean and it covers most requirements.
BigCommerce offers customer group pricing, price lists, and bulk pricing rules, with more granularity in how quantity breaks and per-customer overrides combine.
The question that separates them is how your contract pricing is actually agreed. If prices are negotiated per customer per SKU and change on a contract cycle, you want the more granular model and an integration to whatever system holds the contracts. If pricing is tiered by customer segment, either platform handles it natively.
Quantity breaks
Both support them. Check how they interact with customer-specific pricing, because precedence rules differ and this is a frequent source of surprise.
Contract pricing at SKU level
Feasible on both, usually via integration rather than native configuration. Budget for it explicitly rather than assuming the platform covers it.
Tax and currency by location
Shopify handles this cleanly through company locations. Verify multi-currency behaviour against your actual selling regions before committing.
Quoting and approval workflows
BigCommerce B2B Edition includes quoting natively: a buyer requests a quote, a sales rep adjusts and returns it, and the buyer converts it to an order. On Shopify this is typically an app or custom build.
If quoting is central to how you sell, that difference is worth more than most feature-matrix comparisons suggest, because a native workflow stays supported through platform upgrades while an app-based one is a dependency you carry.
Approval workflows (where a buyer's order requires sign-off above a threshold) follow the same pattern. Native on BigCommerce B2B Edition, generally an app or custom implementation on Shopify.
Catalogue visibility and gated access
B2B catalogues frequently need products hidden from some customers entirely, not merely priced differently. Both platforms support customer-specific catalogue visibility, and both have edges where it gets awkward, particularly around search indexing and how gated products behave for logged-out visitors.
Whichever you choose, test this specifically with real catalogue data. It is the requirement most likely to be demonstrated convincingly in a sales environment and then behave differently against a catalogue with tens of thousands of SKUs and overlapping customer groups.
How to actually decide
Neither platform is the general answer. The decision usually turns on three things.
| If your requirement is… | Lean toward |
|---|---|
| Native quoting and requisition lists | BigCommerce B2B Edition |
| Deep buyer hierarchy with sub-accounts | BigCommerce B2B Edition |
| A mixed DTC and B2B business on one platform | Shopify Plus |
| Fastest time to launch with standard B2B needs | Shopify Plus |
| Headless build with a strong native B2B core | BigCommerce |
| A large existing Shopify app and theme investment | Shopify Plus |
Common questions
Can we run DTC and B2B on the same store?
On Shopify Plus this is the more natural path. B2B is layered into the same store, so a logged-out visitor sees retail pricing and a logged-in buyer attached to a company sees their price list, sharing one catalogue and one theme. That significantly reduces the operational overhead of maintaining two storefronts. On BigCommerce it is achievable but more commonly implemented as separate storefronts under one account, which gives you cleaner separation at the cost of duplicated merchandising work. Which of those is better depends on how much your two catalogues actually overlap. If B2B and DTC sell substantially the same products with different pricing, one store is clearly less work. If the B2B catalogue is largely distinct (bulk packaging, different SKUs, trade-only lines) the separation BigCommerce encourages stops being a drawback and starts being an accurate reflection of the business.
How do these platforms handle ERP integration for B2B?
Both expose comprehensive REST and GraphQL APIs, and both have connectors for the major ERP systems through third-party integration platforms. For B2B specifically, the integration surface is wider than for DTC because more of the truth lives in the ERP: contract pricing, credit limits, customer-specific catalogues, and real-time stock across multiple warehouses. The practical question is not whether integration is possible, but where each piece of logic should live. Pricing calculated in the ERP and pushed to the platform is simpler to reason about but goes stale; pricing calculated at request time is accurate but adds a dependency to every page load. Most working implementations do both, syncing a base price list on a schedule and calling out live only for contract-specific overrides. Decide that split explicitly during architecture, because retrofitting it later means touching every price display in the storefront.
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