In many B2B companies, sales still run on email, phone calls, and spreadsheets. The sales team enters orders by hand, customer pricing lives in the ERP, and the online store can't reflect any of it. Shopware's B2B Components address exactly the features that cause B2B projects to fail: company accounts with multiple buyers, approval workflows, quote negotiation, and quick ordering. Here's what's behind it and how to get started.
How B2B orders actually work today
Let's be honest about day-to-day life in many B2B companies. A customer sends their order by email — sometimes as a PDF, sometimes as a photo of a handwritten note. Someone in the back office types the line items into the ERP. Any questions get resolved by phone. The customer's price list lives in a spreadsheet that someone maintains. And the online store, if there is one, displays list prices that no existing customer can do anything with.
It works. It has worked for decades. But it doesn't scale, it ties up expensive sales time on data entry, and it creates errors at every handoff. The real problem, though, is something else. Your customers' buyers have long been online shoppers in their personal lives. They expect to check availability, pricing, and delivery times on their own, at eleven at night, without calling anyone. Any supplier that makes that possible has an edge with those buyers.
Why standard stores fall short in B2B
Many companies have tried a standard online store and stalled halfway through. The reason is almost always the same. B2B isn't B2C with different logos. It has its own mechanics that a standard store simply doesn't understand.
A business customer isn't a single person — it's an organisation. The site manager places the order, the purchasing manager has to approve it, and the invoice goes to accounting. Prices are negotiated and customer-specific, often with volume tiers. Orders aren't placed through browsing — they're placed from a list of part numbers, usually the same items as last time. And for larger orders, there's no shopping cart logic; there's a quote negotiation.
Building these mechanics into a B2C store means creating an expensive one-off that breaks with every update. This is precisely where Shopware has made significant progress over the past few years.
What the Shopware B2B Components include
Shopware now delivers B2B mechanics as dedicated building blocks. The B2B Components have been available in the Evolve and Beyond plans since mid-2023 and cover typical requirements in a modular way. Modular means you activate what your business needs and leave out what only adds complexity.
In practice, this covers four areas. Employee Management handles company accounts where multiple staff members can place orders with their own roles and permissions. Approval Rules add workflow controls — for example, requiring a manager to sign off on orders above a budget threshold. Quote Management brings the negotiation process into the store: the customer requests a quote, you respond with an offer, the customer accepts, and everything is documented in one place rather than scattered across email threads. And the Quick Order features address the reality of repeat purchasing, with ordering by part number list rather than browsing through a catalogue.
What matters most about this list is what it replaces. Each of these features used to require custom development in B2B projects — exactly the kind of code that blows budgets and blocks updates. As a platform component, each one receives updates from Shopware itself.
Without an ERP connection, it's just a façade
That covers the store side. The harder truth in B2B is this: the store is only as good as its connection to your business systems. Customer-specific pricing lives in the ERP. Availability lives in the warehouse. Orders need to flow back into the ERP without manual intervention — otherwise you've just moved the data entry from sales to IT.
After more than 45 Shopware projects, we can say with confidence: the integration is where B2B projects succeed or fail. Shopware is well-equipped for this because the platform is built API-first. Stock levels, prices, and orders can be synchronised through interfaces, in both directions. But the interface is project work, not a checkbox. Anyone who treats it as a footnote in the proposal will end up paying for it twice. Our recommendation is always the same: ERP integration belongs at the beginning of the planning process, not the end. Which fields are synchronised, how often, which system wins in a conflict — these decisions determine what working with the system is like every day.
A realistic path into B2B commerce
What does a sensible starting point look like? Not one where every customer, every price, and every process goes live on day one. The projects that work follow a different pattern.
Start with a customer group that will feel the benefit immediately. Usually that means regular customers with high order frequency and recurring line items. Set up the store for that group with real customer pricing, company accounts, and quick ordering, connected to the ERP. Keep sales involved, but in a new role — selling, advising, and negotiating rather than entering line items.
Then measure. How many orders are going through the store after three months? How much entry time is the back office saving? What are the customers' buyers saying? These answers drive the decision about what to build next. It's the same principle we recommend for any digitalisation decision: pilot first, then data, then rollout.
What this means commercially
The business case for B2B commerce has two sides, and both are measurable. On the cost side, there's data entry time. Calculate how many hours your back office spends per week typing in orders and what those hours cost. On the revenue side, there's availability. A store takes orders when your office is closed, and it makes reordering simple enough that it happens more often.
There's also a strategic point that's hard to quantify but still matters. Self-service ordering generates data. You can see what your customers are looking for, what they pass over, and where they drop off. The email-and-phone sales model never gave you that visibility. It's the foundation for everything that comes next, from better assortment management to personalisation.
The first step
If you want to know whether B2B commerce makes sense for your business, don't start with a requirements document. Start with two numbers: how many orders does your team enter manually each week, and how many of your top customers would place orders themselves if they could? Your back office knows the first number. Your customers will answer the second more honestly than you might expect.
With those numbers, you can design a pilot that justifies itself. How we structure these projects — from plan selection to B2B Components to ERP integration — is covered on our Shopware page. Whether your current Shopware plan includes the B2B features at all also depends on the new licensing structure. The details are in our article on the Fair Usage Policy. All further analysis can be found in our Shopware Insights.