Turning a Complex B2B Buying Process Into Self-Service Commerce
A US industrial distributor was growing online, but too much of its revenue still depended on sales reps manually handling quotes, account pricing, approvals, and repeat orders. The business didn't need another attractive storefront. It needed Adobe Commerce to work the way its customers actually bought.
Real results. Not just projections.
The problem wasn't traffic. It was how customers had to buy.
This client asked us not to use their name publicly, so we're sharing the work without it, the numbers and the approach are all real, just the brand identity is withheld under NDA.
The distributor already had strong customer relationships and a large catalog. But buying online was much harder than it needed to be. Different customers had different contract pricing. Some accounts could only purchase approved products. Larger orders required internal approval. Repeat buyers often knew the exact SKUs they needed and didn't want to browse hundreds of categories. When an order became even slightly complicated, the digital journey stopped, and someone manually entered the final order. That process worked when volume was lower. It wasn't going to scale.
We started with the buying workflow, not the feature list.
The first step was mapping how different customer types actually purchased. A purchasing assistant placing a $2,000 repeat order needed something very different from a procurement director negotiating a $150,000 project. We redesigned the Adobe Commerce B2B experience around those differences: company-specific catalogs and pricing with no coupon codes or spreadsheets sitting outside the platform, company accounts with different purchasing roles for buyers, managers, and finance teams, a negotiable quote workflow that moved large orders through the platform instead of bouncing between inboxes, and faster SKU-based ordering for repeat buyers who already know what they need.
Connecting Adobe Commerce to the ERP, without duplicating it.
The biggest technical challenge sat behind the storefront. Customer accounts, inventory, contract pricing, order data, and fulfillment information needed to stay aligned with the client's ERP. We built the integration around clear ownership of data rather than duplicating business rules everywhere: the ERP remained responsible for the information it genuinely owned, Adobe Commerce handled the digital buying experience, and integration services synchronized the two. We also built proper exception handling into the workflow, so a failed sync, a message needing retry, or a temporarily unavailable ERP never stopped the entire storefront from working.
What This Project Proved
B2B eCommerce isn't B2C with a company-login field
Pricing, approvals, quotes, account structures, and ERP workflows need to be treated as part of the core architecture.
Self-service doesn't mean removing salespeople
It means removing the tasks customers shouldn't need a salesperson for.
ERP integration is part of customer experience
If price, inventory, and order status are wrong, the quality of the frontend barely matters.
Need Adobe Commerce to Support the Way Your Customers Actually Buy?
SnapTec designs Adobe Commerce B2B platforms around real account structures, pricing models, ERP workflows, and operational requirements, not generic B2C templates adapted after the fact.
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