B2B ecommerce
In B2B you do not have to seduce the customer. You have to take away the friction.
The B2B buyer already knows what they want. They do not need convincing: they need to be able to order properly on their own — with their price list, their history, their roles. We build B2B ecommerce on Shopify and Shopify Plus that sells on price lists and permissions, not on “requests by email”. We have been doing it since 2005.
Industrial B2B · machinery & spare parts
Your catalog is not a shop window. It is a technical bill of materials.
Someone buying a spare part does not “browse”: they look for a code, check compatibility, want their price and the real availability. This is how we treat an industrial ecommerce — tap a requirement.
INDUSTRIAL EVIDENCE
B2B that sells online, properly.
CFS
CFS
100,000 historical orders migrated to Shopify Plus with no interruption to sales.
−70%maintenance
Polin
Polin
Website and technical content for a world leader in industrial ovens.
+90%organic traffic
Vortex Hydra
Vortex Hydra
Industrial machinery told for an international technical audience.
22markets
Esaote
Esaote
A global identity and a technical presence for medical imaging.
22markets aligned
EINS
01
WHY
WHY
Your best salesperson is the reorder the customer makes on their own, on a Saturday night.
In B2B the sale is not won on the wow factor. It is won on how easy it is, for the buyer, to do the thing they do every week: find the right code, see their price, reorder in three clicks. Yet according to McKinsey 30-40% of B2B sales teams’ time goes on manual tasks that a good order portal automates. That means salespeople doing data entry instead of selling. And the hardest rule of all applies: if the customer has to open the PDF to work out the code, you have already lost the order.
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
— Leonardo da Vinci
B2B ecommerce
If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is in sight.
The B2B buyer is not a consumer. And their site is not a shop.
They do not arrive to discover, they arrive to solve. They want the exact code, the real availability, their negotiated price — not the public list. They want to reorder what they took last month without rebuilding it from scratch. And behind them there is a company: several users, different roles, multiple delivery addresses, someone who orders and someone who approves.
A badly built B2B ecommerce ignores all of that and becomes a parallel channel that creates work instead of removing it: the customer goes back to sending emails, and your team goes back to keying orders in by hand.
Your commercial rules are real. The site has to carry them, not simplify them.
This is where the craft is. Price lists differentiated by customer and by group, negotiated prices, volume discounts, minimum orders, batch and packaging logic. Selective catalog visibility, because not everyone should see everything. Company accounts with several users and roles — agents, resellers, direct customers — and approval workflows for whoever has to sign off before an order goes out. And B2B payment terms, 30-60-90 days, handled inside the flow.
Shopify today makes modern B2B possible; our job is to configure it so that it carries your real rules, including the awkward ones.
B2B THAT SELLS ONLINE
B2B ecommerce done properly.
02
CONFIG
WHAT WE CONFIGURE, IN PRACTICE
The commercial engine, not just the shop window.
01
Price lists and customer pricing
The right price for every company and group, volume discounts included.
02
Quick order and reorder
Quick order by code/SKU and reorder from history in a few clicks.
03
Company accounts and roles
Several users, multiple addresses, permissions for agents, resellers, customers.
04
Approval workflows
Who orders and who approves, with the right steps before checkout.
05
Technical sheets and documentation
Filters by specification, manuals and certifications a click away.
→
The advantage
The digital side works, the team breathes. The customer buys properly on their own, the salesperson goes back to selling instead of keying in orders.
CASE STUDY · MEDICAL B2B
800 categories, company purchasing logic, 100,000 historical orders. And zero downtime.
CFS is Italy’s number one in online B2B medical supplies. The problem was not cosmetic: it was carrying the complexity of a medical sector — differentiated price lists, company roles, approval processes, ERP integrations — on a Magento that had become fragile. We took it to Shopify Plus thinking, as I tell clients, “like a CFO”: the commercial rules first, everything else after.
100,000 historical orders and 160 customizations transferred without stopping sales for a day, search and recommendations with Clerk, automations with Klaviyo. The result: maintenance costs down 70% and the conversion rate more than doubled, from 1.14% to 2.51%.
03
INTEGRATE
THE SITE DOES NOT LIVE ALONE
The portal is an extension of how you already work.
A B2B ecommerce that does not talk to the management system is just another place to retype the data by hand. So the heart of the work is the integration: products, prices, availability, customers and orders synced between the site and your systems, automatically. We connect ERP, CRM and PIM with connectors and APIs, so the portal becomes the natural extension of how you already work — not an island to feed.
That is the difference between a site that “shows” the catalog and a portal that actually runs the sale. And the principle stays the one from the ADAM method: every integration exists to remove a measurable piece of manual work, not to lengthen a feature list.
TOOLS
Shopify B2B
Shopify Plus
SAP Business One
Microsoft Navision
Sage
Panthera
CRM
PIM
Klaviyo
Clerk
04
PROCESS
HOW WE BUILD IT, IN 4 PHASES
From rules on paper to a portal that applies them.
01
Mapping
A workshop to put on paper the segments, pricing rules, roles, approvals, minimums and the recurring awkward cases.
02
Prototype
In a test environment we create 2-3 real company accounts, with real price lists, and simulate quick order, reorder, approval and checkout.
03
Pilot
Controlled go-live with selected customers: we measure average reorder time, order errors, tickets and checkout completion.
04
Rollout
We scale to everyone, document the rules and train sales and back office.
CASE STUDY · INDUSTRIAL AUTOMATION
“Now the site does not take our time: it gives it back.”
That is how the team at Star Automation — a European hub in industrial automation, robotics and EOAT — summed the project up. The challenge was delicate: keep all the depth of industrial B2B, but take friction away from both the buyer and the people running it, without dumbing anything down. We treated the job as a translation: from engineering complexity to a clear experience.
Mega menu and filters by technical specification, product pages with manuals and certifications always to hand, a rethought customer area, checkout for multiple orders, and the whole commercial engine behind it — multi-level pricing, quantity discounts, quotes with approval, price history. Less operational complexity, more autonomy for the team.
05
COMPARISON
PORTAL VS INBOX
A portal that sells and an inbox that receives orders.
B2B portal
Orders by email/PDF
The order
The customer, alone
Keyed in by hand
The prices
A price list per customer
Renegotiated every time
The reorder
One click from history
Another email
The errors
Almost eliminated
Wrong codes
The salesperson
Goes back to selling
Does data entry
06
RESULTS
WHAT ACTUALLY CHANGES
Time given back, fewer errors.
Time given back
The 30-40% of sales time absorbed by manual tasks goes back to selling.
Fewer order errors
Correct codes, quantities and price lists, because the system handles them and not the rush.
Fewer tickets
The customer finds the sheets, documents, availability and order history on their own.
Reorders that repeat
Recurring purchase becomes the norm, not the exception you have to chase.
How many B2B orders are you losing
every week, by hand?
Tell us how your order cycle works today — price lists, roles, approvals, ERP — and we will run the free analysis: we tell you what can be digitized straight away and how much time you get back. And if the numbers say your B2B is not ready for self-service yet, we will be the first to tell you, before letting you spend. Twenty years of craft are also for that.