BigCommerce's Bet on Operability in B2B Commerce
May 28, 2026 • 5 Minute Read • Thomas John, Commerce Practice Lead
See All Our Insights
What a Modern B2B Buyer Portal Should Deliver
Jun 23, 2026 • 7 Minute Read • Thomas John, Commerce Practice Lead
What good looks like, how Catalyst and Makeswift change the build pattern, and how the Verndale B2B Buyer Portal Accelerator shortens the path.
B2B commerce discussions tend to center on the storefront. It's the catalog richness, search experience, content marketing, and conversion rate optimization (CRO) that tend to dominate the conversation.
Those things matter. They're highly visible, easy to evaluate, and often the first things organizations focus on when modernizing commerce.
However, they're not what makes a B2B experience different.
What makes B2B commerce different is everything that happens after a customer signs into the portal. It's where buyers manage their ongoing relationship with your business and handle countless account activities that keep their operations moving.
Not only is the portal where customers spend most of their time, but it's also where loyalty and margin are either strengthened or eroded.
For manufacturers and distributors, the B2B buyer portal isn't just a feature on the commerce site. The portal is the commerce experience.
A portal that doesn't reflect contract pricing, handle reorders cleanly, surface invoices, or support approval workflows just pushes customers back to phone calls and emails. The cost is more than customer frustration. It appears as higher operational overhead, slower order velocity, and a customer experience that doesn't match buyers' broader digital experiences.
That reality is why getting it right matters and why getting it wrong is expensive.
This article walks through three things:
- What a modern B2B portal needs in order to deliver a truly effective buying experience
- How BigCommerce's Catalyst and Makeswift change what's possible for those portal experiences
- How Verndale's B2B Buyer Portal Accelerator compresses months of foundation work into a much shorter path to value
What Customers Need from a B2B Buyer Portal
One of the most common mistakes in B2B commerce is treating the B2B buyer portal as a B2C storefront with a login. The reality is far more complex, with a breadth of capability required that's much larger than most teams initially anticipate.
It starts with discovery.
It starts with discovery.
Product Discovery on B2B Terms
B2B buyers arrive knowing what they're looking for, searching by SKU, customer part number, product line, or specification. The portal needs to support:
- Auto-complete search
- Faceted filtering across complex attribute sets
- Customer-specific catalogs that hide products the buyer can't order
- Brand- or product-line organization
Customer part number search is equally important. Most buyers think in their own internal part numbers or business language, not the supplier's language, making the ability to search for those identifiers a meaningful productivity advantage.
Pricing that Reflects the Relationship
Once products are found, pricing has to reflect the relationship, and B2B pricing is rarely universal. Contract pricing, tier and volume breaks, and customer-specific price lists all influence what a buyer should see on the product page in real time. A portal must recognize which customer is signed in and clearly present the negotiated price. Anything less creates uncertainty and undermines confidence in the digital channel.
From there, the experience shifts from discovery to execution.
Ordering Built for Repeat Business
Because much of B2B revenue comes from repeat orders, the portal needs Quick Order screens (SKU entry, file upload, type-ahead), one-click reorder from the order history, standing or recurring orders, saved lists, and frequently ordered widgets. When these capabilities are in place, buyers stay in the portal. When they aren't, they return to email, spreadsheets, and phone calls.Checkout Built for B2B Reality
Checkout introduces another layer of complexity.
Unlike consumer commerce, B2B transactions often involve purchase orders, on-account payments, multiple shipping addresses (often at the line-item level), tax-exemption handling, branch pickup, shipping service selection, and order notes. The checkout experience has to accommodate these realities without forcing buyers into offline processes or email.
Governance and Account Hierarchy
Beyond ordering, the portal must also support governance.
Organizations need user management so their buyer administrator can manage users and permissions without involving the supplier's support team. They need buyer, approver, and administrator roles; approval workflows based on budget, user, or product; and budget management with utilization tracking. Additionally, they need multi-user accounts where the right people see the right information while maintaining appropriate controls.
Account Self-Service
As portals mature, self-service becomes equally important. Self-service is where the portal often generates its greatest operational return. A buyer expects access across order history with proper attribution given to the source (for example, portal, phone, EDI, and punchout), invoices, statements, account balance, named sales rep contact, messaging, and RMA workflows. They expect to answer their own questions without opening a support ticket. Every self-service action removes a phone call from your customer service queue.
Integration with the Systems of Record
Of course, none of this works without integration. The portal must remain synchronized with the systems that run the business. ERP platforms provide order data, pricing, and inventory. PIM manages product information. CRM platforms provide account context. Punchout protocols (cXML, OCI) are for buyers running procurement systems. Without these integrations, the portal shows stale data, and B2B buyers notice immediately.
Building a Modern B2B Buyer Portal
When you step back and evaluate the full scope, the commitment to building a modern B2B portal opens the door to greater customer self-service, stronger digital adoption, and more efficient operations.
Most organizations discover they're addressing only a fraction of what's required to create a truly effective B2B buying experience. In reality, a modern buyer portal spans 85 capabilities across six domains of interconnected capabilities, including discovery, pricing, ordering, governance, self-service, and integration.
What initially looks like a straightforward commerce project quickly expands into an ecosystem of buyer experiences, business rules, integrations, and operational workflows that must work in concert.
Where the Old BigCommerce Pattern Runs Out
For many BigCommerce B2B implementations, the standard pattern has been Stencil with the B2B Edition app. Stencil handles the storefront, and the B2B app adds quotes, lists, approvals, and account hierarchy.
That pattern enabled many successful portal implementations, but it also introduced challenges as buyer expectations and portal complexity increased.
Stencil is an opinionated theming framework. Customization beyond the theme variables means writing within its constraints, and complex portal UX often pushes against them. The B2B Edition app sits on top of the theme, which means the implementation a integrates two layers of opinions about how a portal should look and behave.
For portals that need rich dashboards, deep-integration UIs, customer-specific catalog navigation, or differentiated branding per market, the Stencil-plus-app pattern has been an uphill climb. Teams end up writing custom code around both the theme and the app, with a significant amount of integration "glue" between them.
The platform ships, but the operating model gets expensive. The ability to make changes quickly and to evolve the experience without a development cycle erodes.
BigCommerce is moving past that pattern, which is what Catalyst and Makeswift are designed to address.
Catalyst + Makeswift: A Foundation Built for This
B2B portals are living operational systems, so you need an architecture that can evolve without becoming expensive to maintain.
That's why delivering the kinds of experiences described above—account dashboards, contract-aware pricing, self-service workflows, and ERP-connected experiences—requires more flexibility than traditional storefront architectures were designed to provide.
Catalyst is BigCommerce's headless storefront framework, built on Next.js. It's the storefront layer redesigned as a modern web application: composable, API-first, and free of theming constraints. Catalyst connects to the full BigCommerce platform, including B2B Edition, through APIs. The B2B capabilities are still there; they just aren't routed through an app layer that constrains the experience.
Just as important, portal teams need to evolve experiences after launch. Makeswift is the visual editing layer that sits on top, giving marketing and merchandising teams control over the content and experience without requiring engineering involvement for every update.
Together, they address the operability problem directly. Catalyst gives engineering teams the flexibility to build portal-grade UX and integration. Makeswift enables operations teams to publish content and merchandising changes without involving developers.
The Verndale B2B Buyer Portal Accelerator
Even with the right foundation, starting from zero on a B2B portal is a long project. The capability set is broad, the UX patterns are not obvious, and the integration architecture varies across ERP, PIM, and CRM combinations. Most teams spend months establishing the foundation before they ship anything a buyer would use.
That's the gap our B2B Buyer Portal Accelerator is built to close. We took the patterns we've already delivered and packaged them into a starter that eliminates months of foundational work.
The Accelerator is a working, demonstrable portal built on Catalyst and Makeswift, with 85 capabilities across six B2B domains pre-built and ready to configure. It's grounded in a capability framework, which we use to benchmark current-state experiences, identify gaps, and prioritize roadmap investments.
How You Benefit from Verndale's B2B Buyer Portal Accelerator:
Accelerate time to value with proven B2B UX patterns
Skip months of UX discovery and design with pre-built dashboards, quick-order workflows, role-based experiences, contract pricing displays, approval processes, account hierarchies, and financial self-service capabilities. Your team starts with proven patterns instead of a blank canvas.
Reduce integration risk before development begins
Leverage reference architectures and tested approaches for ERP, PIM, CRM, tax, punchout, and real-time pricing integrations. Instead of inventing patterns as you go, your team starts with implementation strategies validated in real-world B2B environments.
Launch with the capabilities B2B buyers need
Deliver customer-specific catalogs, customer part number search, contract-aware pricing, standing orders, multi-address shipping, budget controls, and other essential B2B functionality from day one. Focus on driving adoption and self-service rather than rebuilding common requirements.
Create a roadmap grounded in buyer experience maturity
Use the 85-capability framework as a benchmark to assess your current portal, identify gaps, and prioritize investments. Rather than debating individual features, you gain a structured view of where you are today and what best-in-class looks like.
The accelerator gives teams a working starting point, compressing months of foundation work into a project that can deliver value quickly while providing a clear roadmap for future enhancements and deeper integration over time.
Understand the Gap to Understand Your Next Move
The B2B portal is where the buyer relationship lives day to day and where most B2B revenue flows.
BigCommerce's Catalyst and Makeswift provide a modern foundation for the customer-specific pricing, repeat purchasing, account governance, financial self-service, and integrations that define modern B2B buying experiences.
The Verndale B2B Buyer Portal Accelerator builds on that foundation with proven UX patterns, integration approaches, and a capability framework shaped by real-world B2B implementations.
Whether you're modernizing an existing portal or planning a new one, here are two ways to get started:
Schedule a Live Demo of a Modern B2B Buyer Portal
See the accelerator in action, including dashboards, quick order workflows, contract pricing, approval processes, and role-based experiences.
Request a B2B Buyer Portal Assessment
Benchmark your current portal against the 85-capability matrix. We'll deliver a gap analysis, prioritized roadmap, and recommendations for next steps.
Every portal modernization starts with understanding the gap between where you are today and where you need to go tomorrow. Learn more and talk with an expert.