What a Modern B2B Buyer Portal Should Deliver
Jun 23, 2026 • 7 Minute Read • Thomas John, Commerce Practice Lead
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How a Pathology Manufacturer Built a Connected B2B Commerce Foundation
Aug 24, 2026 • 4 Minute Read • Commerce Strategy Team, Verndale
For B2B organizations with complex customer relationships, commerce modernization can touch nearly every part of the business: pricing, account management, product data, fulfillment, search, finance, and customer service.
That complexity can grow as organizations expand. Acquisitions introduce new products and data, while customer-specific agreements, account structures, and ERP dependencies add layers to the commerce environment. Over time, digital teams may find themselves managing critical workflows across multiple systems.
For one global pathology products manufacturer, these pressures had converged around a legacy Magento ecommerce environment. The company served hospitals, research labs, clinics, government facilities, and professional laboratories through direct and distribution channels. Its digital commerce operation supported more than 3,000 B2B accounts alongside a complex healthcare supply chain.
As the company expanded through acquisition and grew from a U.S.-centric business into a global, multi-brand manufacturer, its commerce environment needed to support that growth. Modernization required coordinated decisions across the commerce platform, ERP integration, account and pricing architecture, product data, search, and the internal workflows used to manage them.
Three areas of its digital transformation illustrate how those decisions came together across the B2B commerce environment.
1. Start with How the Business Operates
Platform selection is an important part of a commerce transformation. Understanding the operating model the platform needs to support helps define the requirements around it.
The manufacturer's B2B model included customer-specific pricing across more than 3,000 accounts, complex company hierarchies with approval workflows, GPO contract pricing, tax-exempt purchasing, GHX e-procurement, and real-time order synchronization with Epicor ERP. Supporting these requirements on the existing Magento platform required extensive customization.
Verndale migrated the organization from Magento to BigCommerce B2B Edition and structured the new commerce environment around these account, pricing, and purchasing requirements.
As part of the implementation:
- More than 3,000 customer accounts were provisioned in BigCommerce and mapped to Epicor using Customer ID and Customer Number references.
- Company-level attributes were configured to support customer-group and price-list visibility, sales representative ownership, payment terms, ship-to addresses, and order routing.
- Account structures were configured to support buyers, approvers, and administrators within a single company, as well as bulk user provisioning, user reassignment, and self-registration workflows.
- Verndale implemented a customer-specific pricing model in BigCommerce, assigning each B2B account a dedicated price list tied to its customer group, with pricing sourced from Epicor.
- GPO contracts were automated to apply tiered prices based on verified membership.
- Verndale established a data and integration strategy, including the implementation of PIM and middleware (Jitterbit).
- Verndale established a modern B2B product discovery via HawkSearch.
The migration also accounted for historical order continuity. Verndale mapped legacy Magento orders to B2B companies in BigCommerce and retained Epicor order numbers, giving customer service teams access to historical orders across both systems.
Together, these decisions established BigCommerce B2B Edition as the commerce layer for complex account, pricing, and purchasing workflows while maintaining the connections to customer and order data managed in Epicor. The architecture reflects the way the manufacturer’s B2B relationships already operate, with a structure designed to accommodate continued growth.
2. Treat Product Data and Discovery as Core Commerce Architecture
The manufacturer's catalog spans thousands of SKUs across chemicals, stains, cassettes, equipment, and laboratory supplies. Customers often search using exact part numbers, chemical compositions, and application-specific criteria, making the structure and quality of product data central to the purchasing experience.
However, the existing product data model created challenges upstream. Descriptions, images, attributes, safety data sheets, storage requirements, and hazardous-material information were maintained across Epicor and spreadsheets. This created inconsistencies across channels, slowed the onboarding of acquired product lines, and left the merchandising team dependent on IT for catalog changes.
Verndale implemented Syndigo PIM as the centralized source for product information and merchandising control. Product content, imagery, product families, channel distribution, and variant-level visibility are managed through Syndigo and synchronized with BigCommerce. Product attributes and links to safety documentation are also transformed into BigCommerce custom fields that support storefront callouts and product information.
Verndale extended that product data foundation into search, implementing HawkSearch and a custom indexing pipeline to keep the search index aligned with product data from BigCommerce and Syndigo.
Each product variant is indexed independently with its own SKU, price, and attributes, allowing buyers to search by exact part number. More than 30 BigCommerce product attributes are mapped to structured search fields, supporting faceted navigation across category, brand, price range, storage requirements, hazardous-material flags, and other product criteria.
Together, these capabilities give the commerce and merchandising teams greater control over product information, visibility, and channel distribution while supporting the precision required by B2B buyers navigating a specialized catalog. The same foundation provides a governed way to incorporate new product lines as the business grows through acquisition.
3. Give Internal Teams a Coherent View
Operating a connected B2B commerce environment raises another consideration: how internal teams work across the systems supporting it. In this case, ecommerce, customer service, and IT workflows spanned BigCommerce, Epicor, and several third-party platforms.
Verndale created an Azure-hosted buyer and operations portal to centralize visibility and key workflows across that environment. Teams can monitor orders and integration data, manage companies and accounts, validate tax exemptions, test search, inspect product information, and support integration testing from a single interface.
The buyer portal also provides dashboards for daily orders, revenue, order aging, partial shipments, and abandoned carts. For teams responsible for operating an ecosystem spanning BigCommerce, Epicor, Jitterbit, Syndigo, HawkSearch, Avalara, and custom applications, centralized visibility enables them to investigate issues and manage day-to-day commerce operations across the environment.
Modernizing Complex B2B Commerce for Growth
Following the transformation, more than 3,000 customer accounts with customer-specific pricing operate on the BigCommerce B2B Edition platform and are connected in real time to Epicor via Jitterbit. Syndigo provides the governed product data foundation, HawkSearch supports variant-level product discovery, and the operations portal provides internal visibility across the ecosystem.
The transformation brought account management, customer-specific pricing, ERP integration, product data, search, and internal operations into a connected commerce environment. Each component has a defined role, with BigCommerce B2B Edition serving as the commerce platform within a broader architecture designed around the manufacturer's B2B operating model.
For commerce leaders navigating similar complexity, the case underscores the value of defining that operating model early:
- What belongs in the commerce platform?
- Where is critical data governed?
- How will systems exchange it?
- How will internal teams manage the environment?
Those decisions shape the foundation available to support new products, customers, channels, and acquisitions over time.
Planning Your Next Phase of B2B Commerce?
Whether you’re evaluating BigCommerce, reconsidering your commerce architecture, or working through ERP, product data, and account complexity, Verndale can help you define a path forward grounded in how your business operates.