What is B2B ecommerce (online selling between businesses)?

B2B ecommerce is not selling software to companies or having a profile in a supplier directory: it is an online store where the customer is another business. The foodservice supplies distributor that sells to bars, the manufacturer that restocks its retailers, the brand that serves its wholesalers through the web instead of by email. It matters for two reasons. The first is that a B2B store is built differently: price, catalog and terms depend on who has logged in. The second is that this decides what a search engine or an AI assistant can read of it, since neither ever logs in as your customer.

What changes compared with a B2C store

Who buys. In B2C a person buys; in B2B a company does, often with several people and several locations. Shopify, for example, asks you to set up each B2B customer as a company, and from there lets you customize for each one the price, currency, products, payment and shipping methods and store content.⁠^{[1]Shopify Help Center. Shopify B2B}

What price each customer sees. This is the central difference. Instead of one price per product, a B2B store manages several, assigned by customer or by group. BigCommerce explains it with the typical wholesaler case: a standard price for all visitors and a discounted price that only selected customer groups see.⁠^{[2]BigCommerce Help Center. Using Price Lists} How that split is set up is covered in the B2B price list entry.

How much is bought. Businesses buy by the case and by volume, and platforms handle that with quantity rules and tiered pricing. On Shopify, a quantity rule forces purchases in multiples (by 10s if the product comes in cases of 10) or sets a minimum and a maximum per order, and volume pricing allows up to 10 price tiers per product.⁠^{[3]Shopify Help Center. Setting up quantity rules and volume pricing in B2B}

One store or two. Shopify poses the decision before you start: a blended store, which serves consumers and businesses from the same admin, or a dedicated B2B-only store, separate, with its own inventory and its own brand. It warns that it is not easy to change later: moving from one to the other means redoing almost the whole setup.⁠^{[4]Shopify Help Center. Choosing a store type for your B2B business on Shopify} The difference that most affects what is visible from outside is access. In a blended store, only B2B customers who have logged in see the prices, products and B2B account. The B2B-only store can be locked so that its URL and its login page are only available to B2B customers.⁠^{[4]Shopify Help Center. Choosing a store type for your B2B business on Shopify}

What Google and agents see

A crawler enters your store as an anonymous visitor: it has no company account. So, in a blended store, what a search engine or a shopping agent can read is the public price and catalog, not those of your B2B customers, which Shopify only shows to people who log in.⁠^{[4]Shopify Help Center. Choosing a store type for your B2B business on Shopify} In a locked B2B-only store, what sits behind the login is out of its reach entirely.

That has consequences for shopping results. Google only accepts in its merchant listings pages where a shopper can buy the product.⁠^{[5]Google Search Central. Merchant listing (Product, Offer) structured data} A product page that only exists after login is not one of them for anyone without an account.

To describe who an offer is aimed at, Schema.org has a property, eligibleCustomerType, that indicates the types of customer the offer is valid for.⁠^{[6]Schema.org. eligibleCustomerType} Its usual values are four: business (Business), end user (Enduser), public institution (PublicInstitution) and reseller (Reseller).⁠^{[7]Schema.org. BusinessEntityType} It is uncommon: Schema.org places it on between 1,000 and 10,000 domains, according to Google's index data from August 2026.⁠^{[6]Schema.org. eligibleCustomerType}

In a store

Fictional example. An invented blended store sells coffee makers to individuals and to restaurants and cafes. It has a B2B catalog with a 20% discount off the public price, assigned to hospitality businesses, and a quantity rule: capsules are sold in cases of 10. This is how each visitor sees the same product page:

The third row is the one that sells and the one no search engine or assistant ever gets to see.⁠^{[4]Shopify Help Center. Choosing a store type for your B2B business on Shopify} What is published for everyone, the product page, its attributes and its public price, is the only thing they can use to recommend or cite your store.

How to check it

1. Open a product page in a private window, signed out. What you see is what a crawler sees.
2. Look at that page's source code and find the price in the structured data: it has to be the same public price you see on screen.
3. Log in as a test customer of each type. Shopify recommends testing the experience with a test customer before inviting your B2B customers.⁠^{[8]Shopify Help Center. Getting started with Shopify B2B}
4. If your B2B store is locked, list what stays outside: which URLs respond without an account (the homepage, the login) and which do not.⁠^{[4]Shopify Help Center. Choosing a store type for your B2B business on Shopify}
5. Decide which part of the product catalog is public on purpose, and not because of how the setup happened to end up.

Related concept: B2B price list

They are used as if they were the same, and they are not. B2B ecommerce is the whole channel: who buys, how they get in, what catalog they see, how much they can order, and how they pay. The B2B price list is one piece of that channel: the table that says what price each customer or group pays. You can have price lists without a B2B store (a price for a group of loyal customers) and a B2B store with a single price for everyone. The B2B price list entry explains how to build one on Shopify and BigCommerce.

To go further, the catalog and entities reading path orders the rest of the terms.