Selling to businesses breaks consumer commerce in a specific way. The person browsing is not the person who approves the spend, the price depends on who is asking, and the order is often a negotiation rather than a checkout.

Adobe Commerce B2B is Adobe’s answer to that, and it has one load-bearing part. Adobe calls the company account a key entity within B2B on which all other features are in some way dependent — so the decision about company accounts determines what the rest of your B2B capability can do.

Table of contents

1. What is Adobe Commerce B2B?
2. Why the company account is the load-bearing entity
3. Inside a company account
4. Shared catalogs and negotiable quotes: what companies unlock
5. Integration across Adobe Experience Cloud
6. What to plan for: licensing, deployment model and switch-on order
7. Conclusion: why B2B company accounts matter

What is Adobe Commerce B2B?

Adobe documents B2B for Adobe Commerce as an integrated solution that supports both B2B and B2C models, aimed at sellers whose customers are companies with complex structures and multiple users with different purchasing permissions. You sell to businesses and consumers on one instance, not two.

The part for a scoping conversation is how you get it. Adobe Commerce B2B is Adobe Commerce only and requires a separate license; it is an extension that gets installed rather than a capability already present, and provisioning goes through an Adobe account representative. Adobe documents installation for Adobe Commerce on cloud infrastructure (PaaS) and on-premises; other delivery models are a question to settle with Adobe before anything is designed around them.

Why the company account is the load-bearing entity

A company account joins multiple buyers from one business into a single corporate account. Once it exists, the company administrator can build a structure of divisions, subdivisions and users that mirrors how the business actually operates, and control what each may do — ordering, quoting, purchasing, and access to company credit information.

Notably, the customer maintains their own organization inside your store. Adobe documents company accounts as offering unlimited company users, and either side can start the relationship — a visitor can request one from the storefront, which Adobe notes is enabled by default, or a merchant can create one.

Inside a company account

• Roles and permissions. A new company structure holds only the company administrator, and grows into teams and divisions. Adobe describes B2B capabilities as gated by permissions, checked whenever a company user opens a page or runs an action on the storefront. They are organized as a tree, so granting a parent grants everything beneath it.
• Company credit. Adobe documents a Pay on Account option, letting a company purchase against a company credit line. As the merchant you allocate the credit, manage its settings and handle reimbursement, and decide whether that company may exceed its limit.
• Company hierarchy. An optional hierarchy sits above accounts. An administrator can designate a parent company and assign subsidiaries to it, after which the parent company administrator can view and manage all assigned accounts. It is also a shortcut: parent settings can be pushed to children — with a consequence Adobe states plainly: applying parent settings overrides existing child company configurations.

Shared catalogs and negotiable quotes: what companies unlock

Shared catalogs are the pricing mechanism. Adobe describes them as pricing levels setting custom prices per product for different companies across one or multiple websites. They come in two kinds, and one carries a hard limit. A public shared catalog is created automatically when Adobe Commerce B2B is installed and is visible to guests and to logged-in customers not associated with a company — and the system supports only one public shared catalog at a time. A custom shared catalog carries pricing visible only to logged-in associates of the companies assigned to it, and you can create as many as you need. Either way, only one customer group or shared catalog can be assigned per company.

Negotiable quotes are the process mechanism. A quote can be started by an authorized company buyer from the cart or by a sales representative, and the representative assigned to the account is notified when a request arrives. During negotiation, the quote can only be updated by the person currently reviewing it and proposing terms. There is no simultaneous editing.

Both depend on the same foundation. Adobe states that support for shared catalogs and support for negotiable quotes are each available only for Commerce stores configured to support company accounts.

Integration across Adobe Experience Cloud

B2B selling generates signals consumer commerce does not. With the Data Connection extension in place, the storefront events it collects include B2B activity — requisition lists among them — once the separate B2B connector extension is installed. Separately, account audiences for account-based marketing are available only in the B2B and B2P Editions of Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform — though the Adobe Commerce destination itself accepts people audiences only. Commerce runs the buying process, Real-Time CDP assembles the account view in those editions. We connect them deliberately in our Adobe Commerce work.

What to plan for: licensing, deployment model and switch-on order

Nothing is on when you arrive. Adobe states that by default all B2B features are initially disabled, and configuration options appear only once the extension is installed.

Enabling companies enables more than companies. Adobe documents that switching on support for customer companies automatically enables shared catalogs — which also turns on category permissions for all stores — along with B2B quotes and the B2B default payment and shipping methods. Quick Order and Requisition List are the exceptions: those are enabled and disabled independently, so a phased rollout has to be planned around that grouping rather than an intuitive one.

Purchase orders change the default order path. Adobe documents that when purchase orders are activated for a company account, all orders for that company are automatically created as purchase orders — a workflow change for every buyer in that company, not a per-order option.

Blocking is not deleting. A blocked company keeps its account and its users can still log in and access the catalog, but cannot make purchases. Deleting a company sets the associated user accounts to inactive.

The services around B2B carry their own version floor. Adobe documents Catalog Service, Live Search and Product Recommendations as services supporting B2B workflows, and states that Adobe Commerce services are compatible with Commerce 2.4.4 and later — separate from the B2B extension’s own supported-version matrix.

Conclusion: why B2B company accounts matter

Adobe Commerce B2B is capable, and the capability is unusually front-loaded: license, deployment model, installation and the order in which features are switched on are all decided before the first company account exists. Get them right and the platform absorbs a complicated sales process; get them wrong and a promised capability turns out to need a license you do not have.

That is what we scope first: what your license covers, what your deployment model supports, what turns on with what, and which commercial processes the platform will actually carry. A B2B rollout on an existing Commerce store is typically 8–12 weeks: company accounts and shared catalogs first, quotes and approval flows once the commercial process behind them is agreed.