Account-based pricing in B2B eCommerce with Virto Commerce platform

Feature name: Account-based pricing
Readiness: high
Development Effort: low

There are at least two significant points that make pricing different in B2B eCommerce world comparing with B2C.

First, a seller needs to assign specific prices not to a customer user, but to a customer organization. New users can come to the buyer organization and they all should get the same prices that are assigned to the account even without any additional efforts from the seller side.

For example, the Dutch wholesaler company that works in B2B and sells beverages to hotels, restaurants, and bars (HoReCa). These buyers have very different structures. The contract may relate to the group of hotels, and the buyers (users) seat in each hotel and buy for it. Due to Virto Commerce, a company could assign prices and discounts to the entire group (legal entity that pays bills) and due to the account-based pricing functionality, these prices were automatically available for any users that belong to the organization.

Account-based pricing is a B2B e-commerce feature that allows assigning users to a company (your customer) and makes all such users seeing the price list that you have assigned to the company.

The second point is that there is often a need to assign unique prices for each seller organization. Prices are registered in the contract and the contract is the result of negotiation with the customer. In this case, the eCommerce solution should support individual price lists with thousands of SKUs for each of thousands of customer organizations. At the same time, there should be an option to have common “general” pricelists that are overwritten by unique contract prices when for some (or many, or most of) SKUs when required.

Let’s take as an example one of our Dutch customers, the company that sells coffee and some other products in both B2B and B2C channels. Their business model in B2B assumes that they have general price lists, while account managers can setup unique prices for each of 4300+ products for each of 4000+ customers. After migrating their eCommerce solution to Virto Commerce the company got the opportunity to be as flexible as possible in price management and deliver unique prices when required with minimum efforts.

References

Feature list
Customer module documentation
Price module documentation
B2B account-based pricing

Keywords

B2B, pricing, account-based pricing, B2B pricing, pricing for groups of users