B2B eCommerce Platform Comparison: Shopify Plus vs BigCommerce vs Adobe Commerce

Diana ZanderResearch Muse

5 min23 Sep 2026

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A B2B buyer does not shop the way a retail customer does. They log in as a company, not a person. They need a price list negotiated six months ago, a purchase order instead of a credit card, and a catalog that shows only the products their account is allowed to see. Most eCommerce platforms were built for the retail case first and had B2B bolted on later. That history still shapes what each platform can and cannot do out of the box in 2026.

What "B2B-ready" actually means

Before comparing platforms, it helps to name what a real B2B storefront has to support:

Company accounts with multiple buyer roles and permissions.
Custom price lists and discount tiers per account or customer group.
Quote and negotiation workflows, including redlining on price and terms.
Purchase order checkout with net 30, 60, or 90 payment terms.
Hard credit limits enforced at checkout, not just invoiced after the fact.
EDI or punchout support so a buyer's procurement system can order directly.
Multi-level approval chains for large or unusual orders.
Buyer-specific catalogs that hide products an account cannot purchase.

No platform ships all of this identically. The gaps are where the real decision sits.

Shopify Plus

Shopify Plus starts at $2,300/month on a 3-year term, or $2,500/month on a 1-year term. Past roughly $800,000 in monthly GMV, pricing shifts from a flat fee to a small percentage of revenue. The native B2B layer covers companies, catalogs, price lists, net terms, PO checkout, and quotes.

The gaps that show up in production: multi-level approvals, hard credit limits, EDI and punchout, contract pricing, and quote redlining. All five are workaround-able with apps or custom development, but none ship natively.

Best fit: a DTC brand adding a wholesale channel on the same tenant, where B2B and retail share one catalog and one checkout with different pricing and terms per buyer type.

BigCommerce B2B Edition

B2B Edition is an add-on for merchants already on a BigCommerce Enterprise plan, priced from roughly $500/month on top of the Enterprise base (which is itself custom-quoted). It grew out of BigCommerce's 2022 acquisition of BundleB2B, and multiple agency comparisons in 2026 call it the most polished native B2B feature set among the three.

It covers company accounts with role-based permissions, sales rep masquerade, quoting, shared shopping lists, a quick order pad, an invoice portal, and payment-method visibility control so PO options never show up for retail customers. Pricing runs through customer groups and price lists — Distributor, Dealer, OEM tiers with fixed prices or percentage discounts.

The one architectural catch: running unified B2B and DTC on BigCommerce works, but the platform's own recommended pattern is Multi-Storefront — separate storefronts for B2B and DTC rather than one shared front end.

Best fit: a business that wants a published entry price and a mature B2B toolkit without commissioning a full Adobe Commerce build.

Adobe Commerce (Magento)

Adobe does not publish pricing. Licensing is quote-based, tied to your annual GMV. As a rough benchmark: license cost starts around $22,000/year, rises to about $49,000/year on-premise (or $80,000/year on cloud) at $5M–$10M GMV, and a full enterprise deployment starts near $125,000/year on-premise or $190,000/year on cloud at higher tiers.

The license is typically only 20–40% of total spend — implementation, integrations, and hosting bring total cost of ownership at the $5M–$10M tier to roughly $150,000–$300,000+ a year.

What that spend buys: the deepest native B2B feature set of the three, with 15+ workflows out of the box, including RFQ, negotiable quotes, multi-level approval chains, requisition lists, and buyer-specific catalogs.

Best fit: complex B2B operations — distributors, manufacturers, multi-entity buyers — with a budget for a dedicated implementation and dev team.

Total cost of ownership at $10M GMV

These are directional benchmarks from public agency cost analyses, not quotes for your specific catalog or integration list — treat them as a starting comparison, not a budget.

The five gaps that actually decide the call

Multi-level approval chains. Needed the moment an order above a threshold has to clear more than one person before it ships.
Hard credit limits. The difference between a limit enforced at checkout and one discovered on an overdue invoice.
EDI and punchout. Large buyers' procurement systems expect to place the order themselves, inside their own tool, not on your site.
Contract pricing. Prices locked to a signed agreement, not just a generic customer-group discount.
Quote redlining. A buyer pushing back on price or terms inside the quote itself, with a negotiation trail attached to the order.

The platform rarely fails at the demo. It fails six months later, when a buyer's procurement system tries to punch out into a catalog that was never built to receive it.

FAQ

Can B2B and DTC run on the same Shopify Plus store?

Yes — Shopify Plus's native B2B architecture supports one tenant with different catalogs, pricing, payment terms, and checkout flows per buyer type, so a DTC brand can add wholesale without standing up a second storefront.

Does BigCommerce B2B Edition require the Enterprise plan?

Yes. B2B Edition is an add-on layered on top of a BigCommerce Enterprise plan, and its own pricing is on top of that Enterprise base.

Why doesn't Adobe publish Adobe Commerce pricing?

Because licensing is tied to your declared annual GMV and negotiated per account, not sold as a fixed tier — you get a number only after a quote from Adobe or a certified partner.