Both platforms now ship native B2B. The marketing pages look interchangeable. The real differences are price list modelling, catalogue segmentation, checkout extensibility and how each handles a buyer who is also a consumer — and those decide the build.
Both vendors will tell you they support company accounts, customer-specific pricing, payment terms and quoting. Both are telling the truth. Compare the feature grids and you will not be able to choose, because the grids are written to be uncomparable.
After delivering both, we have found the decision reduces to four questions. Answer them honestly about your own business and the platform usually picks itself.
The four questions that decide it
How is your pricing actually shaped?
Flat percentage off list per customer group is easy on both. Volume breaks that differ per customer, per product, per contract period are not. This is where most of the divergence lives.
Do buyers see different catalogues, or the same catalogue at different prices?
Hiding products from specific accounts is a fundamentally different requirement from repricing them, and the platforms model it differently.
How much of your checkout is non-standard?
PO numbers, credit limits, approval chains and split shipments all push against the checkout. What each platform lets you change there is a hard constraint, not a preference.
Do the same humans buy from you as consumers?
A trade customer who also shops retail on the same brand is a surprisingly awkward case, and the two platforms resolve it in opposite directions.
Where they genuinely differ
| Dimension | Shopify Plus B2B | BigCommerce B2B Edition |
|---|---|---|
| Price list model | Price lists attached to a catalogue; fixed price or % off, per-variant | Price lists with native per-SKU volume break tiers |
| Catalogue segmentation | Catalogue per company location — clean separation | Customer group visibility rules |
| Quoting workflow | App or custom build required | Native quote request and management |
| Checkout customisation | Checkout Extensibility: UI extensions + Functions, sandboxed | Open-source checkout — broader control, more to maintain |
| Mixed B2B / B2C | One storefront; company login switches context | Usually separate channels or storefronts |
| ERP integration surface | Admin GraphQL, bulk operations, mature connectors | REST + GraphQL, generous rate limits |
| Headless path | Hydrogen / Oxygen, Storefront API | Catalyst, GraphQL Storefront API |
Pricing: the row that usually decides it
If your commercial model is "this customer gets 22% off list", both platforms handle it and you can stop reading this section. If it is "this customer gets 22% off list, except on the Henderson range where it is 15%, and from 500 units it steps to 28%, and that contract expires in March" — then you are in the territory where the modelling matters.
BigCommerce expresses per-SKU volume tiers natively within a price list. Shopify’s B2B price lists express fixed prices or percentage adjustments against a catalogue, with quantity rules applied per variant. Both can express the requirement; the question is how much of it you end up maintaining yourself versus how much the platform maintains for you.
Where the ERP sits changes the answer
If NetSuite or another ERP already owns pricing, much of the above softens. The storefront is then a cache rather than a system of record: you resolve the customer’s entitled price in the ERP and publish it, and you care far more about the write path and rate limits than about the platform’s native tiering.
That reframing matters, because it changes what you are actually selecting for. Teams that will integrate an ERP on day one should weight API ergonomics, bulk operation support and connector maturity heavily, and weight native pricing features lightly — they are about to be bypassed.
A blunt summary
- Complex native volume tiers and built-in quoting matter most → BigCommerce B2B Edition starts ahead.
- Same humans buy trade and retail from you, and one storefront must serve both → Shopify Plus B2B starts ahead.
- Strict catalogue separation per customer location → Shopify’s catalogue model is cleaner.
- You need deep control of checkout beyond what a sandboxed extension allows → BigCommerce’s open-source checkout gives more room, at the cost of owning it.
- ERP owns pricing anyway → weight API ergonomics and connector maturity, and treat native pricing features as largely irrelevant.
Key takeaways
- Vendor feature grids are written to resist comparison. Model your ten worst real contracts in a trial instead.
- Pricing shape, catalogue segmentation, checkout control and mixed B2B/B2C are the four rows that carry the decision.
- If an ERP will own pricing, native tiering features stop mattering and API ergonomics start.
- Never let the same pricing rule live in two systems — it will drift and nobody will know which is correct.
360 Expert Solutions
E-commerce & ERP Integration Team
We build and scale B2B and DTC commerce on Shopify Plus, BigCommerce and WooCommerce, wired into NetSuite and Oracle. These articles are written by the engineers and architects who deliver those projects.
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