Magento 2 B2B Without Adobe Commerce: The Complete Playbook

The short answer

You do not need Adobe Commerce to sell B2B on Magento. Magento Open Source already ships the backbone of account-based selling — customer groups, group and tier pricing, and catalogue price rules — and a small set of focused modules adds the workflow pieces Adobe reserves for its paid tier: request-a-quote, hidden prices, quote-to-order and payment terms.

Adobe Commerce is licensed on a negotiated, revenue-indexed annual contract — we break the published benchmarks down in Adobe Commerce pricing decoded. For a genuine enterprise that needs company hierarchies and shared catalogues at scale, it can be the right call. For most distributors, wholesalers and trade suppliers, it means paying enterprise rent for a workflow that Open Source plus modules covers. This playbook shows how to build that workflow, section by section, with the real admin paths.

What B2B selling actually needs

Strip "B2B" down to the jobs that matter day to day and it is a short list:

• Quote-to-order — buyers request a price on a basket, you negotiate, and the agreed quote converts to a real order.
• Hidden prices and a gated catalogue — show prices only to logged-in trade accounts, or replace "add to cart" with an enquiry.
• Customer groups and tiered pricing — different prices for different accounts, and volume breaks per product.
• Payment terms — invoice trade accounts rather than taking a card at checkout, then reconcile to your accounts package.
• Fast reordering — trade buyers repeat-purchase; the second order should take a fraction of the effort of the first.

Everything below maps to one of those five jobs.

What Magento Open Source gives you out of the box

More than most people assume. The free core includes the pricing machinery that account-based B2B runs on:

• Customer groups — Customers → Customer Groups. Create a group per account type (Retail, Trade, Distributor) and assign each customer to one. The built-in NOT LOGGED IN group represents anonymous visitors, which matters later for price gating.
• Group and tier pricing — Catalog → Products, open a product, then Advanced Pricing under the Price field. Add rows per customer group and quantity to give each account type its own price and volume breaks.
• Catalogue price rules — Marketing → Promotions → Catalog Price Rule. Apply percentage or fixed discounts across whole categories or attribute sets, scoped to specific customer groups — the fastest way to run "Trade gets 20% off list" without editing every product.
• Offline payment methods — Stores → Configuration → Sales → Payment Methods. Purchase Order and Bank Transfer Payment ship with the core and can be restricted to specific customer groups with a small amount of configuration or a module, giving trade accounts a terms-friendly path through checkout.

None of that costs a licence fee. What the core does not include is the workflow layer: there is no request-a-quote, no negotiation surface, no price hiding, and no company account structure.

Step by step: account-based pricing on the free core

Before adding any module, get the native foundation right. This is the sequence:

1. Go to Customers → Customer Groups and create your trade tiers — for example Trade and Distributor alongside the default General group.
2. Open Customers → All Customers, edit each trade customer, and set their Group on the Account Information tab. New trade sign-ups land in General until you move them, which doubles as a simple manual approval step.
3. For products with negotiated or volume pricing, open Catalog → Products, edit the product, click Advanced Pricing, and add a row per group and quantity break.
4. For blanket trade discounts, create a rule under Marketing → Promotions → Catalog Price Rule, scope it to the Trade group, and apply it to the relevant categories.
5. Enable Purchase Order or Bank Transfer Payment under Stores → Configuration → Sales → Payment Methods so trade accounts are not forced through card payment.
6. Run bin/magento indexer:reindex and bin/magento cache:flush so the new rules and prices take effect on the storefront.

At this point every logged-in trade account sees its own pricing. The remaining gaps are workflow, and they are exactly where modules earn their keep.

The gaps — and the modules that close them

Quoting and negotiation. Open Source has no request-a-quote flow; negotiable quotes are an Adobe Commerce B2B feature. The B2B Suite for Magento adds it: buyers submit a basket as a quote request, you adjust per-line pricing in the admin, the customer accepts in their account, and the quote converts to a genuine Magento order. The mechanics are covered in the complete RFQ flow and quote-to-order on Magento Open Source.

Price gating. Hiding prices from guests — or replacing checkout with an enquiry for quote-only ranges — needs a module that suppresses price and "add to cart" on every surface a price can render, not just the product page. The full surface list and the three gating modes are in hide prices and gate your catalogue.

Terms and accounting. Selling on invoice works best when every order lands in your accounts package automatically. Pairing the quote workflow with a Xero integration means an accepted trade order becomes a Xero invoice without re-keying.

Segmentation. Customer groups plus visibility and pricing rules give you per-account catalogues and pricing without any enterprise machinery — the native foundation from the steps above does most of this on its own.

Fast reordering: the job everyone forgets

The fifth job on the list needs no module at all. A logged-in customer can reorder any previous order from their account dashboard in a couple of clicks, which suits the trade pattern of repeat baskets exactly. Two details make it work well for B2B. First, reordering repopulates the cart at current catalogue prices — so pair it with group and tier pricing, and a trade account's negotiated rates apply automatically to every repeat basket without anyone touching the order. Second, once a negotiated quote has converted to a real order, that order sits in the account history like any other, so the negotiated basket becomes the template for the next one. The second order genuinely does take a fraction of the effort of the first.

A rollout sequence that works in practice: get groups and native pricing right first, then add price gating, then the quote workflow, then terms and accounting sync. Each layer builds on the one before it, and the native foundation costs nothing to prove.

Adobe Commerce B2B vs Open Source plus modules

Capability	Adobe Commerce B2B	Open Source + modules
Customer groups & tier pricing	Yes	Yes — native, no licence
Request-a-quote / negotiation	Yes	Yes — via module
Hide price / gated catalogue	Yes	Yes — via module
Quote converts to a real order	Yes	Yes — via module
Payment terms + accounting sync	Partly — integrations extra	Yes — offline methods + Xero module
Company hierarchies, shared catalogues, requisition lists	Yes — its genuine strength	Limited — groups and rules approximate it
Licence model	Annual, revenue-indexed, negotiated	Core is free; modules are one-off licences

When Adobe Commerce genuinely is the right call

Be fair to it. If you need deep company-account structures — buyer hierarchies with approval workflows, shared catalogues negotiated per company, requisition lists across large buying teams — at serious enterprise scale, and you want Adobe's SLA behind it, Adobe Commerce earns consideration. That describes a minority of merchants. For the rest — niche distributors, trade suppliers, wholesalers with a few hundred accounts — the open-source route delivers the same day-to-day workflow: gated prices, negotiated quotes, real orders, terms invoicing. Every capability in this playbook ships in the B2B modules of the AgenticEcom Suite, and the quoting core is available on its own as the B2B Suite.

FAQ

Can I do B2B on Magento Open Source without Adobe Commerce?

Yes. The free core handles customer groups, tier pricing and catalogue price rules natively, and focused modules add request-a-quote, hide-price, quote-to-order and payment terms. That covers the day-to-day B2B workflow most merchants need without an Adobe Commerce licence.

Does Magento Open Source have customer-specific pricing built in?

It has customer-group pricing, which covers most trade requirements but is not the same thing. Assign each account to a customer group under Customers → Customer Groups, then set group and tier prices per product via Advanced Pricing, or apply group-scoped catalogue price rules under Marketing → Promotions. Every account in a group sees that group's pricing. Genuinely per-account negotiated catalogues — a different price for two customers in the same group — need Adobe Commerce B2B or an extension.

What B2B features does Open Source lack compared with Adobe Commerce?

The workflow layer: request-a-quote and negotiable quotes, price hiding, company accounts with buyer hierarchies, shared catalogues and requisition lists. Quoting and price gating are well served by modules; deep company hierarchies remain Adobe Commerce's genuine advantage.

When is Adobe Commerce B2B actually worth it?

When you need company hierarchies, shared catalogues and requisition lists at enterprise scale, with Adobe's SLA behind them. For most distributors and trade suppliers, Open Source plus modules delivers the same everyday quoting and pricing workflow without the annual, revenue-indexed licence.