Choosing a B2B E-commerce Platform: 12 Requirements to Set

Choosing a B2B e-commerce platform is a decision that lives for five to ten years. Yet it is made surprisingly often on demo gut-feel and monthly fee, while the requirements that actually decide everyday life — pricing logic, integration depth, operations and support — end up in appendix three. This article is meant to be used as a concrete requirements list: twelve points to put to every vendor you evaluate, whether that is us, Shopify, Magento or a Nordic niche player.

The requirements are grouped into three areas: business logic, data and integrations, and operations and economics. The order is deliberate — it is the business logic that most often decides the outcome in B2B, and it is the hardest thing to fix afterwards.

Requirements for the business logic

1. Customer-specific prices without custom builds

B2B prices are negotiated: discount matrices, volume tiers, net prices per customer and product group. Ask the vendor exactly how your current contract structure would be modelled — and insist on seeing it in a demo with your own pricing logic, not with neatly arranged sample data.

2. Company accounts with roles and approvals

Your customers are organisations, not individuals. Multiple purchasers per account, different permissions, spending limits and approval workflows should be standard features. If the answer is “we solve that with an app” — ask who maintains the app in three years.

3. Invoicing and payment terms as the first choice

In Nordic B2B, invoicing with payment terms is the norm. The platform should handle invoice payment, credit limits and the connection to the accounts ledger as naturally as a B2C platform handles card payment. Also look at how returns and credit notes flow back — that is where half-finished invoicing solutions tend to reveal themselves.

4. B2B and B2C in the same solution

Many companies sell in both directions — or will. Two separate platforms mean duplicate assortments, duplicate integrations and duplicate costs. Ask whether B2B and B2C can run in the same core with shared product data and separate price views. It is one of the founding principles behind HDL Commerce — B2B and B2C in one core — and a point where the differences between vendors are large.

Requirements for data and integrations

A B2B platform never lives alone. It has to coexist with ERP, warehouse, finance and marketing systems — and it is in the seams between systems that most projects come apart.

5. Deep ERP integration, not just order sync

The ERP is the hub of B2B. The integration must handle stock levels per warehouse, customer-specific prices in real time, backorders and returns — not just pass orders across. Ask the vendor to describe an existing integration with your specific ERP and who is responsible when it misbehaves.

6. Ready-made integrations over consulting projects

Every custom-built connection is a future maintenance cost. Ask how many ready-made, managed integrations the vendor has and which are included. HDL Commerce, for example, has ready-made integrations — see the full list — but whichever vendor you choose, the principle is the same: ready-made and managed beats bespoke and abandoned.

7. Product information in place — preferably a built-in PIM

B2B assortments are attribute-heavy: technical data, documents, certificates, relationships between items. Without structured product information management, every assortment expansion becomes an Excel project. A platform with a built-in PIM removes both a licence and an integration from your system map.

8. Your data is yours — even on exit

Ask how you get your product data, customer data and order history out the day you want to leave. A vendor who answers that question clearly is a vendor who intends to keep you on merit, not lock-in.

Requirements for operations, support and economics

The last four requirements are about life after launch — the everyday reality that continues for five years after the project team has disbanded. This is where the difference between a good vendor and a good sales organisation becomes visible.

9. Operations with clear commitments

Who is responsible for keeping the store up — you, a hosting partner or the platform vendor? Demand numbers on uptime commitments and what happens when they are not met. HDL Commerce is hosted and operated in Sweden with 99.3% uptime; every vendor should be able to present the equivalent figure and responsibility.

10. Support you can actually reach

When the price list fails to sync on a Monday morning, it matters whether support answers that same morning or within “1–3 business days”, and whether the person at the other end understands Nordic B2B commerce. Ask for concrete response times — we, for example, promise a reply within 4 hours (weekdays) — and by all means test the support during the evaluation itself.

11. Open and predictable pricing

The monthly fee is rarely the whole truth. Ask what is included: operations, support, upgrades, integrations? What do more volume, more markets, more users cost? Demand the total three-year cost, not the monthly price. Our own pricing is open — from SEK 10,000/month for Light and from SEK 65,000/month for Enterprise — precisely so that comparison can be made without a sales meeting.

12. A credible migration plan

The platform can be as good as it likes — if the move there fails, none of it matters. Ask how the vendor migrates product data, customers, order history and SEO equity, and who carries responsibility for each step. A vendor who offers a proper pre-analysis of your current solution is taking the question seriously — we do it in the form of a free migration analysis, and you should demand the equivalent from everyone.

Use the list — literally

Turn the twelve requirements into rows in a spreadsheet, weight each row according to your business, and make every vendor answer in writing. It takes an afternoon and saves you from the most expensive mistake of all: choosing a platform on demo shine and discovering the requirements list after the contract is signed. If you want to see how different platforms stack up against each other, we publish open comparisons with both Magento and the Nordic alternatives.

Put the requirements to us first

We like customers who set hard requirements — that is exactly how this list is meant to be used. Book a demo and we will go through all twelve points against your business, and if you want to go further we will do a free migration analysis of your current solution. Get started here.