Uncovering Solutions to Complex B2B Pricing Requirements
In B2B commerce, pricing is rarely straightforward. Behind every number is a network of contracts, customer-specific deals, and internal rules that shape how you sell. That complexity in pricing is the DNA of your sales strategy, not just a bunch of numbers.
As Sander Mangel, our Senior Technical Solutions Architect explains, “Most B2B companies have complexity that ecommerce platforms were never built to handle. The trick isn’t to simplify the business to fit the ecomm platform, it’s to architect around it.”
Two Flavors of B2B Complexity
Every B2B client we’ve ever had the pleasure of having a discovery call with tells us the same thing: “Our pricing is really complicated.” But, in reality, they most often fall into one of two dominant types of pricing complexities we have to solve for:
1. Legacy Negotiated Pricing
“A web of historical deals and volume commitments isn’t uncommon,” Sander says. The longer a company has been around, the more sales people who have been at the helm, the more one-off arrangements you’ll find. “While it might be much simpler from an operations view to standardize and fit everything into neat tiers, you can’t just rewrite those agreements…they represent relationships.”
2. Complex Configurable Pricing
Products that are configurable or built to order come with their own kind of challenges. Every dimension, material, or add-on affects cost, and the number of possible combinations can be astronomical. “You’re not just pricing a product…you’re pricing an assembly, a process, sometimes even a workflow.” From a technical standpoint, that logic often lives inside CPQ or engineering tools. “The challenge,” Sander explains, “is that those systems were never designed to deliver instant prices to a shopper online.”
Where Pricing Logic Lives
One of the core architectural decisions on any project we work on is deciding where pricing logic should live: ERP, CPQ, commerce platform, or another dedicated service.
Our guiding principle: keep it in the system of record if that ERP or CPQ is performing and has modern APIs that can integrate with your ecommerce platform.
“Don’t rebuild what isn’t broken. But if your pricing lives in someone’s Excel file…it’s broken,” notes Sander.
When Native Features Hit Their Limit
Native platform features like customer-specific catalogs and price lists are fine for static scenarios. But they fall apart at scale.
“Shared catalogs sound great,” Sander says, “until you have 700,000 SKUs and hundreds of customers with negotiated pricing. That’s when you hit a wall.”
We worked with an agricultural dealer that learned this the hard way. Products were being sold at a loss because negotiated prices weren’t keeping up with rising costs. Their legacy system relied on manual updates and static exports from the ERP, which meant margins eroded quietly over time. Once we centralized their pricing logic and automated synchronization, they regained the control and visibility they needed to price effectively.
The Decoupled Pricing Service
When native tools fail, the solution is often a decoupled pricing service: a dedicated microservice that calculates prices independently and serves them in real time.
“This service acts as the central “pricing engine,” integrating with the ERP/CPQ for data and serving real-time prices via API to the ecommerce front-end,” says Sander.
This is the approach we used for L.H. Dottie, where a Redis-powered pricing engine now delivers instant, accurate prices to their storefront reducing the time it takes to update 20M+ pricing records from weeks to under 10 minutes. Download the full L.H. Dottie Case Study.
Performance and Safeguards
While performance issues can be tied to API call volume, what we see as the problem more often is stale data from the ERP. “When you are relying on daily exports from your ERP during times with volatile pricing, whether that’s due to tariffs or other supply chain issues,” Sander notes, “you’re going to run into issues. The fastest API in the world won’t fix calculations completed with yesterday’s data.”
Our team builds layered safeguards to protect against losses:
- Hard Margin Controls: Automatically prevent any product from being sold below a set threshold (e.g., cost + 10%).
- Fluctuation Alerts: Monitor for human or systemic errors by triggering alerts when prices change too dramatically.
Together, these measures keep automation accountable and the business protected. But, solving pricing challenges isn’t just about architecture, performance or safeguards. It’s about a solutions approach. Many agencies stop at what a platform offers out of the box, but at enterprise scale, that mindset can create as many problems as it solves. That’s where the solutions approach becomes as important as the technology.
Beyond ‘Just Use Native’
Too many agencies don’t have the experience or expertise to build solutions beyond what is available out of the box and leave enterprise businesses or any B2B business with complexities in their pricing believing that they have to live with performance issues or edge cases that can’t be handled.
“Our approach,” explains Sander, “is more like a dialogue. We explore native features first but are not afraid to pivot. We use rapid prototyping and load testing with real data to prove if a native solution will fail, avoiding the “sunk cost fallacy” and preventing a slow, unusable website.”
Looking Ahead
Where do we see things heading with B2B pricing solutions? Sander has three thoughts to share: “First, we’re heading into a world where CPQ tools will become more accessible and affordable for the SMB sector, solving many mid-level complexity issues that were previously only accessible to enterprise level businesses. Second, ERP systems are slowly but surely becoming more API-first, which will make it easier to integrate their robust logic directly. And lastly, AI is not yet at a place where it can replace the need for humans in pricing strategy. It’s great for pattern recognition and can analyze margin pressure and quickly detect anomalies across data sets but it still should only be used to support human decision making, not replace it.
Want to learn more about how we handle the complexities of B2B? Let’s chat.
