Comparison / Guides
B2B webshops and Business Central's customer-specific prices
Business Central holds negotiated prices, discounts and agreements per customer. Whether your webshop can show them is the single most decisive question in choosing a B2B ecommerce platform.
How BC prices B2B reality
In a B2B relationship the price is rarely the list price. Business Central models this properly: sales prices per customer or customer price group, line discounts, invoice discounts, quantity breaks, date-limited agreements and currency-specific terms. When a salesperson quotes a customer, BC computes the price from that whole structure.
The webshop question is simple to state and hard to solve: when that same customer logs into your shop, do they see the same number the salesperson would quote? If not, the shop creates confusion, support calls, and orders placed by phone instead — the exact costs the shop was meant to remove.
Why sync-based shops struggle here
Copying list prices to a shop platform is trivial. Copying BC's full pricing engine is not — it is a computation, not a table. Sync-based platforms handle it by replicating the rules (fragile), pre-computing prices per customer (explodes with catalogue size), or calling BC for prices at browse time (reintroduces the ERP dependency the sync was meant to avoid). Each approach works until the pricing structure grows past it.
This is the concrete reason ERP-native architecture exists as a category. When the shop reads BC directly, the price shown is the price BC computes — the same code path the salesperson's quote uses. There is nothing to replicate and therefore nothing to drift.
Questions to ask any vendor
Ask every candidate platform the same five questions, against your own data: How does a customer-specific sales price reach the shop, and how fast? What happens with quantity breaks and date-limited agreements? Can a customer see their own negotiated terms without the shop storing a copy? What breaks when we restructure price groups in BC? And who fixes it when a Business Central update changes pricing behaviour?
Run the demo on your gnarliest real customer agreement, not the vendor's sample data. The platforms that survive that demo are the shortlist; the brochure was never going to tell you.