B2B ecommerce is not B2C with bigger baskets: buyers are organisations with hierarchies, budgets and approval chains. Adobe Commerce’s B2B company accounts model that reality properly - companies containing users with roles, credit lines and negotiated pricing. Understanding the model is the difference between a trade store that fits how businesses buy and one that forces them to phone in orders.
The Company Structure
A Company is the umbrella entity:
- One company admin (the customer’s own admin, not yours) manages the account self-service
- Company users: individual buyers, each with their own login, assigned to teams and roles
- Roles and permissions: the company admin defines who can place orders, who needs approval, spend limits per order or per period
This self-service is the commercial win: your customer’s procurement manager controls their own buyers without emailing your sales team - and your sales team stops being a password-reset desk.
How Companies Relate to Customers
Under the hood, the company admin is a Magento customer with a company association; each company user is also a customer record. The company’s customer group drives pricing: assign the company to a trade group, and shared catalogs, tier pricing and payment methods follow automatically. That linkage is where B2B pricing strategy lives.
Approval Workflows
Purchase orders above a threshold route to an approver inside the customer’s company before becoming orders. Configure per-company: a junior buyer can build carts up to £5,000; above that, their manager approves in their account dashboard. This mirrors real procurement and is often the feature that wins a B2B replatform - consumer platforms simply do not have it.
Company Credit
Payment on account, modelled properly: each company has a credit limit, currency and outstanding balance visible in their dashboard. Orders “paid” on credit decrement available credit; your finance team reconciles offline. Settings control whether exceeding credit blocks checkout. Credit history is tracked per company - audit-friendly by design.
Implementation Notes
- Company accounts are an Adobe Commerce B2B feature (the
magento/module-company-*suite) - confirm the B2B module set is installed and enabled - Company structure import (companies, users, roles) is scriptable via the REST API for migration - do not hand-key 400 trade accounts
- Custom fields (VAT numbers, trade references) go on company attributes, not hacked into customer fields
- Self-registration for companies can be enabled with an approval queue - the right balance for lead generation vs spam control
B2B buyers increasingly expect consumer-grade experience with business-grade account control. Company accounts deliver the second half of that equation; pairing them with shared catalogs and negotiable quotes (covered in their own posts) delivers the first.