Not every customer should see every product at every price. Shared catalogs are Adobe Commerce’s B2B answer: named catalog-and-price configurations assigned to companies or customer groups, so a trade partner sees their assortment at their terms - and nobody else sees it at all. They are powerful, architecturally significant, and worth understanding before you build on them.
What a Shared Catalog Is
A shared catalog bundles two things:
- Product visibility: which products and categories exist for members
- Pricing: per-product custom prices for members (fixed amounts, replacing rather than discounting the base price)
Magento ships with a Default (General) shared catalog containing everything - guests and non-assigned customers see it. Custom shared catalogs are assigned to companies (via company accounts) or customer groups. The key mechanic: assignment changes what the customer can see, not just what they pay.
How It Works Underneath
Shared catalogs integrate with the price index and permissions layer:
- Per-catalog pricing is indexed into dedicated price index tables per catalog - this is why adding many custom catalogs has real indexing cost
- Category permissions restrict visibility at the category tree level
- The storefront resolves the customer’s catalog context on login - anonymous visitors always see the Default catalog
Practical consequence: catalog count is an architectural decision. Ten custom catalogs is fine; a per-company catalog for 500 companies multiplies index dimensions into pain. Design pricing tiers (dozens of catalogs), not per-customer catalogs (hundreds), wherever possible.
Patterns That Work
- Tiered trade pricing: Gold/Silver/Bronze catalogs with progressively better pricing, companies assigned by tier. Simple, scalable, matches how sales teams think
- Assortment control: region-specific or contract-specific product ranges - medical suppliers hiding restricted items, brand owners protecting channel agreements
- Hidden wholesale range: trade-only products never visible to retail customers - the Default catalog simply omits them
The Pitfalls
- Tier pricing vs shared catalog price: shared catalog pricing replaces tier/group pricing for its members - mixing models on the same products produces confusing outcomes. Pick shared catalogs as the pricing source for B2B companies and keep it consistent
- Guest leakage: if trade products must be invisible, verify the Default catalog excludes them - the mistake shows trade pricing to the world
- Reindex cost: watch price indexer runtimes as catalogs multiply; schedule reindexing and monitor the backlog
Shared catalogs turn “call us for trade pricing” into a self-service storefront experience. Model tiers rather than individuals, keep pricing sources unambiguous, and the feature scales cleanly from ten trade accounts to thousands.