Shopware 6 for B2B e-commerce

Most B2B e-commerce platforms weren’t built for how your business actually works. You’ve got customer-specific pricing. Contract terms. Approval chains. Legacy systems that aren’t going anywhere. And somehow, you’re expected to deliver an Amazon-like buying experience on top of all that.

That’s the gap Shopware 6 closes. For B2B too.

In this guide, we’re going to show you how Shopware 6 handles the tough parts of B2B e-commerce operations.

B2B e-commerce has changed

By 2027, B2B online sales in the U.S. alone are expected to hit $3 trillion. And today’s B2B buyers expect more than static catalogs and clunky ordering forms.

They expect sleek, intuitive, self-service experiences, with all the needs of B2B contracts baked in. They’re searching online. Comparing prices. Expecting self-service.

B2B buyers use 10+ channels when researching a purchase. If your online store doesn’t support that process – or worse, slows it down – you’re losing deals you never knew existed.

Shopware 6 for B2B e-commerce features

Shopware 6 answers B2B needs. It’s a modern, API-first platform designed to handle the realities of B2B e-commerce. It lets you:

• Run B2B and B2C on the same backend
• Offer personalized pricing and catalogs
• Manage multi-user accounts with approval workflows
• Integrate with ERP, CRM, and everything in between

Customer-specific pricing

Pricing complexity sits at the core of B2B commerce.
Unlike B2C, where one price fits all, B2B sales are built on:

• Individualized pricing
• Tiered discounts
• Contract-specific rates
• Volume-based deals

Shopware 6 was designed with this reality in mind. It includes robust pricing tools that ensure every customer sees the right price the moment they log in.

You can configure customer-specific pricing so that VIP clients, wholesale buyers, or regional partners instantly access their negotiated terms.

Introduced in Shopware 6.4.18.0 (Beyond plans), this feature can handle millions of price combinations with high performance.

What it offers:

• Import or sync individualized price lists via API
• Show each client exact prices for each product 
• Operates even without the full B2B Suite
• Designed for large-scale product catalogs and ERP integration
• Near real-time price sync if your ERP holds master pricing

The result? B2B buyers see the exact price they negotiated. You maintain consistency, and your sales team spends less time explaining discrepancies.

Rule Builder

Shopware’s Rule Builder lets you define flexible pricing rules without writing a single line of code.

You can create rules based on:

• Customer group
• Order quantity
• Total order value
• Specific contract terms

Examples?

• Automatically apply a 10% discount for orders over 100 units.
• Set tiered pricing where the cost per unit drops when a customer hits 500+ units.
• Offer region-specific deals or time-limited offers to particular clients.

It’s a granular pricing model that mirrors real-world B2B negotiations – now implemented online without Excel exports, price lists, or refunding the difference later.

Equally important, these pricing tools are built to be maintainable. You can adjust pricing rules on the fly through the admin interface, without a developer. This agility means your business team can respond quickly to market changes, offering, say, a targeted discount to a key client segment or adjusting prices for a promotion. 

Personalized catalogs

When it comes to B2B e-commerce, custom pricing is only half the equation.

The other half? Personalized product visibility.

In B2B, it’s common to:

• Offer exclusive product lines to certain clients
• Hide items that don’t apply to a customer’s contract or region
• Tailor catalogs for different buyer groups

Shopware’s B2B features allow for personalized catalogs, ensuring different customer segments see only relevant products and prices.

How personalized catalogs work in practice

Let’s say you’re a manufacturer selling to both:

• Distributors who buy in bulk
• Retailers who need packaged consumer versions

With Shopware 6:

• Distributors would see bulk SKUs, volume pricing, and perhaps even a different navigation tailored for larger orders.
• Retailers would see smaller pack sizes, standard pricing, and a simplified catalog.

All of this is managed through the same backend, using:

• Rule-based visibility settings
• Dynamic product groups

When a customer logs in, Shopware automatically tailors what they see based on their group, account, or assigned rules.

Corporate account management 

Purchasing decisions often involve multiple stakeholders – procurement managers, department heads, financial controllers, and more. To handle this complexity, your e-commerce platform needs to reflect how companies actually work.

Shopware 6 delivers exactly that with corporate account management features designed specifically for B2B.

You can model entire client organizations within your store, complete with multi-user accounts, granular roles, and approval workflows.

Role-based permissions

Using Shopware’s B2B Suite or B2B Components, you can configure fine-grained roles and rights.

For example, a typical client setup might include:

• Buyer: Can place orders up to a predefined limit.
• Manager: Can approve higher-value orders.
• Administrator: Manages the company’s users and permissions.

You control exactly who can:

• View pricing
• Submit orders
• Approve purchases
• Manage users or budgets

And yes – you can also set spend limits per user or company. If someone exceeds their budget, the system triggers an approval request automatically.

Example: Automatic approval flows

Let’s say an engineer at a client company adds $5,000 worth of supplies to their cart.

Their approval limit is set at $3,000.

Shopware automatically:

• Flags the order
• Routes it to their assigned manager
• Sends a notification (via email or within the system)
• Waits for approval before finalizing the transaction

These multi-level workflows are built into the B2B Suite, and they align with how real companies operate.

Support for your sales team 

With the B2B Suite, your internal staff or external sales reps can:

• Be linked to multiple buyer accounts
• Easily switch between the customers they manage
• Place orders on behalf of those customers
• Maintain each customer’s specific catalog and pricing structure

This is especially useful for:

• Distributors with field sales teams
• Account managers juggling several clients
• Sales reps who assist clients in placing complex orders
  

There’s also support for parent-child account structures. So if a parent company has several subsidiaries, a single user can oversee all orders across entities.

Quick ordering processes

Business buyers often know exactly what they need, and they purchase in large quantities or on a repeated schedule. Shopware 6 addresses this with features that streamline the ordering process. Two standout capabilities are Quick Order and Reorder/Shopping Lists.

Quick Order: “Get in, order, and get out”

Shopware’s Quick Order function lets B2B buyers add multiple products to their cart in seconds.

If a buyer knows their internal SKU or part numbers, they can:

• Input them directly in a list
• Upload a CSV/XLS file
• Enter SKUs into a quick entry form (item mask)
  

Once submitted, Shopware automatically finds the matching products and adds them to the cart. This is a huge time-saver for companies placing recurring bulk orders – say, a monthly restock of 50+ items.

Reorder and shopping lists

In B2B, many orders look the same week after week.

That’s why Shopware includes reorder tools and shopping lists (aka requisition lists):

• Save frequently purchased items + quantities
• Reuse and share those lists with a team
• Adjust quantities as needed before reordering
• View past orders and reorder with one click

What used to take an hour via phone or email – now takes a few clicks.

Bulk order management

Shopware also handles large, complex orders without skipping a beat:

• Add 100+ SKUs to the cart? No problem.
• Need to adjust quantities across multiple items? Use bulk actions.
• Want to import product data? Go ahead – the UI supports it.

Fast, flexible checkout

Shopware’s checkout is:

• Customizable: Add fields like PO numbers or internal references.
• Flexible: Offer payment on invoice, bank transfer, or credit card.
• Built for complex shipping: Allow multiple shipping addresses per order (e.g., split shipments by branch or department).
• Engineered for speed: Even large orders flow through without timeout or friction.

To sum up, Shopware 6 simplifies the repetitive, high-volume nature of B2B buying, while keeping things organized, efficient, and error-free.

Quote requests and negotiation (RFQ) capabilities

In B2B, not every purchase is straightforward.

Sometimes it starts with:

“Can you quote me for 500 units of this configuration?”
“Can you offer a project discount?”
“We’ll buy – but only if we get a better rate.”

These are Request for Quote (RFQ) scenarios – and they’re common in industries where pricing is negotiable, quantities vary, and buying cycles are complex.

Shopware 6 understands that. Its built-in Quote Management tools make RFQs a seamless part of your online sales flow.

How Shopware handles RFQs

Here’s what it looks like in practice:

1. The buyer fills a cart or form, then submits it as a quote request instead of checking out.
2. Your sales team is notified inside the Shopware admin.
3. They review the request, adjust pricing (e.g., apply a volume discount), check stock, and send a formal quote – directly through the system.
4. The buyer is notified, reviews the quote, and if satisfied, converts it to an order with one click.

This workflow:

• Allows price negotiation and quantity adjustments
• Supports alternate product suggestions
• Keeps a full audit trail for compliance and clarity

For your sales reps, it means handling multiple quotes in parallel. For your customers, it means fast answers and a smooth experience.

API-first approach

For CTOs and technology leaders, one of the first questions about any e-commerce platform is simple:

“Will it integrate with our existing systems?”

In B2B commerce, the answer has to be yes.

Your e-commerce platform must connect with:

• ERP systems (for inventory, order processing, invoicing)
• CRM tools (for customer data and sales pipeline management)
• PIM systems (for rich product information)
• Business Intelligence platforms, and more.

Shopware 6 is built exactly for this world, thanks to its API-first architecture.

Essentially, any function or data point in Shopware can be accessed through a REST API (and GraphQL in newer versions). For your team, this means you can push and pull data between Shopware and other software in real-time. The platform provides a set of endpoints for products, orders, customers, prices, etc. 

This API-centric design ensures smooth customization and automation for different business needs​. As a result, Shopware can act as the e-commerce hub in your IT ecosystem, exchanging data with SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle, Odoo, or whatever systems you use.

ERP integration

Out of the box, Shopware’s architecture supports connecting to popular ERPs. In fact, Shopware B2B has documented integrations with systems like SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, and Odoo, enabling real-time sync of inventory levels, product data, order status, and even financial info​.

When an order is placed on the Shopware store:

• It can automatically push into your ERP for fulfillment.
• If your ERP updates stock or shipping data, it can sync back to Shopware immediately – ensuring customers always see accurate inventory and pricing.

CRM, PIM, and more

The same integration principles apply to:

• CRM platforms (e.g., Salesforce, HubSpot)
• PIM systems (to manage rich product data)
• BI tools (for analytics)
• External marketplaces (for expanded selling channels)

With Shopware’s APIs, you can, for example:

• Automatically feed new customer registrations into your CRM.
• Pull detailed product data from your PIM.
• Push order data into a business intelligence dashboard for better reporting.

Headless commerce capabilities

Modern e-commerce isn’t confined to websites anymore.

You might want to:

• Launch a mobile app,
• Integrate with voice assistants,
• Build a custom frontend with cutting-edge frameworks,
• Or even embed commerce into IoT devices.

Headless commerce – separating the frontend (what users see) from the backend (business logic and data) – is what makes this possible.

And because Shopware 6 was built API-first, it’s inherently ready for headless.

You can use Shopware as a pure backend while building whatever frontend you want:

• A custom website (React, Vue, Angular)
• A native mobile app
• A B2B ordering portal
• An integration into third-party systems

In fact, Shopware explicitly markets itself as having a headless core​. This means the core commerce capabilities (product management, cart, checkout, etc.) don’t assume any specific presentation layer. You could, for example, use a JavaScript framework like React or Vue to create a storefront experience while Shopware handles the heavy lifting behind the scenes (product data, pricing, cart, orders via API calls). 

Multi-channel and composable commerce

Headless is about multi-channel commerce and composable architecture.

With Shopware, you can:

• Run multiple frontends (e.g., B2C store + separate wholesale portal) from one backend.
• Serve web, mobile, kiosk, and IoT channels simultaneously.
• Follow a best-of-breed strategy – using specialized tools for each piece (CMS, PIM, CRM) and tying them together via APIs.

Shopware 6 for B2B – real-world success stories

Features are great, but what about results? Let’s look at a few real-world cases where companies used Shopware 6 for B2B e-commerce and what they achieved.

BÜFA Chemikalien

BÜFA, a traditional chemical company, undertook a digital transformation using Shopware 6. They shifted from traditional sales channels – think phone and email orders – to a modern online self-service portal.

Key outcomes:

• Efficient, scalable ordering for B2B clients
• Faster order processing through online workflows
• Sales team freed up to focus on high-value activities, not manual order entry

With Shopware’s B2B capabilities, BÜFA replaced legacy processes with a more efficient, customer-friendly system, setting a strong foundation for future growth.

Grohe (Global Sanitary Fittings Manufacturer)

Grohe, a leading brand in fixtures and fittings, selected Shopware’s B2B Suite to power their wholesale dealer portal.

Key benefits:

• Seamless management of complex dealer networks
• Streamlined user rights management (different partners, different access)
• Frictionless B2B transactions – even for large orders

Although specific performance numbers aren’t public, a Shopware executive highlighted on LinkedIn that Grohe is “nailing” B2B e-commerce – a strong endorsement of improved dealer satisfaction and operational efficiency.

Thyssenkrupp (Industrial Engineering Giant)

Thyssenkrupp, one of the world’s major industrial players, had complex digital commerce needs:

• Deep system integration
• Unique frontends for different business units
  

Shopware’s API-first architecture and headless flexibility stood out as the perfect match, providing the robust API layer Thyssenkrupp needed.

The common thread in all these real-world examples is clear: Shopware B2B delivers tangible, business-driven improvements. They translate directly into higher customer retention, bigger order volumes, and lower operational costs. If it worked for them, it can work for you.

Summary

Modern B2B buyers expect more than just a functional storefront – they demand speed, personalization, and flexibility. Shopware 6 gives you the power to deliver fast, personalized, enterprise-ready experiences without compromise.

It’s already helping companies across industries modernize their sales, simplify operations, and scale.