Can WooCommerce handle B2B without replatforming?
A lot of WooCommerce stores in the UK and Ireland started as consumer shops and slowly took on a trade operation: accounts with their own prices, orders on 30-day terms, a wholesale discount bolted onto a user role. At some point someone asks whether the business should move to Shopify Plus or Adobe Commerce. Often it does not have to, provided WooCommerce gets the B2B pieces it lacks.
I am Mariusz Szatkowski, a WordPress developer since 2006. I do this work myself: I read the code, set up pricing and integrations and test everything on staging. There is no team and no subcontractor, so the code you receive is code I wrote. If the storefront changes visually, you supply the design and wireframes and I build them.
A checkout broken by a bad rebuild belongs in the WooCommerce rescue sprint. Ongoing uptime and checkout monitoring is the store reliability plan. Selling into several EU countries under OSS is covered in the WooCommerce EU readiness review.
How to set customer-specific B2B pricing in WooCommerce
WooCommerce core has a regular price and a sale price. Group prices, quantity breaks and contract prices all have to be added. Which way to go depends on how many price lists you really have.
| Scenario | A plugin is enough | Custom code needed |
|---|---|---|
| Up to three customer groups with a fixed discount | yes | no |
| Contract prices that differ per account | no | yes |
| Quantity breaks combined with groups and currencies | rarely | usually |
| Prices pulled live from the ERP | no | yes |
| A catalogue visible to one account only | partly | yes |
When prices are per account, I keep them in a dedicated table fed from the ERP and indexed by account and product. Thousands of prices stored in wp_postmeta slow down every product query.
Quote requests instead of a cart price
Some trade products have no price until someone works it out: pallet quantities, made-to-order variants, freight. For those I use my own plugin, Quotlet from plogins.com. It adds an add-to-quote button, hides prices, lets guests build a quote list and sends the request to you by email. The free edition is on WordPress.org. For quantity breaks there is a sibling plugin, Tiers.
When prices are hidden, product pages stay open to search engines. Descriptions, specifications and data sheets keep ranking, and only a logged-in account sees the price.
Connecting WooCommerce to Xero, Sage or SAP Business One
UK and Irish trade businesses I meet run Xero, Sage 50 or Sage 200, and the larger ones SAP Business One. Each exposes data differently, so the first step is checking which API your installation offers and what it allows.
What I usually sync:
- stock levels, live or on a schedule,
- account data: VAT number, delivery addresses, payment terms, credit limit,
- orders with document numbers and fulfilment status,
- invoice numbers assigned by the ERP.
Why ERP calls do not belong in the checkout
If checkout waits for the ERP, an ERP maintenance window stops your sales. I push each order into a queue run by Action Scheduler, the library WooCommerce already uses to deliver webhooks and WooCommerce Subscriptions uses to take renewal payments. When the ERP is down, jobs wait and run later. Every failed job stays in the log with its error, so you know which order needs a look.
The same queue handles the slow work after an order is placed: PDF invoices, notification emails, exports. The customer sees the confirmation page without waiting for any of it.
Recurring B2B orders with WooCommerce Subscriptions
In trade, a subscription is more often a monthly consumables order or an annual licence than premium access. WooCommerce Subscriptions has two renewal modes. With automatic renewals the gateway charges the customer, and a failed payment is retried by rules, by default five attempts over a week. With manual renewals the customer gets a renewal order and pays with any method enabled in the store, bank transfer included.
Invoice customers on 30-day terms fall outside the retry system. For them I set up reminders and statuses so an overdue renewal reaches your accounts team, and the subscription does not lapse on day one of a late payment.
Order approval and credit limits
Neither exists in WooCommerce core. When you need them, I build them:
- order approval: a buyer fills the cart, the order gets its own status and waits until someone with the right permission approves or rejects it from an email link or the dashboard,
- credit limits: the account page shows the remaining limit, the store blocks an order that would exceed it, and the figure updates from the ERP once a payment is posted,
- cost centres: an order can be assigned to a branch or project so purchases land on the right budget.
Checking VAT numbers after Brexit
Great Britain VAT numbers are no longer in the EU’s VIES system. I validate them against the HMRC check a UK VAT number service and EU numbers, including Irish ones, against VIES, at account registration and again at checkout. A missing or invalid number is caught before the order reaches your accounting software.
What does HPOS change for a B2B store?
HPOS (High-Performance Order Storage) moves orders out of wp_posts and wp_postmeta into four dedicated tables: wc_orders, wc_order_addresses, wc_order_operational_data and wc_orders_meta. Since WooCommerce 8.2, released in October 2023, it is the default for new installs. Older stores often still keep orders in the posts table next to products and pages.
Before switching, I check every plugin and every line of custom code. Compatible code loads orders with wc_get_order(), changes metadata through the order object and calls save(), and the plugin declares support with FeaturesUtil::declare_compatibility. Direct wp_postmeta queries get rewritten. Then I turn on compatibility mode, in which WooCommerce keeps the old and new tables in sync, and only make HPOS authoritative once both sides match.
Can database work replace replatforming?
Before you pay for a migration, look at the database. In trade stores I usually find:
- a
wp_optionstable full of autoloaded rows left by plugins removed years ago, - order metadata from extensions that no longer exist,
- plugin and theme queries that run once per product variation,
- orders still in
wp_postmetabecause nobody switched to HPOS.
If checkout completion drops without a gateway outage, start with WooCommerce performance optimization. Moving platform makes sense when you need a multi-vendor marketplace, when your ERP vendor offers a certified connector only for another platform, or when a load test on a copy of the store shows WooCommerce cannot cope on sensible hardware. In that case I write down what the data migration costs and what happens to your URLs.
Testing and handover
Every change is tested on staging with a copy of the data stripped of personal information:
- the purchase path for each customer group, checking each account sees its own price and terms,
- an order placed exactly at a quantity break,
- what the store does when the ERP does not respond,
- payments in the gateway’s test mode, for example Stripe or GoCardless.
The code lives in a private Git repository. Each change comes with a written note on what changed and how to check it. I work by email and in shared documents, so decisions stay on record. Before I get access to a store holding customer data, I sign a data processing agreement under Art. 28 GDPR. I invoice as a Polish business with EU VAT ID PL7393037445, under a contract governed by Polish law.
Related services
- WooCommerce developer: ongoing development on your store.
- Speed up WordPress: the performance work a stable checkout depends on.
- GEO and LLMO optimization: how your shop appears in AI search.
Describe your store and what needs to change through the contact form. I will reply with scoping questions and then a quote with its assumptions.
