Entitlement gets confused with pricing, and the two are separate problems. Pricing answers what this account pays. Entitlement answers whether this account is allowed to know the product exists. A seller with channel agreements usually needs both, and needs them to disagree, because two accounts on the same price class may still be entitled to different assortments.
Implementations vary widely. BigCommerce B2B Edition and Shopify B2B both attach catalogues or price lists to companies. Other platforms handle it with customer groups and category permissions. Some sellers run a separate site per channel, which works and costs more to operate.
The awkward case is a product that has to be hidden from search and from the sitemap for one audience while staying indexed for another. That is an architecture question rather than a setting, and it is worth answering before the platform is chosen.
Why it decides a platform
Entitlement is often a contractual obligation rather than a preference. If you have promised a distributor that end customers will not see their products, a platform that can only hide products globally cannot honour the agreement.
Also called: catalog entitlement, shared catalogue, shared catalog, customer-specific catalogue, assortment control, product visibility rules.
Last updated 2026-08-20.