A consumer platform models a customer as a person with an email address. A B2B customer is an organisation: it has a credit limit, a contract, a shipping account, several buyers with different authority, and often several locations that each need their own prices and delivery addresses.
When the platform has no company object, teams simulate one. They give the whole company a shared login, or they create a customer group per company, or they put the account number in a custom field. Each of those works for a while and each fails the same way, at the point where you need to know who placed the order and whether they were allowed to.
The thing to check is not whether the platform says it supports B2B. It is what the platform's company object can hold, how many people and locations fit inside one, and whether the buyer's role controls what they can do rather than just what they can see.
Why it decides a platform
Consumer platforms model a customer as one person. If your customers are organisations, everything downstream, from pricing to approvals to reporting, depends on the platform modelling that properly.
Also called: B2B company, account hierarchy, buyer roles.
Last updated 2026-08-20.