Celeste library
Decision guides for a B2B commerce project
What a mid-market B2B commerce build actually costs, how long it takes, what your team has to supply, how to tell a rescue from a rebuild, and how to run the discovery that makes the platform choice obvious.
What does a mid-market B2B ecommerce project actually cost?
Only one of the five cost lines in a mid-market B2B commerce project is published, and that’s the platform licence. Shopify Plus starts at $2,500 USD a month on a one-year term, BigCommerce Performance at $1,499 USD a month billed annually, and Shopware Rise at €600 a month. The other four lines, the integration build, the data preparation, your own team’s time, and the cost of owning the integration after launch, are set by the shape of your pricing, item data and warehouses, so this page hands you the questions that decide your number instead of a range we would have to invent.Is your ERP ready for ecommerce? Ten checks you can run this afternoon
Most B2B commerce projects stall on ERP data rather than on the platform, and you can find out which way yours will go before you talk to a vendor. Ten checks inside Acumatica or Cin7 decide it: publishable item descriptions, one stable item key, prices held in the ERP rather than a spreadsheet, a deduplicated customer master, per-warehouse availability, consistent units of measure, and tax rules that live in the ERP rather than in the order desk’s head.Rescue or rebuild? How to decide whether a stalled B2B storefront is worth fixing
Rescue a stalled B2B storefront when the platform can still model your contract pricing, company accounts and per-warehouse stock, and the failure sits in the integration, the data or the original scope, which is the majority of cases. Rebuild when a structural limit blocks something you can’t sell without, such as Shopify’s cap of three active catalogues on Basic, Grow and Advanced against a book of hundreds of contract-priced accounts, or when the build is unmaintained and nobody can change it safely.What a B2B storefront actually costs over three years
Year one is the quote you were given. Years two and three are the licence increases you didn’t model, the connector maintenance nobody owns, and the ERP tier you cross when orders grow. On the projects we see, the build is roughly 40 to 55 per cent of the three-year number, and the line that surprises people most is the cost of keeping two systems agreeing with each other.What a custom ERP connector really costs, separately from the storefront
The build is the small half. A custom connector costs you a rebuild of every mapping each time either vendor ships a release, a person who understands both systems well enough to tell a data problem from a code problem, and a decision about what happens at three in the morning when the sync fails. Acumatica ships two feature releases a year. Hosted platforms ship continuously.