Top SaaS B2B Ecommerce Platforms for 2025: A Buyer's Guide

A 2024 Forrester-commissioned survey found that 73% of B2B buyers expect the same online experience they enjoy as consumers. It’s a percentage that is growing each year. More B2B businesses are shifting their operations online to better meet these expectations. 

However, scaling and improving B2B ecommerce operations, especially those powered by custom or legacy solutions, can require significant overhead costs, lengthy development times, and the need for specialized IT resources. 

To meet these rising expectations, B2B businesses are turning to SaaS ecommerce platforms that unify online operations, simplify management, and scale globally.

A key way to modernize the B2B buying experience without costly overhead is by partnering with the right software-as-a-service (SaaS) B2B ecommerce platform. This guide explores what these platforms offer, how to evaluate them, and why modern brands are choosing SaaS solutions like Shopify to power their growth.

What is a SaaS B2B ecommerce platform?

A SaaS B2B ecommerce platform is commerce software hosted and managed in the cloud by a provider and offered to businesses on a subscription basis.

The core advantage of SaaS for B2B is its ability to blend wholesale-specific features with the agility of a managed platform. Today’s B2B buyers expect a seamless, self-serve purchasing experience, similar to what they get as consumers.

A unified SaaS platform like Shopify allows you to run B2B and direct-to-consumer (DTC) operations from a single back end. The reliability of that back end during high-traffic events is what frees your team to focus on growth instead of maintenance.

This flexibility is what makes SaaS the preferred model for modern enterprises—especially when compared to on-premise or open-source alternatives. 

As Chiel Versteeg, platform lead at Tony's Chocolonely, explains, “We've already seen several peak moments where hundreds of people are checking out. That used to crash our website but now it keeps on running smoothly. In turn, that means we're able to focus our time on doing bigger activations.”

SaaS vs. on-premise vs. open-source platforms

The main difference between SaaS, on-premise, and open-source platforms comes down to convenience versus control.

SaaS platforms offer the most convenience, since the provider manages hosting, updates, and security. On-premise and open-source platforms give businesses full control over the software and code, but also full responsibility for technical management.

💡 Did you know? A headless build with Hydrogen allows for smoother and more flexible integrations with the essential systems that power B2B operations, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and product information management (PIM).

For most enterprises, the agility and lower maintenance of SaaS outweigh the full-control advantages of legacy or open-source systems—especially as digital transformation accelerates. These advantages have led more enterprises to evaluate the leading SaaS providers head-to-head to find the right balance of cost, flexibility, and performance.

Top SaaS B2B ecommerce platforms compared

Choosing the right SaaS B2B ecommerce platform starts with understanding how leading providers differ in cost, scalability, and ecosystem support. Below, we compare Shopify with other major platforms to highlight where each stands out—and how Shopify simplifies growth for modern B2B brands.

Shopify vs. Salesforce

For brands focused on performance, long-term value, and operational simplicity, choosing Shopify over Salesforce is a smart move. The data shows Shopify provides a distinct advantage by delivering a higher-converting, unified platform at a significantly lower total cost of ownership (TCO).

• Proven conversion advantage: Research from an independent consulting firm reveals that Shopify Checkout converts 36% better than Salesforce Commerce Cloud.
• Significant long-term savings: Over five years, Shopify's TCO is, on average, 35% lower after factoring in licenses, development, and maintenance costs.
• Rapid deployment: Brands migrating from Salesforce consistently launch on Shopify in under six months. Mustang Survival, for example, made the switch in just 92 days and saw a 172% increase in conversions.

“Selling direct to consumer is a major growth channel for Mustang Survival. By migrating to Shopify, we’ve built the right foundation that lets us focus on growth,” says Joshua Horoshok, vice president of recreation. “Expanding into new international markets, deploying in-store and popup retail experiences, and optimizing our tech stack performance with developers in the Shopify ecosystem.”

Shopify’s platform was built from the ground up to unify point of sale (POS) and ecommerce, ensuring a single source of truth for all data. In contrast, Salesforce’s platform is a mix of acquired solutions, which can lead to architectural complexities.

📚 Read our Shopify vs. Salesforce Commerce Cloud guide

Shopify vs. Adobe Commerce

If you prioritize a swift market entry, superior site performance, and lower operational overhead, you will find a clear advantage with Shopify over Adobe Commerce. The platform is designed for faster launches and better conversions without the high costs associated with Adobe.

• Accelerated launch times: Brands launch 40% faster on Shopify, thanks to a more intuitive admin and prebuilt connectors for ERPs.
• Lower total cost of ownership: Independent research shows Shopify's five-year TCO is 29% better than Adobe’s. Adobe projects typically incur 42% higher implementation costs, 42% higher platform fees, and 24% higher operating costs.
• Superior performance and reliability: Shopify stores load twice as fast and see an average 5% higher conversion rate than Adobe sites—supported by a 99.9% uptime and rapid API responses.

Shopify unifies B2B, ecommerce, and POS on a single platform. Adobe Commerce often relies on costly and complex third-party integrations to achieve similar functionality.

📚 Read our Shopify vs. Adobe Commerce guide

Shopify vs. BigCommerce

When comparing Shopify and BigCommerce for SaaS B2B ecommerce, the difference lies in ecosystem depth and proven conversion results. Shopify offers a more robust, extensible platform that delivers better long-term value and higher performance.

• More cost-effective: On average, Shopify's five-year TCO is 31% lower than BigCommerce's. BigCommerce often has 88% higher implementation costs, 32% higher platform fees, and 21% higher support costs.
• Higher-converting checkout: Shopify Checkout converts 12% better on average. After migrating from BigCommerce, fitness brand Crossrope experienced a 24% lift in conversions and a 90% revenue increase.
• A deeper partner ecosystem: With over 16,000 apps compared to BigCommerce’s ~1,200, Shopify’s ecosystem provides far more options for customization, reducing the need for fragmented third-party tools.

“We weren’t confident in our previous ecommerce platform’s ability to support us as we scaled,” says Srdjan Popovic, CMO of Crossrope. “While it was risky to replatform during a period of intense sales demand, the risk paid off, and today we’re optimized for incredible international growth.” 

Overall, Shopify operates from one source of truth for all channels. BigCommerce's reliance on external apps for core functionality can disrupt data consistency across the business.

📚 Read our Shopify vs. BigCommerce guide

While each platform serves different needs, these comparisons show how SaaS solutions like Shopify combine scalability, speed, and simplicity to support complex enterprise operations. But whatkey features make these advantages possible?

Key features of modern SaaS B2B platforms

When a B2B business decides to switch to a SaaS ecommerce platform, choosing the right one is crucial. Otherwise, you could end up replatforming again in a year, wasting valuable time and resources that could be spent on innovation and growth. 

Today’s B2B platforms must deliver consumer-grade experiences while handling complex business logic behind the scenes. The right SaaS solution should align with your business goals and your budget—and fully support B2B operations, not just DTC. Here is a quick rundown of the key features to look for:

Robust B2B functionality

B2B buying requires a different set of features than DTC purchasing. Ask your provider if their platform is optimized for bulk orders, with features like quick-order workflows, customer-specific pricing, tiered discounts, volume pricing, requests for quotes, and reorders.

The Somewhere Co., an Australian retailer of colorful home essentials, migrated from a less efficient platform to Shopify for its B2B operations. By doing so, they reduced the average time it took to place a bulk order by 33%. 

Simplified back-end management allowed them to update and edit B2B product listings 91% faster. This made the entire B2B buying experience more accurate and efficient for their wholesale customers, driving a 13% year-over-year (YoY) increase in average B2B order value.

These core capabilities set the foundation for other advanced features that enhance the buyer experience.

CPQ and visual product configuration

Configure, price, quote (CPQ) tools, enhanced with visual product configuration, are a top B2B feature that automates sales for complex products. They help buyers design a product, receive negotiated pricing options, and generate a quote instantly. 

For example, Future Glass replaced their manual, error-prone quoting process with a custom configurator on Shopify. The tool lets customers visually design railing systems, leading to a 340% growth in B2B sales and an 80% decrease in quoting time.

👉 Read Future Glass’s story

Once configuration and pricing are streamlined, personalization becomes the next lever for improving conversion and loyalty.

Personalized buyer experience

To keep up with evolving buyer expectations, the platform should allow you to quickly build and deploy a personalized buyer experience, including product recommendations, targeted promotions, and customized store content. 

Personalization also applies across every channel. If your business needs to support both B2B and DTC operations, modern platforms allow you to consolidate operations into a single back end, ensuring consistency in branding, customer data, and order management. You should be capable of managing all of the different customer segments, sales channels, and regions you serve on a single platform.

Integration is what makes this unified experience possible—connecting data, storefronts, and systems in real time.

Integration capabilities and API architecture

Simplifying your tech stack can take a lot of work off of development teams and reduce the risk of security issues and outages. 

Platforms like Shopify natively integrate with key business systems like ERP, CRM, PIM, and marketing-automation platforms to ensure accurate, real-time data exchange that streamlines processes. For more advanced customization, Shopify also provides a suite of flexible APIs that developers can use to build unique ecommerce solutions.

Self-service tools then extend this efficiency to buyers, making the platform easier to use at every touchpoint.

Self-service customer portals

Enabling self-service ordering gives today’s buyers what they want and saves businesses a lot of time and cost. The platform should support customer portals that allow buyers to manage their accounts, place orders, track shipments, view order history, and access invoices independently.

And because today’s B2B buyers shop across devices, mobile accessibility is essential.

Mobile commerce

Millennials make up more of the B2B buyers in the market today and are much more comfortable placing orders on a range of devices, including their phones and tablets. The platform should provide fully responsive theme designs and mobile-friendly interfaces for a consistent, optimized buying experience across devices.

For brands that work with multiple sellers, marketplace functionality can further expand reach and efficiency.

Marketplace and multi-vendor functionality

Your platform should let you create a marketplace experience that caters to multiple vendors at once. 

For a fully custom experience, you can use Shopify's Marketplace Kit to build a multi-vendor marketplace on top of Shopify’s APIs. This official toolkit, maintained by Shopify engineers, lets you create a custom storefront with Shop Pay, seller onboarding, and specific product and order flows.

You can also install a marketplace app like Multi Vendor Marketplace by Webkul to add features such as seller dashboards, product approvals, commission rules, and vendor management. If you want to sync products to marketplaces like Amazon or Walmart, you can use the Shopify Marketplace Connect app. 

Together, these capabilities ensure B2B brands can serve complex buyer needs from one scalable SaaS platform.

Analytics and reporting

Being able to leverage centralized data to make strategic decisions can give your business a competitive edge. The platform should provide comprehensive dashboards and reporting tools to track key metrics, gain insights into customer behavior, and inform data-driven decisions.

Finally, understanding a platform’s vision and innovation roadmap helps you evaluate its ability to support long-term growth.

Vision and innovation

Not all SaaS ecommerce platforms in the market today are focused on the needs of B2B businesses. It’s important to ask the provider about their product roadmap and commitment to innovation, to ensure they will be the right partner in 5 to 10 years, not just today. 

How to evaluate SaaS B2B ecommerce platforms 

Once you have determined the key features you need, it’s time to evaluate SaaS ecommerce providers themselves. Selecting a platform isn’t just about features—it’s about how those features align with cost, implementation, scalability, and security over time.

Here’s a quick rundown of what to consider when comparing vendors:

Total cost of ownership analysis

When evaluating the cost of a new platform provider, start by fully reviewing the TCO of your current solution. Factor in the direct costs of hardware, software, developers, and engineers, as well as the opportunity cost of time spent on maintenance, bug fixing, and developing new features. 

Then, ask potential vendors about their pricing model, and take the time to uncover every potential cost, such as fees for integrations, third-party providers, data storage, and more. Comparing full TCOs side by side provides a more accurate and comprehensive view of both the up-front and ongoing investment.

Implementation timeline considerations

Getting your new B2B site live can take anywhere from a few months to over a year. The platform itself is just one part of the project—your business needs and existing systems will ultimately set the pace.

A standard implementation for a headless build often falls between 4 to 16 weeks. More complex enterprise projects, especially those involving heavy integrations, can easily extend to 6 to 12 months or more.

Factors that influence your timeline are:

• Data migration: The complexity of your product catalogs, customer-specific price lists, and company accounts directly affect the timeline.
• Integration scope: The more systems you connect (ERP, PIM, tax software, etc.), the longer the project will take.
• Platform architecture: A standard, theme-based site is the fastest route to launch. A flexible headless or composable architecture requires more development time for API strategy and testing.

💡 New website builds don’t always need to be slow. Carrier, a global provider of HVAC technology, built their B2B business on a custom platform prior to moving to Shopify. 

Previously, it took them 9 to 12 months to launch new ecommerce experiences for different markets and customer segments. After replatforming, they can now launch new features and capabilities in just 30 days with much less hassle and direct costs.

Scalability and performance benchmarks

The first step is to assess the size and complexity of your ecommerce operations, including your transaction volume, number of customers, and product catalog size. Make sure the provider can handle your current operations, as well as your projected growth, to avoid any issues related to scalability. 

Evaluate how the system manages order fulfillment, inventory, and customer relationships without added friction. The platform should be able to handle your unique workflows without overcomplicating them. If you have any unique industry requirements, make sure the provider is ready to support them. Ask if and how they support other customers in your industry. 

B2B SaaS ecommerce platforms like Shopify solve the scalability problem with large global footprints of optimized, maintained infrastructure that is ready to scale as businesses grow. Businesses can take advantage of flexible integration options and customizable features to adapt to specific needs, without adding complexity to their ecommerce tech stack. 

Security and compliance requirements

Investigate your platform to ensure it lives up to its security and compliance claims. Reputable vendors are transparent about their security practices and provide up-to-date certifications. 

Some requirements, like Level 1 PCI DSS for handling credit card information, are non-negotiable. Shopify simplifies this by maintaining rigorous standards across its platform. 

Confirm your provider supports:

• User access controls: Support for single sign-on (SSO), multi-factor authentication (MFA), and role-based access to ensure your team members only see what they need to.
• Data encryption: All data must be encrypted both in transit and at rest.
• Vulnerability management: Regular third-party security testing with published results.
• Availability and uptime: Look for a public status page with incident history and a clear service level agreement (SLA) that guarantees uptime.

Evaluating costs and timelines is only part of the process—the systems you connect to your platform ultimately determine how scalable and future-proof your commerce operations can be.

SaaS B2B platform pricing models

Pricing structures are a key component of total cost of ownership. The right model can help you align platform expenses with your business’s growth pattern and sales volume. Most SaaS providers use one of three pricing models. 

1. Transaction-based pricing: Pay for what you use

With this model, your costs are directly tied to your sales activity. The platform charges a small fee for each order or payment it processes.

Consider the following:

• Some platforms charge a fee for each order processed rather than taking a percentage of the total sale amount.
• Other platforms may charge an additional fee if you use an external payment provider instead of their built-in solution. 

Best for: Businesses with predictable sales volume or companies that want costs to scale directly with their activity. If your profit margins are tight, a model with no platform transaction fees is often a better choice.

2. Revenue-based pricing: Sharing a slice of your sales

In this model, the platform's fee is a percentage of your gross merchandise volume (GMV). Essentially, the platform's success is tied to yours—they make more money as you grow.

Best for: Fast-growing brands that prefer lower up-front costs. It aligns the platform's incentives with your own revenue goals, though you’ll want to budget for higher fees during peak sales seasons or periods of rapid growth.

3. User-based pricing: Paying per team member

This per-seat model is common across all B2B software. Your cost is determined by the number of administrators on your team who need access to the platform's back end.

This can become expensive if you have a large operations, sales, or marketing team. However, some platforms offer a significant advantage here. For example, the Shopify Plus plan includes unlimited admin users, so you can grow your team without increasing your platform costs.

Best for: Companies where the platform's main value is concentrated among a smaller group of internal team members. It's less ideal for large or rapidly growing teams unless the provider offers unlimited seats.

Each pricing model offers trade-offs between flexibility and predictability. Understanding how your business scales helps determine which model will deliver the best long-term value—and sets the stage for exploring how integrations support that growth.

Integration architecture for B2B platforms

Once cost and features are understood, integration becomes the next deciding factor—it’s what enables unified commerce across all your systems.

ERP integration strategies

Your ERP system is the nucleus of business operations. When integrating with your B2B ecommerce platform, there needs to be a two-way data sync between the two. 

Key information, such as company details, product catalogs, price lists, inventory levels, and orders, must flow in both directions. Shopify provides unified commerce capabilities to support this. This ensures accuracy across every transaction and reduces the manual work required to manage data between systems.

iPaaS solutions and middleware

When you need to connect multiple applications— like your ERP, PIM, warehouse management system, third-party logistics (3PL)—point-to-point scripts can quickly become hard to maintain. 

Companies use an integration platform as a service (iPaas) to handle the integrations and manage data-mapping, error retries, and monitoring. Popular solutions in ecommerce are Celigo, Boomi, and MuleSoft. 

Using iPaaS helps centralize integrations and minimize downtime or data loss as your system scales.

API management and webhooks

APIs and webhooks help your systems talk to each other. APIs let you build integrations that work within the platform's rules—such as rate limits or a calculated query cost. For example, Shopify has a Bulk Operations API that can handle volumes of data at once (like a massive product catalog) in a single API call. 

Webhooks push real-time data from the platform. A sudden burst of orders can create a flood of webhook notifications. Your system should utilize a durable queue to buffer these events, preventing data loss in the event of temporary server unavailability.

Webhooks can sometimes be sent multiple times. Your systems must be designed to be idempotent, meaning they can safely process duplicate notifications without creating errors.

Proper API management keeps data synchronized in real time, improving efficiency and customer experience across all channels.

Modern integration strategies future-proof your operations and make SaaS B2B platforms a long-term foundation for growth. Together, the right integrations, pricing model, and platform features create a foundation that supports both short-term agility and long-term growth.

Start your SaaS B2B transformation

Over the past decade, ecommerce technology has come a long way. As buyer expectations evolve and markets remain competitive, B2B businesses have a lot to gain from everything a modern SaaS B2B ecommerce platform has to offer. 

SaaS platforms bring agility, scalability, and reliability to operations—helping brands deliver the seamless digital experiences today’s buyers expect while managing B2B and DTC from one unified system.

With a platform like Shopify, even the largest, most complex B2B business can modernize operations with centralized data, workflow automation, and simplified storefront creation and feature development. With Shopify, you can deliver a more streamlined buying experience and enable robust self-service for more of your customers—and give today’s B2B buyers exactly what they want.

Whether you’re replatforming or scaling globally, a SaaS approach helps align your technology with how buyers actually want to shop. Don't let outdated B2B systems become a barrier to your future success. Find out how partnering with Shopify can help you streamline, automate, and transform your B2B business operations while reducing your security risks and saving on costs.

To get a first-hand look at the Shopify B2B experience, sign up for access to our demo store.