The short version
- Publishing a list price in B2B sets the price for everyone. Your resellers, your key accounts and your competitors read it too, and every negotiated discount turns into an exception you have to justify.
- The opposite, hiding everything behind a “contact us”, is expensive as well: a professional buyer qualifies suppliers online before speaking to anyone, and a silent website drops off the shortlist.
- Three architectures cover nearly every case: the online quote, the approved account with pricing by profile, and the public catalogue with prices hidden. They work together.
- The quote is the cheapest way in: it captures demand without publishing anything, and it teaches you what your buyers actually ask for before you invest in the rest.
The question almost always reaches us in the same shape: “we would like to sell online to trade customers, but we cannot show our prices”. Then come the reasons, all of them fair: rates negotiated customer by customer, a reseller network you must not undercut, volumes that change everything, competitors who would love a look.
The conclusion drawn from it is almost always wrong: “so e-commerce is not for us”. B2B e-commerce is not about displaying prices, it is about letting a buyer get as far as possible on their own. Price is one step in that journey, and it can be conditional.
What a trade buyer actually does on your site
Before any contact, they check three things: that you stock the product, that you are a serious outfit, and that dealing with you will not be painful. A complete, well documented catalogue answers the first two. The third comes down to friction: can they get a price, a lead time and a stock level without three rounds of emails?
That is where the generic “contact us for a quote” fails: it turns every question into a conversation, and the buyer in a hurry picks the supplier who asked the least of them. The paradox of B2B online is that the buyer wants a B2C journey on B2B terms.
The three architectures
| Architecture | How it works | What it protects | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Online quote | Public catalogue with no prices, the basket becomes a quote request, the priced answer comes back by email with online payment | Everything: nothing is published, every price stays a decision | A human answers every request, and your response time becomes your shop window |
| Approved account, pricing by profile | Prices only appear once the buyer logs in, and each customer group sees its own price list: reseller, key account, occasional buyer | The coherence of the network: everyone sees their own price, nobody sees anyone else’s | It needs a real pricing policy in writing, and account approval creates a queue somebody has to keep clear |
| Public catalogue, price on request per item | Everything is visible except the price, replaced by a request button on the product itself | Search visibility: the pages exist, rank and get compared | Every click is an inbound enquiry to handle, and the volume can overwhelm you |
The mistake that costs the most Opening B2B online sales with a single public price “to keep it simple”, telling yourself you will refine it later. The next morning your best reseller has that price in front of them, and is comparing it with their own terms. That conversation does not get refined later: it leaves marks on a distribution network that took years to build. A public price is published once and withdrawn badly.
Start with the quote, and here is why
If you are starting from nothing, begin with the online quote. Three reasons, in order.
It publishes nothing. Your pricing policy can stay exactly what it is: negotiated, differentiated, confidential. The site captures the demand, the pricing decision stays human.
It teaches you your own market. Every request tells you what buyers are looking for, in what quantity, with what urgency. After three months of quotes, you know which items deserve an automatic price list and which will stay bespoke. That data is what makes the next step, accounts with pricing by profile, genuinely configurable instead of guessed at.
It can be measured. Response rate, response time, quote-to-order conversion: three numbers that tell you whether the channel works, and that are sorely missing from the inboxes where these requests currently end up.
A ten minute self-diagnosis: count the price enquiries that came in by email or phone last month, and the average time to first reply. Those enquiries are your current B2B channel. If there are more than a handful a week and the reply takes over a day, online quoting will pay for itself.
What breaks it, all of it predictable
- Response time. An online quote answers within hours or it serves no purpose. Decide who answers, and within what promised time, before you install anything.
- VAT and the paperwork. A trade journey shows prices excluding VAT, checks the EU VAT number, and produces clean documents. It is the same data hygiene that French electronic invoicing demands: since 1 September 2026 every company must be able to receive an electronic invoice, and small and micro businesses will have to issue them by 1 September 2027 at the latest. Clean company and VAT numbers in the customer record, from the very first order.
- Stock, visible or not. Showing availability without showing the price is often the right compromise: it is the information the buyer wants most, and it weakens no negotiation.
- Ranking pages that carry no price. A page without a price ranks perfectly well if it carries everything else: specifications, technical documents, compatibility. It is even an advantage, because it pulls in the buyer during qualification, before the price comparison starts.
The tooling
On WooCommerce, we deploy the extension published by Datafirefly Limited, our agency’s sister company: WooCommerce Quotes gives you a drag and drop quote editor, PDF generation, email delivery, a secure page where the customer accepts, payment through Stripe Checkout and automatic conversion into a WooCommerce order. One-off purchase · 12 months of updates. On PrestaShop the platform is enough for the approved account architecture: a group’s “Show prices” setting hides prices from visitors who are not logged in, the price display method can be set to tax excluded per group, and catalogue price rules can be conditioned on the customer group.
Method beats tooling, and here the reminder is almost comic: no module writes your pricing policy for you. Who is entitled to which price list, who approves an account, who answers quotes and how fast: all of that gets written before installation, on one page, and that page is the real deliverable.
The bigger point
B2B online suffers from a false choice: show everything like a consumer site, or show nothing like a brochure site. Between the two sits the right question, and it is not a technical one: what is each type of visitor entitled to see? That is a commercial policy question, and the site merely carries it out.
The same reasoning shapes our e-commerce and marketplaces expertise: the channels that work are the ones where the rules were written before the tool was chosen. Selling to trade customers without damaging your network means deciding first, and only then configuring.
Sources
The verifiable claims in this article link to their primary source, consulted on 10 August 2026. We do not cite a source we have not read.
- PrestaShop 8 documentation, Groups. View
- PrestaShop 8 documentation, Catalog Price Rules. View
- impots.gouv.fr, À partir de quand suis-je concerné par la réforme de la facturation électronique ? View
- Datafirefly Limited, WooCommerce Quotes, product page. View
FAQ
Doesn’t hiding prices drive buyers away?
A missing price with nothing offered instead drives them away. A price replaced by a two-click request with a fast answer keeps them: professional buyers are used to price on request, what they will not tolerate is effort and waiting. The subject is the journey, not the hiding.
How do I stop my resellers seeing my key account prices?
With the approved account architecture: each customer group only sees its own price list once logged in. No price exists publicly, so no comparison is possible. That is exactly the problem this architecture was designed to solve.
Won’t online quoting bury us in requests that go nowhere?
There will be some, and that is information: they tell you what the market wants and at what implied price. A minimum quantity field and a company name field filter out most of the merely curious, and the conversion rate can be measured, which your current inbox does not allow.
Do we need a separate site for B2B?
Rarely at the start. A trade area on the existing site is enough as long as the catalogue is largely shared. A separate site becomes justified when catalogues, journeys and brands genuinely diverge, and that is a decision to take with quote data in hand, not before.
Can Dotsland help?
Yes. Writing the price visibility policy, choosing the architecture, setting up quoting or approved accounts, and measuring the channel. It is one strand of our e-commerce and marketplaces expertise. Let’s talk, or start by counting last month’s price enquiries and how long they took to answer.