How do Shared Catalogs work for dealer tier pricing?

Shared Catalogs in Adobe Commerce B2B let you create separate, gated product catalogs for different dealer tiers. Each catalog contains specific products and categories with tier-specific pricing. You assign companies (dealers) to the appropriate shared catalog, so platinum dealers see different products and prices than authorized resellers — all managed from the Adobe Commerce admin.

Can dealers manage their own users and permissions in Adobe Commerce?

Yes. Company Accounts in Adobe Commerce B2B include a self-service administration layer. Each company designates a company administrator who can create and manage user accounts, assign roles and permissions, set up team structures, and configure approval rules for purchase orders — all without requiring merchant admin intervention.

What is the Negotiable Quote workflow in Adobe Commerce B2B?

The Negotiable Quote workflow allows dealers to request custom pricing on a cart of products instead of placing an order at catalog price. The merchant's sales team reviews the request, adjusts pricing line by line, and negotiates back and forth within the platform. Once both parties agree, the quote converts directly to an order with a single click.

Do Purchase Order workflows support multi-level approval chains?

Yes. Adobe Commerce B2B Purchase Order workflows support multi-level approval chains based on configurable rules. Approvals can be triggered by order total, number of items, or specific SKUs. Dealer companies define their own approval hierarchy, ensuring that high-value or sensitive orders get appropriate sign-off before being placed.

Building a B2B Dealer Portal on Adobe Commerce: Account Management, Tiered Pricing, and Self-Service Ordering

Q: What is a B2B dealer portal in Adobe Commerce?

A B2B dealer portal in Adobe Commerce is a gated, self-service ecommerce experience for dealers and distributors. It uses native B2B modules — Company Accounts, Shared Catalogs, Negotiable Quotes, Purchase Orders, and Requisition Lists — to give each dealer organization its own account structure, pricing, ordering workflows, and procurement controls, all within a single Adobe Commerce instance.

April 15, 2026 By Joshua Warren

Learn how to build a complete B2B dealer portal on Adobe Commerce using native features — Company Accounts, Shared Catalogs, Negotiable Quotes, Purchase Orders, and Requisition Lists — without third-party add-ons.

Most manufacturers and distributors share a common frustration: their dealer network deserves a self-service portal that actually works, but every solution feels like bolting a B2C storefront onto a B2B relationship. Tiered pricing breaks. Account hierarchies don’t map to real-world dealer structures. And procurement workflows — purchase orders, approval chains, custom quotes — are either missing or cobbled together from third-party extensions.

Adobe Commerce B2B was built to solve exactly this problem. Its native modules — Company Accounts, Shared Catalogs, Negotiable Quotes, Purchase Orders, and Requisition Lists — provide a complete dealer portal framework out of the box. No Shopify app ecosystem hunting. No duct-taping BigCommerce workarounds. Just purpose-built B2B commerce infrastructure on a platform that scales with your dealer network.

This article walks through how these features work together to create a dealer portal that handles multi-tier account management, segment-specific pricing, custom quoting, and controlled procurement — all within Adobe Commerce.

Why Adobe Commerce B2B for Dealer Portals

Dealer portals aren’t just B2C stores with wholesale pricing toggled on. They require:

Account hierarchies that mirror real dealer organizations (national distributors, regional dealers, independent resellers)
Segmented pricing where different dealer tiers see different products and price lists
Custom quoting for large or complex orders that don’t fit a catalog price
Procurement controls so dealer employees follow approval workflows, not rogue purchasing
Repeat ordering because dealers order the same SKUs month after month

Adobe Commerce B2B addresses every one of these natively. The B2B extension (now at v1.5.3 as of March 2026) has been refined over years of enterprise B2B deployments, with recent improvements to shared catalog performance, negotiable quote checkout reliability, and requisition list functionality.

For a deeper look at the account hierarchy and shared catalog architecture, see our Adobe Commerce B2B Account Hierarchy and Shared Catalog Playbook.

Building Block 1: Company Accounts and Hierarchies

The foundation of any dealer portal is the Company Account module. Each dealer in your network gets a company account that acts as a container for:

Company administrators who manage their own users, roles, and permissions
Company users (buyer accounts) who place orders within the company’s credit limits and approval rules
Company structure (teams, divisions) that maps to the dealer’s actual organizational chart
Roles and permissions so dealer admins control who can view pricing, create quotes, approve orders, or manage the account

Company Hierarchies for Multi-Tier Dealer Networks

For manufacturers with complex dealer networks — national distributors who sub-distribute to regional dealers, who sell through independent resellers — Company Hierarchies let you nest company accounts in parent-child relationships.

This means:

A national distributor’s account can be linked to its regional sub-dealers
Pricing and catalog rules cascade down the hierarchy or stay isolated at each tier
Reporting rolls up from individual dealers to the distributor level
Credit limits can be managed at the parent company level with allocation to children

The result is a dealer portal structure that matches how your business actually operates, not how the platform forces you to organize it.

Building Block 2: Shared Catalogs for Tiered Dealer Pricing

Not every dealer should see every product. And not every dealer should see the same price. Shared Catalogs solve both problems.

A shared catalog is a gated, customizable product catalog assigned to specific companies or company groups. Here’s how it works in a dealer portal context:

Create shared catalogs by dealer tier. For example: “Platinum Dealer Catalog,” “Gold Dealer Catalog,” “Authorized Reseller Catalog.”
Assign products and categories to each catalog. Platinum dealers might see your full SKU library; authorized resellers see only a curated subset.
Set tier-specific pricing within each catalog. The same widget costs less for a platinum dealer than for an authorized reseller.
Assign companies to the appropriate shared catalog based on their dealer agreement.

Recent B2B v1.5.3 Improvements

The March 2026 B2B release brought significant performance improvements to shared catalog category unassignment — previously a slow operation via REST API — and fixed issues with bulk product unassignment for catalogs with long SKUs. For dealer portals managing thousands of SKUs across multiple tiers, these fixes make daily catalog management dramatically smoother.

Restricted admin users can now also assign companies to shared catalogs without encountering exceptions, which matters when you have a dealer operations team managing catalog assignments without full admin access.

Building Block 3: Negotiable Quotes for Custom Dealer Pricing

Catalog pricing covers standard orders. But B2B deals often need custom pricing — volume discounts, seasonal promotions, project-specific bids, or negotiated terms that don’t fit a price list.

Negotiable Quotes give dealers the ability to request custom pricing on a cart-level basis, and give your sales team the tools to respond:

Dealer initiates a quote by adding items to cart and submitting a quote request instead of checking out
Your sales team reviews the request, adjusts pricing line by line, adds shipping costs, applies discounts, or suggests alternatives
Back-and-forth negotiation happens within the platform — no emails, no spreadsheets, no lost context
Quote-to-order conversion — once both parties agree, the quote converts to an order with a single click

What’s New in v1.5.3

The latest B2B release fixed critical checkout issues for negotiable quotes: Payflow Pro payment processing now completes successfully during quote checkout, PayPal Express no longer doubles shipping costs, and quote rename operations show consistent success messages. These fixes eliminate friction points that previously disrupted the quote-to-order workflow at the moment of conversion — exactly when you can least afford errors.

For a complete walkthrough of the negotiable quote workflow, see our guide on the Adobe Commerce B2B Quote-to-Order Workflow.

Building Block 4: Purchase Order Workflows for Procurement Control

Dealers aren’t individuals clicking “buy now.” They’re organizations with procurement policies, approval chains, and budget controls. Purchase Order (PO) workflows in Adobe Commerce B2B reflect this reality.

When PO workflows are enabled:

Dealer employees create purchase orders instead of placing orders directly
Approval rules route POs through the right people based on order total, number of items, or SKU-level criteria
Multi-level approvals ensure that a $50,000 order from a regional dealer gets appropriate sign-off
PO tracking gives dealer admins visibility into pending, approved, and rejected orders
Once approved, the PO converts to an order and follows standard fulfillment

This isn’t just a nice feature — it’s how B2B buying actually works. Dealers need internal controls, and Adobe Commerce B2B gives them those controls within the portal rather than forcing them into separate procurement software.

The v1.5.3 release also fixed PO total calculations when Cross Border Trade is enabled, ensuring accurate order totals for international dealer networks.

Building Block 5: Requisition Lists for Repeat Ordering

Dealers order the same products repeatedly. A plumbing distributor orders the same fittings, valves, and fixtures every month. An industrial equipment dealer reorders consumables on a predictable cycle. Requisition Lists make this painless.

Requisition lists are saved product lists that dealers can:

Create and name based on their ordering patterns (“Monthly Restock,” “Seasonal Inventory,” “Project Alpha Materials”)
Add items to cart in one click instead of searching and adding individually
Share across company users so any authorized buyer in the dealer organization can use the same list
Maintain with current pricing — lists reflect the dealer’s shared catalog pricing, not stale numbers

Recent v1.5.3 fixes resolved issues with grouped products in requisition lists when category permissions are active, restored the “Add to Requisition List” button on category pages, and fixed the requisition list print function. For dealer portals, these fixes mean requisition lists work reliably across all product types and shopping contexts.

For more on requisition lists and procurement workflows, see our Adobe Commerce B2B Purchase Order and Requisition List Procurement Guide.

Implementation Considerations

Building a dealer portal on Adobe Commerce B2B isn’t just about enabling modules. Here are the implementation decisions that determine whether the portal works for your dealers or frustrates them.

Frontend Experience with Hyvä

The default Luma frontend wasn’t designed for B2B workflows. Hyvä provides a modern, fast alternative that dramatically improves Core Web Vitals and the dealer experience. Hyvä’s approach — lightweight JavaScript, Tailwind CSS, Alpine.js — delivers the speed that B2B buyers expect, especially on requisition lists and catalog pages with hundreds of SKUs.

At Creatuity, we implement dealer portals with Hyvä as the default frontend because dealer adoption depends on portal speed. A slow portal is a portal dealers avoid, which means your phone rings instead of your orders flowing.

ERP Integration

Dealer portals don’t exist in isolation. They need to sync with your ERP for:

Real-time inventory visibility so dealers see accurate stock levels before ordering
Customer-specific pricing that may live in SAP, Oracle, or Microsoft Dynamics, not just in Adobe Commerce shared catalogs
Order and shipment status flowing back from ERP to the dealer portal
Credit limit management tied to the dealer’s actual account standing

For a deeper dive on ERP integration architecture, see our guide on Adobe Commerce ERP Integration and Automation.

Performance at Scale

Dealer portals with thousands of SKUs, multiple shared catalogs, and hundreds of concurrent dealer sessions need performance tuning that goes beyond cache warming. We cover this in our Adobe Commerce B2B Operational Health Scorecard, which provides a framework for monitoring the specific performance metrics that matter in B2B contexts.

Putting It All Together

A dealer portal built on Adobe Commerce B2B combines these five modules into a cohesive experience:

Company Accounts create the organizational structure — each dealer is a company with its own users, roles, and permissions
Company Hierarchies link related dealers (distributors, sub-dealers, resellers) into a structure that matches your channel
Shared Catalogs control which products each dealer tier sees and at what price
Negotiable Quotes handle custom pricing for orders that don’t fit the catalog
Purchase Orders give dealers the procurement controls their organizations require
Requisition Lists make repeat ordering effortless

This isn’t a theoretical architecture. It’s what Adobe Commerce B2B does natively, today, with the reliability improvements in v1.5.3 making each module more dependable for production dealer portals.

Why Creatuity for Adobe Commerce B2B Dealer Portals

Creatuity is an Adobe Commerce specialist agency. We don’t dabble in Shopify or moonlight on BigCommerce. Every engagement is Adobe Commerce — and a significant portion of our work is B2B.

Our dealer portal implementations combine deep B2B module expertise with practical experience in ERP integration, Hyvä frontend development, and performance optimization at scale. We use AI-accelerated delivery to move faster without sacrificing quality, and we’ve built enough dealer portals to know where the edge cases hide.

If you’re planning a dealer portal on Adobe Commerce — or rescuing one that isn’t working — let’s talk.