Challenge
An established industrial distributor with 6,000+ B2B customers ran most orders through phone and fax. They had a website, but it was a brochure — the actual order desk was a team of CSRs re-keying orders into NetSuite. Pricing was account-specific and lived in NetSuite, so the website couldn't show real prices. Net effect: long order cycles, frequent pricing errors, and a customer service team buried in repetitive work.
Approach
Discovery confirmed what we suspected: the path was a deeply integrated commerce platform, not a replacement of NetSuite. The website needed to pull real-time pricing and inventory from NetSuite per account, push orders back as proper sales orders, handle approved-buyer logic, and support the quote-to-order workflow most large accounts actually used. Build was phased: catalog and pricing first, ordering second, quoting and approvals third.
What we built
A custom B2B commerce platform on Next.js with deep NetSuite integration — account-specific pricing fetched per request, inventory and lead-time data cached intelligently, orders pushed back as native NetSuite sales orders with the right account, ship-to, and payment terms. A customer portal for order history, reorder, scheduled deliveries, and quote management. Akeneo PIM as the product source of truth, with rich content surfacing in the storefront.
Results
Within 9 months of launch, 80%+ of orders moved to self-serve. Order-to-fulfillment time dropped 46%. Pricing errors fell 94% (because pricing lived in one place and was fetched live). Customer service load dropped 38% — the team moved from order entry to complex account management and customer success. The platform now handles ~$40M in annual orders.