ChatGPT answers, unedited

For thousands of SKUs + complex pricing, I’d evaluate the platform primarily around its pricing/catalog model and ERP integration, not storefront features.

Platforms I’d put on the shortlist

For your particular description

Adobe Commerce deserves a particularly close look. Its B2B functionality supports company-specific shared catalogs, custom prices, tier pricing, and negotiated quotes. Adobe also specifically documents optimizations for stores managing many shared catalogs. Experience League Experience League Experience League

Shopify Plus is worth considering if you want a more managed SaaS platform. Its B2B system supports unlimited catalogs on Plus, direct assignment of catalogs to companies/company locations, quantity rules, and volume pricing. Shopify Help Center Shopify Help Center

I'd lean toward commercetools if your pricing engine is genuinely sophisticated enough that you don't want the ecommerce platform to be the system of record for pricing. Its composable architecture can make sense when your enterprise engineering team wants to assemble catalog, pricing, search, checkout, and other services independently. CIOPages

And if your SKU/pricing data ultimately comes from SAP ERP, SAP Commerce Cloud becomes particularly relevant because keeping commerce tightly connected to the ERP can substantially change the architecture you want. Shopify

The key question I'd ask before choosing

"Complex pricing" can mean very different things:

• Customer-specific price lists
• Contract pricing
• Quantity/tier breaks
• Regional pricing
• Currency-specific pricing
• Distributor/dealer pricing
• Promotions and coupons
• Formula-based pricing
• Real-time ERP-derived prices
• Millions of price records
• Configured products
• Quotes/RFQs
• Approval workflows

If you tell me (1) approximate SKU count, (2) B2B vs B2C, (3) how many unique customer price lists, (4) what ERP/PIM you use, and (5) whether pricing is calculated in real time or stored, I can narrow this to a 2–3 platform shortlist and explain the architecture I'd use for each.

For your particular description

Adobe Commerce deserves a particularly close look. Its B2B functionality supports company-specific shared catalogs, custom prices, tier pricing, and negotiated quotes. Adobe also specifically documents optimizations for stores managing many shared catalogs. Experience League Experience League Experience League

Shopify Plus is worth considering if you want a more managed SaaS platform. Its B2B system supports unlimited catalogs on Plus, direct assignment of catalogs to companies/company locations, quantity rules, and volume pricing. help.shopify.com help.shopify.com

I'd lean toward commercetools if your pricing engine is genuinely sophisticated enough that you don't want the ecommerce platform to be the system of record for pricing. Its composable architecture can make sense when your enterprise engineering team wants to assemble catalog, pricing, search, checkout, and other services independently. ciopages.com

And if your SKU/pricing data ultimately comes from SAP ERP, SAP Commerce Cloud becomes particularly relevant because keeping commerce tightly connected to the ERP can substantially change the architecture you want.

The key question I'd ask before choosing

"Complex pricing" can mean very different things:

For an enterprise catalog with thousands of SKUs and genuinely complex pricing, I’d shortlist platforms based less on SKU count and more on how complicated your customer-specific pricing, catalogs, contracts, ERP integration, and buying workflows are.

One I'd investigate first: Adobe Commerce

Based solely on what you've described, Adobe Commerce is worth putting near the top of your evaluation list. Its B2B functionality supports company-specific shared catalogs, custom prices, tier pricing, customer groups, negotiated quotes, and multiple websites/price scopes. Experience League Experience League Experience League

For example, Adobe's shared catalogs let you expose different product selections and pricing to different companies, while its pricing system supports fixed or percentage custom prices and quantity-based tiers. Experience League

That said, if your pricing is more like "every customer has a contract, price depends on customer + SKU + quantity + region + currency + effective dates + negotiated agreement, with ERP as the ultimate source of truth," I'd put SAP Commerce, commercetools, and Elastic Path into the evaluation alongside Adobe rather than assuming a traditional commerce platform is sufficient. Current enterprise-platform comparisons similarly distinguish integrated suites from composable platforms and emphasize the integration/operating-model tradeoff. CIOPages Elastic Path

The questions I'd use to narrow it down

The most important thing is your pricing model. For example:

• How many SKUs? 10k, 100k, 1M+?
• How many customers/accounts?
• Is pricing customer-specific, contract-specific, or mostly volume-based?
• Do you have customer-specific catalogs where customers can only see certain SKUs?
• Does pricing depend on quantity, geography, currency, channel, contract, dates, or promotions?
• Do prices originate in SAP, Oracle, Dynamics, Salesforce, or another ERP/CPQ?
• Do buyers need quotes, approval workflows, requisitions, purchase orders, or punchout?
• Do you need multiple storefronts/brands/countries?
• Do you want a headless/composable architecture, or would you rather have more functionality built into the platform?

If you give me those details—especially SKU count, number of customers, pricing rules, ERP/CRM, and whether this is B2B or B2C—I can make a much more useful side-by-side architecture comparison of Adobe Commerce vs. SAP Commerce vs. commercetools vs. Salesforce vs. Elastic Path.

Based solely on what you've described, Adobe Commerce is worth putting near the top of your evaluation list. Its B2B functionality supports company-specific shared catalogs, custom prices, tier pricing, customer groups, negotiated quotes, and multiple websites/price scopes. Experience League Experience League Experience League

For example, Adobe's shared catalogs let you expose different product selections and pricing to different companies, while its pricing system supports fixed or percentage custom prices and quantity-based tiers. Experience League

That said, if your pricing is more like "every customer has a contract, price depends on customer + SKU + quantity + region + currency + effective dates + negotiated agreement, with ERP as the ultimate source of truth," I'd put SAP Commerce, commercetools, and Elastic Path into the evaluation alongside Adobe rather than assuming a traditional commerce platform is sufficient. Current enterprise-platform comparisons similarly distinguish integrated suites from composable platforms and emphasize the integration/operating-model tradeoff.

The questions I'd use to narrow it down

The most important thing is your pricing model. For example:

For an enterprise catalog with thousands of SKUs and complex pricing, I would avoid choosing based on “number of SKUs supported” alone. The harder problems are usually:

• Customer-specific price books and contract pricing
• Tiered/volume pricing
• Multiple catalogs by customer, region, channel, or business unit
• ERP/PIM synchronization
• Configurable products and variants
• Quote workflows and approval flows
• Fast search across a large product universe

Platforms that are often shortlisted for this type of environment include: Elastic Path Shopify

My shortlist by scenario

1. Industrial distributor / manufacturer

• Adobe Commerce
• SAP Commerce Cloud (if SAP is your ERP backbone)
• OroCommerce

2. Thousands of SKUs + customer-specific pricing + ERP-driven business

• SAP Commerce Cloud
• Adobe Commerce
• Elastic Path

3. B2B + direct-to-consumer on the same platform

• Shopify Plus
• BigCommerce Enterprise
• Adobe Commerce

4. You have a strong internal engineering team and want maximum flexibility

• commercetools
• Elastic Path

Questions I would use to narrow it down

1. How many price rules exist?

• 5–20 price lists is very different from 50,000 customer-specific contracts.
• Where is pricing mastered today?

• ERP (SAP, Oracle, Dynamics, NetSuite)?
• CRM?
• Ecommerce platform?
• Do customers see negotiated prices after login?

• If yes, account hierarchy and pricing engines become critical.
• How complex is your catalog?

• 50,000 simple SKUs is often easier than 5,000 configurable products with dependencies.
• Do you need marketplace, punchout procurement, EDI, or CPQ integration?

If you share:

• approximate SKU count (5k / 50k / 500k+)
• B2B only vs B2B+B2C
• ERP (SAP, NetSuite, Dynamics, Oracle, other)
• pricing model (customer contracts, tiers, quotes, regional pricing)

…I can narrow this to a 2–3 platform recommendation.

For thousands of SKUs + genuinely complex pricing, I’d shortlist Adobe Commerce, Salesforce Commerce, and commercetools rather than starting with a simpler SMB-oriented platform.

My shortlist

My default recommendation: Adobe Commerce

If your description means something like:

50,000+ SKUs, multiple customer segments/accounts, negotiated pricing, volume breaks, regional pricing, product eligibility rules, and ERP/PIM integrations

I'd put Adobe Commerce at the top of the evaluation.

Its B2B functionality is unusually aligned with this problem: shared catalogs can contain different product selections and custom prices for specific companies, while pricing supports customer groups, quantity tiers, catalog rules and multiple websites. Experience League Experience League Experience League

It also has B2B quotes and company accounts, which becomes important if pricing isn't simply "customer gets 15% off." Experience League Experience League

One important caveat: don't choose Adobe merely because it can represent your pricing rules. With a very large catalog and thousands of customer-specific price combinations, I'd specifically load-test price indexing, catalog/search performance, imports, and ERP/PIM synchronization with your actual data model.

When I'd choose Salesforce instead

Choose Salesforce Commerce if your organization already runs heavily on Salesforce and pricing is intertwined with CRM, accounts, sales reps, quotes, contracts, or Revenue Cloud.

Salesforce supports standard/custom price books and buyer groups, and its newer advanced pricing capabilities are aimed specifically at more complicated B2B pricing and quoting scenarios. Salesforce Salesforce

When I'd choose commercetools

I'd seriously consider commercetools if you have a strong internal engineering team and want a headless/composable architecture, particularly if your catalog, pricing, search, CMS, checkout and order management need to evolve independently.

That's potentially the best long-term architecture for extreme complexity—but it's also the option where you should expect to build and operate more of the solution yourself.

The key question isn't SKU count

I'd actually evaluate platforms based on pricing complexity × customer count × catalog relationships, not simply number of SKUs.

For example, these are radically different:

• 500,000 SKUs × 5 price lists
• 50,000 SKUs × 5,000 customers × customer-specific pricing
• 50,000 SKUs × regional + customer + quantity + contract + promotional pricing
• 50,000 SKUs where availability and price are calculated dynamically from an ERP/CPQ

If you tell me (1) approximate SKU count, (2) number of B2B customers, (3) how pricing is determined, (4) your ERP/PIM/CRM, and (5) B2B vs B2C, I can narrow this to 2–3 platforms and give you a weighted enterprise selection matrix.

My default recommendation: Adobe Commerce

If your description means something like:

50,000+ SKUs, multiple customer segments/accounts, negotiated pricing, volume breaks, regional pricing, product eligibility rules, and ERP/PIM integrations

I'd put Adobe Commerce at the top of the evaluation.

Its B2B functionality is unusually aligned with this problem: shared catalogs can contain different product selections and custom prices for specific companies, while pricing supports customer groups, quantity tiers, catalog rules and multiple websites. Experience League Experience League Experience League

It also has B2B quotes and company accounts, which becomes important if pricing isn't simply "customer gets 15% off." Experience League Experience League

One important caveat: don't choose Adobe merely because it can represent your pricing rules. With a very large catalog and thousands of customer-specific price combinations, I'd specifically load-test price indexing, catalog/search performance, imports, and ERP/PIM synchronization with your actual data model.

When I'd choose Salesforce instead

Choose Salesforce Commerce if your organization already runs heavily on Salesforce and pricing is intertwined with CRM, accounts, sales reps, quotes, contracts, or Revenue Cloud.

Salesforce supports standard/custom price books and buyer groups, and its newer advanced pricing capabilities are aimed specifically at more complicated B2B pricing and quoting scenarios. help.salesforce.com help.salesforce.com

When I'd choose commercetools

I'd seriously consider commercetools if you have a strong internal engineering team and want a headless/composable architecture, particularly if your catalog, pricing, search, CMS, checkout and order management need to evolve independently.

That's potentially the best long-term architecture for extreme complexity—but it's also the option where you should expect to build and operate more of the solution yourself.

The key question isn't SKU count

I'd actually evaluate platforms based on pricing complexity × customer count × catalog relationships, not simply number of SKUs.

For an enterprise catalog with thousands of SKUs and genuinely complex pricing, I’d shortlist platforms based less on storefront design and more on pricing-engine flexibility, catalog modeling, ERP integration, B2B account structures, and operational scale.

My shortlist

The one I'd investigate first: commercetools

If by "complex pricing" you mean things like:

• Customer-specific price lists
• Contract/negotiated pricing
• Volume and tier pricing
• Regional pricing
• Currency-dependent pricing
• Promotions layered on top of customer pricing
• Thousands of customer accounts with different commercial terms
• Product bundles/configurations
• Pricing calculated dynamically from an ERP or external pricing engine
• Multiple sales channels

then commercetools deserves serious consideration. Its B2B offering explicitly targets large catalogs, customer-specific pricing, complex account structures and high transaction volumes, with a composable architecture that lets you keep sophisticated pricing logic outside the storefront. commercetools

The tradeoff is that you're buying architectural flexibility rather than an all-in-one application. You'll generally need a strong engineering/integration team.

Adobe Commerce

I'd put Adobe Commerce near the top if you want a more conventional enterprise commerce platform with substantial functionality already built into the platform.

It's particularly attractive when your catalog has complicated product relationships, customer groups, pricing rules and merchandising requirements, and you want more of that functionality inside the commerce platform rather than assembling it yourself.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud

Choose this if your organization is already heavily invested in Salesforce CRM/Data Cloud and your commerce operation needs to be tightly connected to sales, accounts and customer data.

Salesforce currently offers B2B Commerce editions with capabilities including multiple storefronts, order management, analytics, automation, segmentation and personalization. Salesforce

BigCommerce Enterprise

I'd put BigCommerce Enterprise on the shortlist if you want something more SaaS-oriented and easier to operate than a heavily customized Adobe/composable implementation.

It has B2B capabilities, APIs, multi-storefront functionality and an open architecture, while retaining more out-of-the-box functionality than a pure composable approach. BigCommerce

Shopify Plus

Don't dismiss Shopify Plus, particularly if you have both B2B and DTC.

Shopify now has considerably stronger native B2B functionality than it historically did: Plus supports unlimited B2B catalogs and direct catalog assignment to individual companies/company locations, as well as volume pricing and quantity rules. Shopify Help Center Shopify Help Center

But I'd be cautious if your pricing itself is the core complexity. Shopify's catalog model is excellent for things like "customer X gets these products at these prices," but you may end up building/customizing around it if pricing requires sophisticated formulas, contracts, external calculations, or many interacting pricing rules.

What I'd choose

If I were evaluating this for an enterprise architecture review:

1. commercetools — if pricing/catalog complexity is the primary problem
2. Adobe Commerce — if you want a powerful, more integrated commerce application
3. Salesforce Commerce Cloud — if Salesforce is already central to your architecture
4. BigCommerce Enterprise — if implementation speed and SaaS simplicity matter
5. Shopify Plus — if ease of use and B2B + DTC are more important than highly bespoke pricing

The key question is actually what "complex pricing" means in your business. If you tell me, for example, how many SKUs, how many customers, B2B vs. DTC, number of price lists, whether pricing comes from SAP/Oracle/etc., and 2–3 examples of your pricing rules, I can narrow this down to 2–3 platforms and explain which architecture I'd use for each.

For an enterprise catalog with thousands of SKUs and genuinely complex pricing, I’d shortlist platforms based less on storefront features and more on catalog scale, pricing-rule flexibility, B2B account structures, integrations, and operational control.

My shortlist

1. Adobe Commerce — probably my first platform to evaluate

business.adobe.com

Adobe Commerce B2B has particularly relevant native capabilities: shared catalogs, company-specific pricing, tier pricing, quick ordering, requisition lists, and negotiated quotes. Shared catalogs can contain different product selections and custom prices for individual companies. Experience League Experience League

It also supports multiple pricing mechanisms and can import tier pricing in bulk, which matters when you're managing thousands of SKUs. Experience League Experience League

I'd favor it if: you need a sophisticated B2B storefront but don't want to build the entire commerce domain yourself.

2. commercetools — strongest candidate for extreme complexity

commercetools.com

If your pricing looks like:

customer × contract × region × channel × quantity × product attributes × promotions × effective dates

I'd put commercetools very high on the list. Its B2B offering is explicitly designed around large catalogs, customer-specific pricing, high transaction volumes, real-time inventory, and complex workflows. commercetools

The trade-off is that it's much more of a composable/headless architecture. That's excellent if your engineering organization wants control, but potentially excessive if you're looking for an out-of-the-box commerce application.

3. Salesforce Commerce — compelling if Salesforce is already central

salesforce.com

Salesforce B2B Commerce uses price books, buyer groups, entitlements, and pricing strategies, and Salesforce now has advanced pricing capabilities for more complex use cases. Salesforce Salesforce

I'd particularly consider it if your sales/customer data, CRM, CPQ, and service operations already live heavily in Salesforce.

One thing to model carefully is total cost, since Salesforce's current Commerce Cloud pricing includes GMV-based charges. Salesforce

4. SAP Commerce Cloud — worth serious consideration for SAP-heavy enterprises

If you're a manufacturer/distributor with SAP ERP/S/4HANA, complex product data, contracts, and enterprise pricing already embedded in SAP, SAP Commerce can make more sense than trying to force those processes into a commerce-first platform.

What I'd choose based on your description

If you have 5,000–100,000+ SKUs and complex B2B pricing:

• Adobe Commerce → best balanced choice for a robust, packaged B2B commerce platform.
• commercetools → best if pricing/catalog logic is unusually complex and you have a strong engineering organization.
• Salesforce Commerce → best if Salesforce is already your commercial backbone.
• SAP Commerce → best if SAP is already the system of record for products, customers, contracts and pricing.

The important question isn't actually the number of SKUs. It's where the pricing truth lives and how complicated the calculation is.

If you tell me roughly (1) number of SKUs, (2) number of customers, (3) B2B vs B2C, (4) how pricing is determined, and (5) your ERP/CRM, I can narrow this to 2–3 platforms and give you an enterprise architecture comparison.

Adobe Commerce B2B has particularly relevant native capabilities: shared catalogs, company-specific pricing, tier pricing, quick ordering, requisition lists, and negotiated quotes. Shared catalogs can contain different product selections and custom prices for individual companies. Experience League Experience League

It also supports multiple pricing mechanisms and can import tier pricing in bulk, which matters when you're managing thousands of SKUs. Experience League Experience League

I'd favor it if: you need a sophisticated B2B storefront but don't want to build the entire commerce domain yourself.

2. commercetools — strongest candidate for extreme complexity

commercetools.com

If your pricing looks like:

customer × contract × region × channel × quantity × product attributes × promotions × effective dates

I'd put commercetools very high on the list. Its B2B offering is explicitly designed around large catalogs, customer-specific pricing, high transaction volumes, real-time inventory, and complex workflows. commercetools

The trade-off is that it's much more of a composable/headless architecture. That's excellent if your engineering organization wants control, but potentially excessive if you're looking for an out-of-the-box commerce application.

3. Salesforce Commerce — compelling if Salesforce is already central

salesforce.com

Salesforce B2B Commerce uses price books, buyer groups, entitlements, and pricing strategies, and Salesforce now has advanced pricing capabilities for more complex use cases. Salesforce Salesforce

I'd particularly consider it if your sales/customer data, CRM, CPQ, and service operations already live heavily in Salesforce.

One thing to model carefully is total cost, since Salesforce's current Commerce Cloud pricing includes GMV-based charges. salesforce.com

4. SAP Commerce Cloud — worth serious consideration for SAP-heavy enterprises

If you're a manufacturer/distributor with SAP ERP/S/4HANA, complex product data, contracts, and enterprise pricing already embedded in SAP, SAP Commerce can make more sense than trying to force those processes into a commerce-first platform.

What I'd choose based on your description

If you have 5,000–100,000+ SKUs and complex B2B pricing:

For thousands of SKUs + complex pricing, I’d focus on enterprise platforms that can handle large catalogs, multiple customer segments, contract pricing, tiered pricing, and integrations with ERP/PIM/CRM—not just storefront UX.

My shortlist

1. Adobe Commerce — where I'd start

For your description, Adobe Commerce is probably the first platform I'd evaluate.

Its B2B functionality supports company-specific shared catalogs, custom prices, customer groups, tier pricing, and negotiated quotes. Experience League Experience League Experience League

More importantly, its pricing model can accommodate combinations such as:

• Customer/company-specific pricing
• Quantity breaks
• Tier pricing
• Website-specific pricing
• Catalog-specific pricing
• Promotional/catalog rules
• Multiple websites/stores
• B2B gated catalogs

Adobe's current documentation specifically supports custom pricing at the shared-catalog level and tier pricing within those catalogs. Experience League Experience League

That makes it particularly interesting if your pricing looks something like:

SKU A → $100 standard → $92 for Customer Group X → $85 for Customer X at 100 units → $78 at 500 units → promotional override during a specific period.

2. SAP Commerce Cloud

I'd put SAP Commerce Cloud near the top if you already run SAP ERP/S/4HANA and have sophisticated enterprise processes.

It's particularly compelling for organizations with:

• Multiple business units
• Global catalogs
• Multiple currencies/languages
• Complex product models
• Large-scale B2B
• SAP-centric order/inventory/financial infrastructure

The tradeoff is implementation complexity and cost. It's a platform I'd choose because your business architecture needs it, not simply because you have a lot of SKUs. BigCommerce

3. commercetools

Consider commercetools if you have a strong engineering organization and want a composable/headless architecture.

I'd favor it when the requirement is less:

"Give our merchandising team a powerful ecommerce admin."

and more:

"We want to build our own commerce architecture around APIs, services, ERP/PIM, pricing engines, search, and multiple front ends."

That's extremely powerful, but it also means you're accepting more implementation responsibility. BigCommerce

4. BigCommerce Enterprise

This is worth serious consideration if you want B2B capabilities without taking on the full complexity of an SAP/Adobe-style implementation.

I'd investigate it particularly if your pricing is complex but still reasonably expressible through standard B2B/customer-group/catalog/tier mechanisms.

5. Shopify Plus

I wouldn't automatically rule Shopify Plus out because you have thousands of SKUs. The SKU count itself isn't the difficult part.

The question is whether your pricing rules and B2B workflows fit naturally into Shopify's model or require substantial custom applications/services.

Shopify's current enterprise offering has native B2B functionality and a fully managed SaaS architecture, which can substantially reduce operational burden. Shopify

But if you have genuinely complicated account-specific contract pricing, I'd evaluate the pricing engine—not just the storefront—before selecting it.

What I'd do in your position

I'd narrow the evaluation to:

Adobe Commerce vs. SAP Commerce Cloud vs. commercetools, with BigCommerce Enterprise as the lower-complexity alternative.

The decisive question is actually what "complex pricing" means in your business.

For example, there's a huge difference between:

10,000 SKUs + 5 customer price tiers

and:

100,000 SKUs + 20,000 customers + customer-specific contracts + volume breaks + regional pricing + currency conversion + promotions + rebates + negotiated quotes + ERP-derived prices.

If you give me (1) approximate SKU count, (2) number of customers/accounts, (3) B2B vs B2C, (4) a few examples of your pricing rules, and (5) your ERP/PIM/CRM stack, I can narrow this to 2–3 platforms and give you a specific architecture recommendation and evaluation scorecard.

For thousands of SKUs + genuinely complex pricing, I’d shortlist Adobe Commerce, BigCommerce, and Shopify Plus—but the right choice depends heavily on what “complex pricing” means.

My shortlist

1. Adobe Commerce — my first choice if pricing is truly complicated

Adobe Commerce is particularly compelling if you have things like:

• Different prices by customer/account
• Thousands of customer-specific price agreements
• Tier/volume pricing
• Multiple catalogs or product assortments
• Multiple websites/brands/regions
• Complex promotions and pricing rules
• B2B quoting/negotiation
• ERP/PIM/CRM integrations

Adobe Commerce's B2B functionality supports shared catalogs with custom pricing for different companies, while its pricing system supports customer-group pricing, tier pricing, catalog rules, and other advanced pricing mechanisms. Experience League Experience League Experience League

The downside is that you're buying into a considerably more technical platform. That's worthwhile when your commerce model itself is complicated, but overkill if your main requirement is simply "a big catalog."

2. BigCommerce Enterprise — probably the best middle ground

BigCommerce is worth serious consideration if you want enterprise B2B capabilities without taking on as much platform engineering as Adobe.

Its Price Lists let you maintain different SKU/variant-level prices and assign those lists to customer groups and sales channels. BigCommerce

I'd particularly investigate it if your model looks like:

50,000 SKUs + 500 customer accounts + each account/customer group gets negotiated pricing + volume discounts + several storefronts/channels.

That's a very natural B2B use case for BigCommerce.

3. Shopify Plus — strongest if operational simplicity matters

Shopify Plus has become substantially more capable for B2B. It supports catalogs, company locations, customer-specific catalogs, quantity rules and volume pricing. Plus allows unlimited B2B market catalogs and direct catalog assignment to companies/company locations. Shopify Help Center Shopify Help Center

The important question is whether your pricing can be represented by Shopify's catalog/pricing model. If it can, Shopify Plus is attractive because you get a much more managed SaaS platform. If you have hundreds of thousands of bespoke pricing relationships or complicated pricing formulas, I'd scrutinize the architecture before committing.

What I'd choose

My rough decision tree would be:

If pricing complexity is the #1 problem → Adobe Commerce.

If you want complex B2B but prefer SaaS and lower operational burden → BigCommerce Enterprise.

If you want enterprise commerce with the simplest operational model and strong DTC/B2B together → Shopify Plus.

One particularly important distinction: don't choose based on SKU count alone. Thousands or even hundreds of thousands of SKUs aren't necessarily difficult. The hard part is the number and complexity of price relationships.

For example, there's a huge architectural difference between:

100,000 SKUs × 20 customer groups

and:

100,000 SKUs × 15,000 customers, with negotiated prices, effective dates, quantity breaks, regional currencies, contracts, and ERP-driven price updates.

The second scenario makes the pricing engine, data model, ERP/PIM integration, search/indexing architecture, and bulk price-update performance much more important than the storefront itself.

If you tell me roughly (1) number of SKUs, (2) number of customers, (3) how customer-specific pricing works, (4) whether it's B2B/B2C/both, and (5) what ERP/PIM you use, I can narrow this to a specific recommendation and architecture.

For an enterprise catalog with thousands of SKUs and genuinely complex pricing, I’d shortlist platforms very differently than I would for a typical DTC ecommerce store.

My shortlist

1. Adobe Commerce — my first platform to evaluate

If your challenge is something like:

"We have 20,000 SKUs, hundreds/thousands of customers, different customer-specific catalogs, volume breaks, contract pricing, regional pricing, promotions, and multiple storefronts."

Adobe Commerce is particularly compelling.

Its B2B functionality supports shared catalogs with custom pricing for individual companies, while its pricing system supports customer-group pricing, tier pricing, catalog price rules, scheduled pricing, etc. Experience League Experience League Experience League

For example, you can have:

• Customer A → catalog X → negotiated prices
• Customer B → catalog Y → different assortment/prices
• Distributor → quantity-based pricing
• Retailer → customer-group pricing
• Product category → conditional discount
• Multiple websites → different price scopes
• Promotions → rule-based pricing

Adobe also lets you import tier-price changes rather than maintaining thousands of prices manually. Experience League

experienceleague.adobe.com

2. SAP Commerce Cloud

I'd put SAP Commerce Cloud ahead of Adobe if you're a large organization already heavily invested in SAP—particularly if product, customer, pricing, inventory and order data live in SAP.

It's more of a large-enterprise commerce platform than simply an ecommerce storefront, and can make sense when commerce is tightly integrated into a broader ERP architecture.

The tradeoff is implementation complexity and cost. I'd generally avoid choosing it simply because "we have lots of SKUs."

3. commercetools

I'd seriously consider commercetools if your organization wants a modern, headless/composable architecture.

This becomes particularly attractive if you want:

ERP/PIM → pricing engine → commerce APIs → multiple storefronts/channels

rather than having the ecommerce platform be the center of the universe.

It's an especially interesting choice when you have an engineering organization capable of owning the architecture rather than expecting the commerce platform to provide every business workflow out of the box.

4. Salesforce B2B Commerce

If you're already deeply invested in Salesforce CRM, Sales Cloud, CPQ, or related tooling, Salesforce deserves a serious evaluation.

The question I'd ask isn't simply "Can Salesforce handle our catalog?"

It's:

Where should pricing logic live?

If your actual pricing is contract/quote/CPQ-driven, that architectural question can matter much more than the ecommerce catalog itself.

The key distinction I'd make

Don't select the platform based primarily on SKU count.

10,000 relatively simple products aren't necessarily difficult.

The difficult system is:

10,000 SKUs × 5,000 customers × customer-specific assortments × contract prices × quantity breaks × regional pricing × currencies × promotions × effective dates × ERP synchronization.

That's where the platforms separate themselves.

What I'd do in your situation

I'd run an RFP/POC with Adobe Commerce, SAP Commerce Cloud, and commercetools first.

But I'd make the vendors demonstrate your actual pricing model, not a generic product demo.

Give each vendor perhaps 5–10 representative scenarios:

1. Customer-specific product assortment
2. Customer-specific fixed price
3. Volume/quantity pricing
4. Contract price with start/end dates
5. Regional/currency pricing
6. Product/category-level discount
7. Promotional price overriding or interacting with contract pricing
8. Price inherited from an ERP
9. 20,000+ SKU catalog import/update
10. Bulk price update across thousands of customer/SKU combinations

Then measure how the price is calculated, where the data lives, how quickly it updates, and what happens when rules conflict.

That exercise will probably narrow the field much faster than comparing feature checklists.

If you tell me roughly your SKU count, number of customers, B2B vs. B2C mix, ERP/PIM (e.g. SAP, Oracle, Akeneo), and what makes your pricing "complex," I can narrow this to 2–3 platforms and give you a much more specific recommendation.

3. commercetools

I'd seriously consider commercetools if your organization wants a modern, headless/composable architecture.

This becomes particularly attractive if you want:

ERP/PIM → pricing engine → commerce APIs → multiple storefronts/channels

rather than having the ecommerce platform be the center of the universe.

It's an especially interesting choice when you have an engineering organization capable of owning the architecture rather than expecting the commerce platform to provide every business workflow out of the box.

4. Salesforce B2B Commerce

If you're already deeply invested in Salesforce CRM, Sales Cloud, CPQ, or related tooling, Salesforce deserves a serious evaluation.

The question I'd ask isn't simply "Can Salesforce handle our catalog?"

It's:

Where should pricing logic live?

If your actual pricing is contract/quote/CPQ-driven, that architectural question can matter much more than the ecommerce catalog itself.

The key distinction I'd make

Don't select the platform based primarily on SKU count.

10,000 relatively simple products aren't necessarily difficult.

The difficult system is:

10,000 SKUs × 5,000 customers × customer-specific assortments × contract prices × quantity breaks × regional pricing × currencies × promotions × effective dates × ERP synchronization.

That's where the platforms separate themselves.

What I'd do in your situation

I'd run an RFP/POC with Adobe Commerce, SAP Commerce Cloud, and commercetools first.

But I'd make the vendors demonstrate your actual pricing model, not a generic product demo.

Give each vendor perhaps 5–10 representative scenarios:

1. Customer-specific product assortment
2. Customer-specific fixed price
3. Volume/quantity pricing
4. Contract price with start/end dates
5. Regional/currency pricing
6. Product/category-level discount
7. Promotional price overriding or interacting with contract pricing
8. Price inherited from an ERP
9. 20,000+ SKU catalog import/update
10. Bulk price update across thousands of customer/SKU combinations

Then measure how the price is calculated, where the data lives, how quickly it updates, and what happens when rules conflict.

That exercise will probably narrow the field much faster than comparing feature checklists.

If you tell me roughly your SKU count, number of customers, B2B vs. B2C mix, ERP/PIM (e.g. SAP, Oracle, Akeneo), and what makes your pricing "complex," I can narrow this to 2–3 platforms and give you a much more specific recommendation.

For an enterprise catalog with thousands of SKUs and complex pricing, I would focus less on “largest catalog support” and more on whether the platform can model your pricing rules, customer segments, product relationships, and integrations. A 5,000-SKU catalog with dozens of price books can be harder than a 500,000-SKU catalog with simple pricing. Elastic Path

Here are the platforms I would shortlist:

Shopify Elastic Path## My likely recommendations by scenario

If you are a manufacturer, distributor, or industrial supplier

Start with:

1. Adobe Commerce
2. SAP Commerce Cloud (if SAP is your backbone)
3. OroCommerce

These tend to fit businesses where buyers need:

• Contract pricing
• Customer-specific catalogs
• Quote workflows
• Multiple buyer roles
• Purchase approvals
• ERP synchronization

Alkali### If pricing logic is your hardest problem

Look closely at:

• Contract price books
• Account-level overrides
• Volume breaks
• Regional pricing
• Currency/tax rules
• Promotions that interact with negotiated pricing

In many enterprises, the ecommerce platform should display and transact pricing, while an ERP, CPQ, or pricing engine remains the source of truth.

If you have a modern engineering team

A composable approach may fit better:

• commercetools
• Elastic Path

This lets you separate:

• Product information management (PIM)
• Search
• Pricing engine
• Checkout
• Order management

It is powerful, but you are effectively building a commerce architecture rather than buying a single application. Elastic Path

Questions I would use to narrow the choice

1. How many SKUs and variants?

• 5,000?
• 50,000?
• 500,000+?
• How does pricing work?

• One price per SKU?
• Customer-specific contracts?
• Thousands of negotiated price lists?
• What is your system of record?

• SAP?
• Oracle?
• Microsoft Dynamics?
• NetSuite?
• Custom ERP?
• Do buyers need:

• Quotes/RFQs?
• Purchase orders?
• Approval chains?
• Multiple users per account?
• Are you replacing an existing ecommerce system or building new?

If you tell me your industry (manufacturing, wholesale, retail, healthcare, etc.), SKU count, ERP, number of price rules, and B2B/B2C mix, I can narrow this to a 2–3 platform shortlist.

For thousands of SKUs + complex pricing, I’d avoid choosing based on storefront features alone. Your biggest decision is how well the platform can model catalog hierarchies, customer-specific pricing, contracts, quantity breaks, promotions, ERP-fed prices, approvals, and potentially multiple business units/regions.

My shortlist would be:

1. Adobe Commerce — probably my first evaluation

Adobe Commerce is particularly compelling when pricing and catalog logic are the hard parts.

It supports things like company-specific catalogs/pricing, customer hierarchies, negotiated quotes, purchase-order workflows, requisition lists and complex B2B purchasing. Its flexibility also means you can implement unusual pricing logic rather than forcing your business processes into a rigid SaaS model. Elogic Commerce Bemeir

I'd put Adobe at the top of the RFP if you have:

• 10K–500K+ SKUs
• Multiple catalogs or assortments
• Customer-specific price lists
• Contract pricing
• Quantity/volume breaks
• Complex product configurations
• ERP-driven pricing/inventory
• Multiple business units or websites
• Custom approval/quote workflows
• An internal engineering team or capable implementation partner

The tradeoff is implementation and ongoing technical complexity. This isn't the platform I'd choose simply because you have a lot of products.

2. commercetools — if you're building a commerce platform, not just a store

commercetools is worth serious consideration if your enterprise has a substantial engineering organization.

It's API-first/composable, so you can build your own pricing, catalog, search, checkout and customer experiences around the platform. That's extremely attractive when your pricing engine is genuinely proprietary.

But there's an important catch: you are taking on more of the engineering responsibility yourself. Recent enterprise comparisons consistently position commercetools toward organizations wanting maximum architectural freedom rather than maximum out-of-the-box B2B functionality. Elogic Commerce Elastic Path

I'd choose it over Adobe when:

"Our commerce logic is a competitive advantage and we want our architecture to revolve around it."

3. Salesforce Commerce Cloud — especially if Salesforce is already your backbone

If you're already deeply invested in Salesforce, this jumps considerably higher on my list.

Salesforce supports B2B price books, buyer groups, entitlements and pricing strategies, including more advanced pricing through Revenue Cloud. Salesforce Salesforce

The question I'd ask is whether your pricing/customer data already lives in Salesforce. If it does, the integration advantages can be substantial.

4. BigCommerce Enterprise — the SaaS option I'd investigate

BigCommerce has surprisingly strong B2B capabilities for a SaaS platform. Its B2B functionality supports company accounts, customer groups and company/currency-specific price lists. Buyers can also request quotes and manage orders through the buyer portal. BigCommerce

This is attractive if your goal is:

"We need sophisticated B2B ecommerce, but we don't want to operate a large commerce engineering stack."

I'd put it ahead of Shopify if your business is predominantly complex B2B.

5. Shopify Plus — don't dismiss it, but test your edge cases

Shopify Plus is excellent when speed, operational simplicity and B2B + DTC convergence matter. Current enterprise comparisons also rate it strongly for unified B2B/DTC and faster implementation. Shopify Elogic Commerce

But with thousands of SKUs, I wouldn't approve it based on a demo.

I'd make Shopify prove your actual catalog and pricing model in a POC. In particular, test product variants, customer-specific pricing, price lists, ERP synchronization, promotions, search, bulk updates and your most complicated configurations.

What I'd do in your position

I'd run a 4-platform bake-off:

1. Adobe Commerce
2. commercetools
3. BigCommerce Enterprise
4. Salesforce Commerce Cloud — particularly if you're already a Salesforce shop

Then make every vendor implement the same representative dataset:

• 25,000–100,000 SKUs
• 5–10 product families
• 5+ customer segments
• Customer-specific negotiated prices
• Volume/quantity pricing
• Contract pricing
• Promotions
• Regional catalogs
• Multiple currencies
• ERP inventory/pricing feeds
• Product bundles/configurations
• Quote/RFQ workflow
• Customer-specific assortment restrictions

Don't let vendors demonstrate a toy catalog. Give them 500–1,000 real-ish SKUs and your nastiest pricing rules.

The winner should be the platform that can represent your actual pricing model without 200 custom workarounds.

My initial ranking

If you told me only what you've told me so far, I'd start at:

Adobe Commerce → commercetools → BigCommerce Enterprise → Salesforce Commerce Cloud → Shopify Plus

But that ranking could change dramatically depending on B2B vs. B2C, SKU count, annual GMV, pricing complexity, ERP, Salesforce/SAP usage, and how large your engineering team is.

If you give me those 6 details, I can narrow this to 2–3 platforms and give you a weighted enterprise selection matrix.

BigCommerce has surprisingly strong B2B capabilities for a SaaS platform. Its B2B functionality supports company accounts, customer groups and company/currency-specific price lists. Buyers can also request quotes and manage orders through the buyer portal. BigCommerce

This is attractive if your goal is:

"We need sophisticated B2B ecommerce, but we don't want to operate a large commerce engineering stack."

I'd put it ahead of Shopify if your business is predominantly complex B2B.

5. Shopify Plus — don't dismiss it, but test your edge cases

Shopify Plus is excellent when speed, operational simplicity and B2B + DTC convergence matter. Current enterprise comparisons also rate it strongly for unified B2B/DTC and faster implementation. shopify.com Elogic Commerce

But with thousands of SKUs, I wouldn't approve it based on a demo.

I'd make Shopify prove your actual catalog and pricing model in a POC. In particular, test product variants, customer-specific pricing, price lists, ERP synchronization, promotions, search, bulk updates and your most complicated configurations.

What I'd do in your position

I'd run a 4-platform bake-off:

For an enterprise catalog with thousands of SKUs and genuinely complex pricing, I’d shortlist these platforms rather than defaulting to Shopify:

My first choice: Adobe Commerce

If your pricing looks something like:

Customer A gets 17% off SKU X, but only for quantities >50; Customer B has a negotiated fixed price; distributors see a different catalog; certain products are unavailable to certain accounts; prices vary by region/currency/channel.

Adobe Commerce is probably the first platform I'd evaluate.

Its B2B functionality supports company-specific shared catalogs, custom prices, category/product visibility, tier pricing, negotiated quotes, and company accounts. Experience League Experience League Experience League

It also has APIs around shared catalogs, which matters if your pricing/catalog data ultimately comes from an ERP, PIM, CPQ, or proprietary pricing engine. Adobe Developer

experienceleague.adobe.com

When I'd choose the others

Salesforce Commerce Cloud becomes particularly compelling if your enterprise already runs heavily on Salesforce. Its B2B Commerce pricing supports price books, buyer groups and pricing strategies, with advanced pricing capabilities for more complicated use cases. Salesforce Salesforce

salesforce.com

commercetools is worth serious consideration if you want a headless, API-first architecture and have a sophisticated engineering organization. I'd favor it when the pricing/catalog logic itself is a strategic differentiator rather than something you want the commerce platform to dictate.

BigCommerce Enterprise is attractive if you want substantially less implementation complexity. Its price-list system can assign variant-level prices to customer groups and channels. BigCommerce

bigcommerce.com

The key question isn't actually "how many SKUs?"

I'd evaluate platforms based on how your pricing is calculated.

If you tell me:

• approximate number of SKUs
• number of customers/accounts
• B2B, B2C, or both
• number of price lists
• whether prices are customer-specific
• quantity/tier pricing
• contract/negotiated pricing
• regional/currency pricing
• ERP/PIM/CPQ you're integrating with
• whether you need headless

…I can narrow this to 2–3 platforms and give you an enterprise architecture recommendation, including where each platform will likely break down.

If your pricing looks something like:

Customer A gets 17% off SKU X, but only for quantities >50; Customer B has a negotiated fixed price; distributors see a different catalog; certain products are unavailable to certain accounts; prices vary by region/currency/channel.

Adobe Commerce is probably the first platform I'd evaluate.

Its B2B functionality supports company-specific shared catalogs, custom prices, category/product visibility, tier pricing, negotiated quotes, and company accounts. Experience League Experience League Experience League

It also has APIs around shared catalogs, which matters if your pricing/catalog data ultimately comes from an ERP, PIM, CPQ, or proprietary pricing engine. Adobe Developer

experienceleague.adobe.com

When I'd choose the others

Salesforce Commerce Cloud becomes particularly compelling if your enterprise already runs heavily on Salesforce. Its B2B Commerce pricing supports price books, buyer groups and pricing strategies, with advanced pricing capabilities for more complicated use cases. help.salesforce.com help.salesforce.com

salesforce.com

commercetools is worth serious consideration if you want a headless, API-first architecture and have a sophisticated engineering organization. I'd favor it when the pricing/catalog logic itself is a strategic differentiator rather than something you want the commerce platform to dictate.

BigCommerce Enterprise is attractive if you want substantially less implementation complexity. Its price-list system can assign variant-level prices to customer groups and channels.

For thousands of SKUs + genuinely complex pricing, I’d focus on enterprise/B2B platforms rather than a conventional storefront platform.

My shortlist

A recent 2026 comparison similarly puts Adobe Commerce toward complex B2B, Shopify Plus toward speed/unified B2B+DTC, Salesforce toward Salesforce-centric enterprises, and commercetools toward composable commerce. Elogic Commerce Shopify

Why I'd investigate Adobe Commerce first

Your combination of large catalog + complex pricing is particularly aligned with Adobe Commerce B2B.

It supports company-specific shared catalogs, where different companies can see different product assortments and prices. Experience League It also supports:

• Customer/company-specific pricing
• Tier/volume pricing
• Customer-group pricing
• Catalog price rules
• Multiple websites/stores
• Negotiable B2B quotes
• Quick ordering by SKU
• Category/product permissions
• Bulk price imports

Its pricing engine can combine regular, group/tier, special and catalog-rule pricing, and shared catalogs can have their own custom and tier prices. Experience League Experience League Experience League

One particularly relevant detail for a thousands-of-SKUs/many-customer environment: Adobe documents a setting specifically intended to improve performance when managing many shared catalogs with custom pricing. Experience League

When I'd choose commercetools instead

I'd lean toward commercetools if your organization thinks of commerce as an API/platform layer rather than something you want the ecommerce vendor to provide end-to-end.

It gives you much more architectural freedom and supports unlimited catalogs, channels and storefronts in its current offering; its B2B capabilities model business-unit hierarchies and granular purchasing permissions through APIs. Commercetools

The tradeoff is that you own more of the architecture. That's attractive for a sophisticated engineering organization and less attractive if you want a packaged commerce system.

The key question isn't actually SKU count

I'd want to understand your pricing matrix.

For example, if your rules look like:

Customer → Contract → Region → Currency → Product → Quantity → Date → Customer tier → Promotion → Shipping terms

and you have thousands of customers with individualized price lists, that's a very different problem from simply having 100,000 SKUs.

Before selecting a platform, I'd make each vendor demonstrate—using your actual pricing rules and a representative catalog—these five things:

1. Price calculation latency with your full catalog.
2. Bulk price updates—e.g. hundreds of thousands/millions of price changes.
3. Customer-specific catalogs and assortments.
4. Effective-dated pricing and overlapping promotions/contracts.
5. ERP/PIM/CPQ synchronization without turning the ecommerce platform into your master pricing database.

If you tell me (a) roughly how many SKUs, (b) how many customers, (c) B2B vs B2C, (d) what makes your pricing complex, and (e) your ERP/PIM—SAP, Oracle, Dynamics, Salesforce, etc., I can narrow this to 2–3 platforms and give you a weighted enterprise selection matrix.

I'd lean toward commercetools if your organization thinks of commerce as an API/platform layer rather than something you want the ecommerce vendor to provide end-to-end.

It gives you much more architectural freedom and supports unlimited catalogs, channels and storefronts in its current offering; its B2B capabilities model business-unit hierarchies and granular purchasing permissions through APIs. commercetools.com

The tradeoff is that you own more of the architecture. That's attractive for a sophisticated engineering organization and less attractive if you want a packaged commerce system.

The key question isn't actually SKU count

I'd want to understand your pricing matrix.

For example, if your rules look like:

Customer → Contract → Region → Currency → Product → Quantity → Date → Customer tier → Promotion → Shipping terms

and you have thousands of customers with individualized price lists, that's a very different problem from simply having 100,000 SKUs.

If you have thousands of SKUs plus genuinely complex pricing, I’d focus on enterprise B2B commerce platforms rather than choosing primarily on storefront/marketing features.

My shortlist

My first two choices for your description

1. Adobe Commerce

I'd put this at the top if "complex pricing" means things like:

• Customer-specific price lists
• Thousands of customer/company-specific prices
• Contract pricing
• Tier/volume pricing
• Different catalogs by customer
• Complex product relationships/configurations
• Multiple websites/brands/regions
• ERP-driven pricing
• RFQs/negotiated pricing
• Heavy customization

Adobe Commerce's B2B functionality specifically supports company-specific shared catalogs and custom pricing, quotes, quick ordering by SKU, company accounts, and requisition lists. Experience League Experience League

The downside is that you're buying a much more customizable system, which generally means more implementation and ongoing engineering responsibility. Shopify

2. commercetools

I'd seriously consider this if you have a capable engineering/architecture organization and your pricing engine is unusual enough that you don't want the commerce platform dictating your business model.

Its composable approach is particularly attractive when commerce needs to integrate deeply with ERP, PIM, pricing engines, OMS, CRM, etc. It also supports unlimited catalogs/channels/storefronts and has B2B APIs for business-unit hierarchies and granular purchasing permissions. commercetools

Where Shopify Plus fits

Shopify Shopify Plus has become substantially more capable for B2B. It now supports unlimited B2B catalogs on Plus, direct assignment to companies/company locations, volume pricing, quantity rules, payment terms, and related B2B capabilities. Shopify Help Center Shopify Help Center

So I wouldn't rule it out simply because you have thousands of SKUs.

I'd choose it when your pricing can be expressed reasonably well through catalogs, customer/company assignments, quantity breaks and discounts and you value SaaS simplicity and faster implementation more than maximum pricing-engine flexibility.

The key question

"Complex pricing" can mean very different things. For example:

Customer A gets SKU 123 at $47. Customer B gets $43, unless they order 100+, when it's $39. Customer B also has a contract discount, but only for Region East, while distributors have a different price book, and some products inherit pricing from a product family.

If that's roughly your world, Adobe Commerce or commercetools would be my starting point.

If instead it's more like:

Different customers see different catalogs and negotiated/volume prices, but the rules aren't exceptionally complicated.

Then Shopify Plus or BigCommerce Enterprise becomes much more attractive.

If you tell me what your pricing rules look like (customer-specific prices, price lists, volume breaks, contracts, formulas, promotions, ERP-calculated prices, currencies, etc.), plus roughly how many SKUs, customers, and orders/year, I can narrow this to 2–3 platforms and give you a practical architecture recommendation.

If you have thousands of SKUs plus genuinely complex pricing, I’d focus on enterprise B2B commerce platforms rather than a conventional DTC ecommerce stack. The important distinction is whether pricing is simple tiered pricing or involves customer contracts, account hierarchies, ERP-calculated prices, volume breaks, regional catalogs, quotes, etc. SAP Help Portal SAP Learning

My shortlist

Adobe Commerce, for example, is strong when you need customer-specific catalogs, pricing, quotes, approval workflows and other deep B2B functionality. Elogic Commerce BigCommerce supports company-specific and currency-specific price lists and buyer portals, making it a compelling lower-complexity SaaS alternative. BigCommerce

Where I'd start for your situation

1. Adobe Commerce — probably my first evaluation.

If your pricing looks something like:

Customer A → contract price → SKU family → quantity break → region → currency → effective date → customer-specific discount → promotion

…and you also have multiple catalogs, sales reps, quotes, approvals, ERP integration and customer account hierarchies, Adobe is a particularly strong candidate. Elogic Commerce

2. commercetools — if you're technically sophisticated.

I'd consider this when ecommerce is really becoming a composable commerce platform rather than simply a website. You get considerable architectural freedom, but you also take on substantially more engineering responsibility. BigCommerce

3. SAP Commerce Cloud — if your enterprise already revolves around SAP.

SAP's own documentation explicitly addresses customer-specific catalogs, negotiated prices at organization/company/department levels, and ERP-sourced complex pricing. SAP Help Portal SAP Learning

4. BigCommerce B2B — if you want SaaS and less operational burden.

This is attractive if you have substantial B2B complexity but don't want to operate a highly customized Adobe/composable stack. BigCommerce

One important architectural point

For your use case, I wouldn't evaluate the ecommerce platform in isolation.

I'd map the stack as:

ERP → pricing engine → PIM/catalog → ecommerce → search → OMS → CRM

The critical question is where the authoritative price lives. If your ERP calculates contract prices dynamically, you don't necessarily want to replicate thousands or millions of pricing rules into the ecommerce platform. SAP, for example, explicitly supports scenarios where complex B2B pricing is sourced from the ERP. SAP Learning

I'd also test the platforms with your actual catalog and pricing rules, rather than doing a feature-checkbox RFP. A 20,000-SKU catalog with 50 pricing rules is a very different problem from 20,000 SKUs with 2 million customer/SKU price relationships.

If you tell me (1) approximate SKU count, (2) B2B vs B2C, (3) ERP—SAP/Oracle/Dynamics/etc., (4) how pricing works, and (5) whether you need multiple countries/currencies, I can narrow this to 2–3 platforms and give you an architecture + decision matrix.

For thousands of SKUs + genuinely complex pricing, I’d shortlist Adobe Commerce, Shopify Plus, and commercetools rather than treating this like a standard DTC platform decision.

My shortlist

My first choice: Adobe Commerce

If by "complex pricing" you mean things like:

• Different prices for thousands of customer accounts
• Customer-specific catalogs
• Contract pricing
• Volume/tier pricing
• Multiple currencies and websites
• Customer groups
• Wholesale + retail pricing
• Rules based on SKU, quantity, customer, geography, etc.
• Large product catalogs with frequent bulk price updates

Adobe Commerce deserves a very serious look.

Its B2B functionality includes shared catalogs with custom pricing by company, and it supports tier pricing, customer-group pricing, catalog rules, multiple websites, and bulk/import-oriented pricing workflows. Experience League Experience League Experience League

It also has a specific optimization for merchants managing many shared catalogs, which is particularly relevant to an enterprise catalog. Experience League

When I'd pick Shopify Plus instead

I'd choose shopify.com if your priority is:

"I need enterprise scale, but I don't want my ecommerce platform to become a giant software project."

Shopify Plus now has unlimited B2B catalogs and allows catalogs to be assigned directly to companies and company locations. It also supports volume pricing and quantity rules. Shopify Help Center Shopify Help Center

The catch is that if your pricing engine starts looking like a custom CPQ/contract-pricing system, you'll likely end up putting more logic into external services/apps rather than relying solely on native Shopify pricing.

When commercetools makes more sense

If you have a strong internal engineering organization and you're already thinking in terms of headless/composable commerce, I'd put commercetools.com high on the list.

It's particularly attractive when commerce is one component of a larger architecture involving:

ERP → PIM → pricing engine → commerce APIs → OMS → CRM → multiple storefronts/channels

rather than wanting the ecommerce platform to own everything.

The decision I'd make based on your description

I'd roughly rank them:

1. Adobe Commerce — if pricing/catalog complexity is the dominant problem
2. Shopify Plus — if operational simplicity and speed are dominant
3. commercetools — if architectural flexibility and custom pricing services are dominant
4. Salesforce Commerce Cloud — if Salesforce is already central to your business
5. BigCommerce Enterprise — worth evaluating if you want SaaS but more B2B depth than a typical storefront platform

One important caveat: SKU count itself isn't the deciding factor. A catalog with 500,000 SKUs and one price per SKU can be easier than 20,000 SKUs where every customer has a different contractual price.

If you tell me (1) approximate SKU count, (2) number of customers, (3) B2B vs B2C, (4) how pricing is determined, and (5) your ERP/PIM (SAP, Oracle, NetSuite, etc.), I can narrow this down to a 2–3 platform recommendation with an architecture and migration-risk comparison.

For an enterprise catalog with thousands of SKUs + complex pricing, I’d shortlist Adobe Commerce, commercetools, Shopify Plus, and BigCommerce Enterprise—but I’d put Adobe Commerce at the top of the evaluation if pricing and catalog rules are genuinely complex.

My shortlist

Why I'd look closely at Adobe Commerce

Adobe's B2B model maps particularly well to what you're describing. It supports shared catalogs with company-specific product assortments and custom prices, company accounts, quick ordering by SKU, requisition lists, and negotiable quotes. Experience League Experience League Experience League

Importantly, Adobe has also added a setting specifically aimed at performance when merchants have many shared catalogs: only products assigned to a shared catalog need to be stored in the price index. Experience League

That makes it particularly interesting if your pricing looks something like:

SKU → customer/account → contract → price list → quantity break → region/currency → promotion → effective date

rather than simply "product has a price."

When I'd choose something else

Choose commercetools if you have a strong engineering organization and want commerce to be a composable/API-first capability. You get tremendous architectural flexibility, but you're taking on substantially more responsibility for assembling and maintaining the solution. Elogic Elogic

Choose Shopify Plus if your pricing complexity is manageable through its B2B capabilities/extensions and you value SaaS operations, faster implementation, and combining B2B and DTC. It is much less attractive if your pricing engine itself is the core differentiator.

Choose BigCommerce Enterprise if you want a managed SaaS platform but need more B2B/catalog flexibility than a typical Shopify implementation. It's worth a serious POC before jumping to the heavier Adobe/composable options.

Choose Salesforce Commerce Cloud if your customer/account/pricing logic is tightly intertwined with Salesforce CRM, sales reps, contracts, and account data. Salesforce's B2B model includes price-book hierarchies and contract-rate concepts. Shopify

The key question I'd ask before selecting one

Don't start with "How many SKUs can it handle?"

I'd map your pricing decision tree first.

For example:

Customer
  └── Customer group / contract
       └── Region
            └── Currency
                 └── SKU
                      ├── Base price
                      ├── Volume break
                      ├── Customer-specific override
                      ├── Contract price
                      ├── Promotion
                      └── Effective date

Then test each platform with your actual pricing rules and catalog data, not a demo dataset.

If you tell me roughly (1) number of SKUs, (2) number of customers/accounts, (3) how many distinct price lists, (4) whether B2B/B2C or B2B-only, (5) your ERP/PIM/CRM, and (6) whether pricing is real-time or batch, I can narrow this to a 2–3 platform recommendation and an enterprise evaluation scorecard.

For thousands of SKUs + complex pricing, I’d focus less on “which ecommerce platform is best?” and more on which platform can represent your pricing/catalog model without turning every new rule into custom code.

My shortlist

Adobe is particularly interesting for your description. Its B2B functionality supports company-specific shared catalogs, custom prices, tier pricing, company accounts, and negotiable quotes. Experience League Experience League Experience League It also has a feature specifically intended to improve performance when managing many shared catalogs with custom pricing. Experience League

Where I'd draw the line

Choose Adobe Commerce if your pricing looks something like:

SKU × customer/account × quantity × region × contract × currency × channel × date → final price

and you need administrators to manage much of that without building an entirely separate pricing engine.

Choose commercetools if your actual requirement is more like:

“Our ERP/CPQ/PIM/pricing engine is the source of truth, and ecommerce should be a composable presentation/order layer.”

That gives you considerably more architectural freedom, but also means your team owns more of the implementation.

Choose Salesforce Commerce Cloud if your sales organization already runs heavily on Salesforce and customer/rep relationships, quotes and commerce need to live together.

Choose BigCommerce or Shopify Plus if your pricing is complex but still fits reasonably cleanly into their B2B model, and you strongly prefer managed SaaS over a more customizable platform.

One important distinction: SKU count itself shouldn't drive the decision. “20,000 SKUs” with simple pricing can be much easier than “2,000 SKUs” with 300,000 customer-specific price relationships.

What I'd evaluate in your situation

I'd make vendors demonstrate these with your actual data, rather than accepting a feature checklist:

1. Import 10,000+ SKUs from your PIM/ERP.
2. Create 100+ customer-specific price lists.
3. Apply quantity breaks and contract pricing.
4. Handle products belonging to multiple catalogs.
5. Calculate the correct price when several rules overlap.
6. Change a price and measure how quickly it propagates.
7. Search/filter the catalog at realistic scale.
8. Handle regional currencies/tax rules.
9. Integrate orders/inventory back into your ERP.
10. Show an administrator how to create a new pricing rule without developer intervention.

That last test is particularly important. A platform can technically support your pricing model while making it so cumbersome that your IT team becomes the bottleneck.

If I were narrowing this to three for an enterprise with genuinely complex catalog/pricing requirements, I'd start with Adobe Commerce, commercetools, and whichever of Salesforce Commerce Cloud or BigCommerce best matches your existing enterprise stack. Current 2026 comparisons similarly tend to position Adobe around deep B2B customization, commercetools around composable architecture, and SaaS platforms around faster implementation/lower operational burden. Itechguides Elogic Commerce

If you tell me rough SKU count, number of customers, number of price lists/contracts, B2B vs B2C, ERP/PIM/CRM (e.g. SAP, Oracle, Salesforce), and whether you need real-time pricing, I can give you a much more specific platform recommendation and architecture.

SKU × customer/account × quantity × region × contract × currency × channel × date → final price

and you need administrators to manage much of that without building an entirely separate pricing engine.

Choose commercetools if your actual requirement is more like:

“Our ERP/CPQ/PIM/pricing engine is the source of truth, and ecommerce should be a composable presentation/order layer.”

That gives you considerably more architectural freedom, but also means your team owns more of the implementation.

Choose Salesforce Commerce Cloud if your sales organization already runs heavily on Salesforce and customer/rep relationships, quotes and commerce need to live together.

Choose BigCommerce or Shopify Plus if your pricing is complex but still fits reasonably cleanly into their B2B model, and you strongly prefer managed SaaS over a more customizable platform.

One important distinction: SKU count itself shouldn't drive the decision. “20,000 SKUs” with simple pricing can be much easier than “2,000 SKUs” with 300,000 customer-specific price relationships.

What I'd evaluate in your situation

I'd make vendors demonstrate these with your actual data, rather than accepting a feature checklist:

1. Import 10,000+ SKUs from your PIM/ERP.
2. Create 100+ customer-specific price lists.
3. Apply quantity breaks and contract pricing.
4. Handle products belonging to multiple catalogs.
5. Calculate the correct price when several rules overlap.
6. Change a price and measure how quickly it propagates.
7. Search/filter the catalog at realistic scale.
8. Handle regional currencies/tax rules.
9. Integrate orders/inventory back into your ERP.
10. Show an administrator how to create a new pricing rule without developer intervention.

That last test is particularly important. A platform can technically support your pricing model while making it so cumbersome that your IT team becomes the bottleneck.

If I were narrowing this to three for an enterprise with genuinely complex catalog/pricing requirements, I'd start with Adobe Commerce, commercetools, and whichever of Salesforce Commerce Cloud or BigCommerce best matches your existing enterprise stack. Current 2026 comparisons similarly tend to position Adobe around deep B2B customization, commercetools around composable architecture, and SaaS platforms around faster implementation/lower operational burden.

For thousands of SKUs + complex pricing, I’d focus on enterprise/B2B platforms rather than Shopify-style storefronts. The key question is whether your complexity is mostly catalog/pricing rules or whether you also need ERP integration, customer-specific catalogs, quoting, approvals, and multiple business units.

My shortlist

My initial recommendation

I'd put Adobe Commerce and commercetools at the top of your evaluation, unless you're heavily invested in SAP or Salesforce.

Adobe Commerce is particularly interesting for your description because its B2B functionality lets you create shared catalogs with company-specific product selections and pricing, including fixed/percentage pricing and quantity-based tier pricing. Experience League Experience League It also supports company hierarchies, purchasing permissions, quick order by SKU, and negotiated quotes. Experience League Experience League

commercetools becomes more attractive if your pricing engine is unusually sophisticated—for example:

customer × contract × region × currency × quantity × channel × date × product segment

Its price model supports dimensions such as volume, currency, country, distribution channel, customer group and time period, and can be extended with custom fields. commercetools Documentation

The tradeoff is important: Adobe gives you more B2B commerce functionality out of the box; commercetools gives your engineering team more architectural freedom but generally requires you to assemble more of the solution.

One thing I'd investigate before choosing

Don't evaluate these platforms based on SKU count alone. "10,000 SKUs" isn't particularly scary for an enterprise platform. The difficult part is your pricing matrix and number of catalog/customer relationships.

I'd map these five dimensions:

1. SKU/catalog complexity — variants, bundles, configurable products, multiple catalogs, regional assortments.
2. Pricing complexity — customer-specific, contract, volume, promotions, rebates, currencies, effective dates, price overrides.
3. B2B structure — parent companies, subsidiaries, locations, buyers, approval chains and purchasing limits.
4. Integration — SAP/Oracle/NetSuite/other ERP, PIM, CRM, CPQ, OMS and tax/shipping systems.
5. Scale — number of customers, prices, orders/day and simultaneous users, rather than just number of SKUs.

If you give me (a) approximate SKU count, (b) B2B vs B2C, (c) ERP/PIM you're using, (d) how your pricing works, and (e) whether you want SaaS vs self-managed, I can narrow this to 2–3 platforms and give you a side-by-side architecture recommendation.

My initial recommendation

I'd put Adobe Commerce and commercetools at the top of your evaluation, unless you're heavily invested in SAP or Salesforce.

Adobe Commerce is particularly interesting for your description because its B2B functionality lets you create shared catalogs with company-specific product selections and pricing, including fixed/percentage pricing and quantity-based tier pricing. Experience League Experience League It also supports company hierarchies, purchasing permissions, quick order by SKU, and negotiated quotes. Experience League Experience League

commercetools becomes more attractive if your pricing engine is unusually sophisticated—for example:

customer × contract × region × currency × quantity × channel × date × product segment

Its price model supports dimensions such as volume, currency, country, distribution channel, customer group and time period, and can be extended with custom fields. commercetools Documentation

The tradeoff is important: Adobe gives you more B2B commerce functionality out of the box; commercetools gives your engineering team more architectural freedom but generally requires you to assemble more of the solution.

One thing I'd investigate before choosing

Don't evaluate these platforms based on SKU count alone. "10,000 SKUs" isn't particularly scary for an enterprise platform. The difficult part is your pricing matrix and number of catalog/customer relationships.

I'd map these five dimensions:

1. SKU/catalog complexity — variants, bundles, configurable products, multiple catalogs, regional assortments.
2. Pricing complexity — customer-specific, contract, volume, promotions, rebates, currencies, effective dates, price overrides.
3. B2B structure — parent companies, subsidiaries, locations, buyers, approval chains and purchasing limits.
4. Integration — SAP/Oracle/NetSuite/other ERP, PIM, CRM, CPQ, OMS and tax/shipping systems.
5. Scale — number of customers, prices, orders/day and simultaneous users, rather than just number of SKUs.

If you give me (a) approximate SKU count, (b) B2B vs B2C, (c) ERP/PIM you're using, (d) how your pricing works, and (e) whether you want SaaS vs self-managed, I can narrow this to 2–3 platforms and give you a side-by-side architecture recommendation.

If you have thousands of SKUs plus genuinely complex pricing, I’d focus less on “which platform scales?” and more on which platform can model your pricing/catalog rules without turning your team into a custom-software shop.

My shortlist

Adobe Commerce would be my first platform to evaluate. Its B2B functionality supports shared catalogs with company-specific pricing, customer groups, tier pricing, catalog price rules, and negotiated quotes. Experience League Experience League Experience League

The particularly relevant capability is shared catalogs: you can have different product assortments and pricing structures for different companies, rather than forcing everything into one global price list. Experience League Experience League

When I'd choose something else

• commercetools — choose this if you have a substantial engineering team and want pricing, catalog, promotions, checkout, etc. assembled as composable services. It gives you enormous architectural flexibility, but you also own much more of the solution. Elastic Path BigCommerce
• SAP Commerce Cloud — particularly compelling if SAP ERP is deeply embedded in your business and product, customer, inventory and pricing data already revolve around SAP.
• Salesforce Commerce Cloud — compelling if Salesforce is already the center of your CRM/sales ecosystem.
• BigCommerce Enterprise — attractive if you'd rather have a managed SaaS platform and your pricing requirements don't warrant the customization burden of Adobe/composable commerce. BigCommerce
• Shopify Plus — I'd favor it when operational simplicity and fast implementation matter more than highly intricate B2B pricing/procurement logic.

The key question I'd ask before choosing

“Complex pricing” can mean very different things.

If yours looks like:

customer × SKU × quantity × region × contract × currency × date × channel × volume tier × promotion

…and you have hundreds/thousands of customer-specific price lists, price overrides, contract pricing, or ERP-driven pricing, I'd put Adobe Commerce, SAP Commerce, commercetools, and possibly a dedicated external pricing engine at the top of the evaluation.

If you tell me (1) B2B vs B2C, (2) approximate SKU count, (3) what makes the pricing complex, (4) your ERP/CRM, and (5) whether you have a strong engineering team, I can narrow this to 2–3 platforms and give you a practical architecture recommendation.

For thousands of SKUs + complex pricing, I’d shortlist platforms based less on raw catalog size and more on how sophisticated your pricing, customer segmentation, and ERP integration are.

My shortlist

My first choice: Adobe Commerce

If by "complex pricing" you mean things like:

• Customer-specific price lists
• Different prices by customer/account
• Volume breaks
• Contract pricing
• Thousands of SKUs with different availability by customer
• Multiple catalogs or websites
• B2B company accounts
• Quotes/RFQs
• ERP-driven pricing
• Sophisticated promotions and discounts

I'd put Adobe Commerce at the top of the evaluation list.

Adobe's B2B functionality specifically supports shared catalogs with custom prices for different companies, company-specific product selections, and negotiable quotes. Experience League Experience League

That makes it particularly interesting when your pricing model is the difficult part of the commerce architecture, rather than simply having a large number of products.

When I'd choose something else

Choose commercetools if you have a strong engineering organization and want commerce to be a composable platform rather than a monolithic application. It's particularly compelling if pricing, catalog, search, checkout, and customer data are going to be separate services and you want maximum architectural control. The downside is that you take on considerably more implementation and ongoing engineering responsibility. Elastic Path Elogic Commerce

Choose Salesforce Commerce Cloud if your sales/customer ecosystem already revolves around Salesforce. The integration with CRM, customer accounts, sales processes, and service can outweigh architectural considerations. Bemeir

Choose BigCommerce Enterprise if you want a managed SaaS platform and your B2B requirements are substantial but don't justify the engineering overhead of Adobe/commercetools. BigCommerce emphasizes native B2B capabilities, APIs, and multi-storefront support. BigCommerce

Choose Shopify Plus if operational simplicity and speed-to-market are more important than having every unusual pricing rule natively modeled. It can be an excellent enterprise platform, but I'd pressure-test your pricing requirements very carefully before committing. Shopify

The important question

"Thousands of SKUs" by itself wouldn't worry me about any of these platforms. The pricing engine is what I'd investigate first.

For example, there's a huge difference between:

50,000 SKUs, one price per SKU

and:

20,000 SKUs × 5 regions × 300 customer accounts × contract-specific pricing × quantity breaks × currency × effective dates × promotions.

The second scenario can fundamentally change the architecture I'd recommend.

If you tell me (1) approximate SKU count, (2) B2B vs B2C, (3) how customer-specific pricing works, (4) your ERP—SAP/Oracle/Dynamics/etc., and (5) whether you need multiple countries/stores, I can narrow this to 2–3 platforms and give you an architecture-level comparison.

If you have thousands of SKUs plus genuinely complex pricing, I’d focus less on “which platform has the nicest storefront” and more on catalog architecture, pricing-rule flexibility, B2B account structures, ERP integration, and performance at scale.

My shortlist would be:

Why I'd put Adobe Commerce near the top

Your description—thousands of SKUs + complex pricing—is almost exactly where Adobe Commerce becomes interesting.

Its B2B functionality supports shared catalogs with custom prices for different companies, company-specific catalogs, customer groups, tier pricing, and negotiable quotes. Experience League Experience League Experience League

It also has rule-based catalog pricing where conditions can incorporate things like customer groups, categories, and product attributes. Experience League

For example, you could potentially model something like:

Customer = Distributor A

• Region = Northeast
• Product family = Industrial Pumps
• Quantity > 100
• Contract = 2026 Distributor Agreement

→ Customer-specific price

That's a very different problem from simply having a 10%-off coupon.

Adobe also has tooling specifically aimed at managing large numbers of shared catalogs and pricing configurations. Experience League Experience League

When I'd choose commercetools instead

I'd seriously consider commercetools if you have a strong internal engineering organization and want a headless/composable architecture.

The tradeoff is that you're assembling more of the solution yourself. That's attractive if your business has unusual pricing logic, multiple channels, sophisticated APIs, or you expect commerce to become part of a larger digital architecture.

In other words:

• Adobe Commerce: more commerce capability out of the box.
• commercetools: more architectural freedom, but more engineering responsibility.

The most important question: what does “complex pricing” mean?

This could change my recommendation substantially.

If your pricing looks like:

• Customer-specific price lists
• Contract pricing
• Volume/tier discounts
• Hundreds/thousands of customer accounts
• Regional pricing
• Currency-specific pricing
• Product/customer eligibility rules
• Promotions stacked with negotiated pricing
• Quotes/RFQs
• ERP-derived prices
• Real-time pricing from an external pricing engine

…I would not select a platform based on SKU count alone.

I'd make vendors demonstrate your actual pricing matrix in a proof-of-concept. In particular, ask them to calculate the price for the same SKU across 5–10 different customers and quantities, including conflicting discounts and contract overrides.

That's where platforms that look similar in a feature checklist can behave very differently.

My recommendation

I'd start with Adobe Commerce + commercetools + Salesforce Commerce as the serious enterprise evaluation set, then add Shopify Plus or BigCommerce if ease of administration and faster implementation are major priorities.

If you tell me (1) B2B vs B2C, (2) approximate SKU count, (3) number of customer accounts, (4) what ERP you're using, and (5) an example of your pricing rules, I can narrow this to the 2–3 platforms I'd actually shortlist and explain why.

I'd seriously consider commercetools if you have a strong internal engineering organization and want a headless/composable architecture.

For an enterprise catalog with thousands of SKUs, complex pricing, and likely B2B workflows, I would focus less on “which ecommerce platform has the most features” and more on how well it handles:

• customer-specific pricing and contract pricing
• multiple price lists
• large product attribute models
• ERP/PIM integration
• buyer permissions and account hierarchies
• quote/RFQ workflows
• bulk ordering and repeat purchases
• regional catalogs, currencies, and inventory rules

Complex B2B catalogs often need these capabilities natively rather than through many custom extensions. Elastic Path Webscale

Platforms I would shortlist

Shopify Alkali## My likely recommendations by scenario

If you are a distributor/manufacturer

Look hardest at:

1. Adobe Commerce
2. OroCommerce
3. SAP Commerce Cloud (especially if SAP ERP is central)

These are stronger when your pricing model looks like:

• Customer A gets negotiated prices
• Customer B sees a different catalog
• Volume breaks change pricing
• Sales reps negotiate quotes
• Buyers have approval chains

Alkali Ivris Tech### If your catalog is huge but you want flexibility

Consider:

• commercetools
• Elastic Path

These work well when commerce is one layer in a broader architecture with ERP, PIM, search, pricing engines, and custom customer experiences. Elastic Path

If you want faster implementation and lower operational overhead

Consider:

• BigCommerce
• Shopify Plus

They can be excellent choices if your pricing complexity is manageable and you value SaaS simplicity. Shopify

Questions that would narrow this down quickly

1. Is this primarily B2B, B2C, or both?
2. How many SKUs: ~5,000, 50,000, 500,000+?
3. Where does pricing live today: ERP, CPQ system, spreadsheets, ecommerce platform?
4. Which ERP/PIM do you use (SAP, Oracle, NetSuite, Dynamics, Infor, custom)?
5. Do customers need login-based catalogs with negotiated pricing?
6. Are you replacing an existing platform or starting fresh?

With those answers, the shortlist usually shrinks from ~8 platforms to 2–3 realistic candidates.

For thousands of SKUs + complex pricing, I’d focus less on storefront features and more on how well the platform handles catalog scale, customer-specific price lists, contract pricing, quantity breaks, ERP/PIM integration, and rules-driven pricing.

My shortlist

If pricing is the hard part, I'd start with Adobe Commerce

Adobe Commerce's B2B functionality is particularly relevant to your situation. It supports shared catalogs with company-specific product selections and pricing, multiple pricing structures, customer/company assignments, tier pricing, and catalog price rules. experienceleague.adobe.com

It also supports pricing at website scope and has explicit mechanisms for managing large numbers of shared catalogs; Adobe recommends its direct-product price-assignment capability when merchants have many shared catalogs. experienceleague.adobe.com

I'd therefore put it at the top if your pricing looks something like:

SKU × customer/account × region × quantity × contract × channel × effective date

Shopify Plus is the "simpler operations" alternative

Shopify Plus has become considerably more capable for B2B. Its catalogs can control both product availability and customer-specific pricing, and Plus allows unlimited B2B catalogs and direct assignment to companies/company locations. It also supports quantity rules and volume pricing. help.shopify.com

I'd favor it when your pricing can be represented reasonably cleanly as catalogs/price lists rather than requiring a highly customized pricing engine.

Consider composable if your catalog/pricing is really complicated

commercetools is attractive when you have an engineering organization capable of building around APIs and you want commerce to be one component of a broader architecture. Shopify's current enterprise comparison also places commercetools among the platforms aimed at custom catalogs, pricing and account hierarchies. www.shopify.com

Similarly, SAP Commerce Cloud becomes particularly compelling if SAP is already the system of record for products, customers, contracts, inventory and pricing.

One important caveat

"Thousands of SKUs" by itself isn't particularly scary for modern enterprise platforms. The number of pricing relationships is what I'd use to choose the architecture.

For example, there's a huge difference between:

• 50,000 SKUs × 10 price lists
• 50,000 SKUs × 5,000 customers
• 50,000 SKUs × customer-specific contracts × quantity breaks × currencies × regions
• prices calculated dynamically from an ERP/CPQ rather than stored in ecommerce

In the last two cases, I'd be much more cautious about selecting a platform primarily because its admin UI handles large catalogs.

My initial recommendation: shortlist Adobe Commerce, Shopify Plus, and commercetools, then add SAP Commerce Cloud if you're SAP-centric and Salesforce Commerce Cloud if Salesforce is your commercial backbone.

If you tell me (1) approximate SKU count, (2) number of customers, (3) B2B vs B2C, (4) what determines a price, and (5) your ERP/PIM, I can narrow this to 2–3 platforms and explain which architecture I'd choose.

For thousands of SKUs + genuinely complex pricing, I’d shortlist Adobe Commerce, commercetools, and Salesforce Commerce rather than the typical SMB platforms.

My shortlist

What I'd investigate first

1. Adobe Commerce — probably my default recommendation

If your complexity is things like:

• Customer-specific price lists
• Thousands or tens of thousands of SKUs
• Different catalogs by customer/account
• Volume/tier pricing
• Contract pricing
• Multiple websites/brands
• B2B accounts and approval workflows
• Quotes and negotiated pricing
• ERP/PIM integrations

Adobe has a particularly strong native model. Its B2B functionality supports shared catalogs with custom pricing for individual companies, tier pricing, company accounts, quotes, requisition lists, and buyer permissions. Experience League Experience League Experience League

That makes it attractive when you want the commerce platform itself to understand a substantial portion of your pricing and catalog rules rather than building everything around an API platform.

2. commercetools — if you're building a modern composable stack

I'd put commercetools ahead of Adobe if you have a strong engineering organization and want commerce to be an API-driven component of a larger architecture.

It explicitly targets large catalogs, high transaction volumes, customer-specific pricing, and complex B2B workflows, while its current offering supports unlimited catalogs/channels/storefronts on its pricing model. Commercetools Commercetools

The tradeoff is that you're accepting more architectural responsibility: PIM, search, frontend, ERP integration, pricing services, etc. may become a collection of components rather than one commerce application.

3. Salesforce Commerce — if Salesforce is already your system of record

If your sales, CRM, customer service, CPQ/revenue operations, etc. are already heavily invested in Salesforce, this becomes much more compelling. Salesforce supports standard and advanced B2B pricing/price-book models and quote workflows. Salesforce

I wouldn't choose it just because it's Salesforce, though. For unusually intricate catalog/pricing logic, I'd test your actual pricing rules against it during the evaluation.

The key question isn't really "how many SKUs?"

I'd evaluate platforms based on how your price is calculated.

For example, there's a huge difference between:

25,000 SKUs with 5 customer price tiers

and:

25,000 SKUs × 4 regions × 12 currencies × customer-specific contracts × quantity breaks × product/customer eligibility × promotions × negotiated overrides × ERP-derived costs.

The second scenario can make pricing architecture more important than the storefront itself.

Adobe, for example, can assign custom prices to shared catalogs and apply fixed or percentage pricing plus tier pricing. Experience League

My recommendation

If I were running your selection process, I'd start with:

Adobe Commerce vs. commercetools vs. Salesforce Commerce, and add SAP Commerce Cloud if SAP is central to your back office.

I'd then give each vendor the same 10–20 real pricing scenarios from your business and make them demonstrate:

1. Customer-specific pricing
2. Contract overrides
3. Quantity breaks
4. SKU/customer eligibility
5. Effective dates
6. Regional pricing
7. Currency conversion
8. Promotions interacting with contract prices
9. Real-time ERP price/inventory changes
10. Bulk updates across thousands of SKUs
11. Price calculation latency at peak traffic
12. How pricing is maintained by business users rather than developers

That exercise will usually reveal the right platform much faster than feature-comparison spreadsheets.

If you tell me your SKU count, number of customers, B2B vs B2C mix, ERP/PIM (e.g. SAP, Oracle, Dynamics), and an example of your most complicated pricing rule, I can narrow this to 2–3 platforms and explain which architecture I'd choose.

The tradeoff is that you're accepting more architectural responsibility: PIM, search, frontend, ERP integration, pricing services, etc. may become a collection of components rather than one commerce application.

3. Salesforce Commerce — if Salesforce is already your system of record

If your sales, CRM, customer service, CPQ/revenue operations, etc. are already heavily invested in Salesforce, this becomes much more compelling. Salesforce supports standard and advanced B2B pricing/price-book models and quote workflows. Salesforce

I wouldn't choose it just because it's Salesforce, though. For unusually intricate catalog/pricing logic, I'd test your actual pricing rules against it during the evaluation.

The key question isn't really "how many SKUs?"

I'd evaluate platforms based on how your price is calculated.

For example, there's a huge difference between:

25,000 SKUs with 5 customer price tiers

and:

25,000 SKUs × 4 regions × 12 currencies × customer-specific contracts × quantity breaks × product/customer eligibility × promotions × negotiated overrides × ERP-derived costs.

The second scenario can make pricing architecture more important than the storefront itself.

Adobe, for example, can assign custom prices to shared catalogs and apply fixed or percentage pricing plus tier pricing.

My recommendation

If I were running your selection process, I'd start with:

Adobe Commerce vs. commercetools vs. Salesforce Commerce, and add SAP Commerce Cloud if SAP is central to your back office.

I'd then give each vendor the same 10–20 real pricing scenarios from your business and make them demonstrate:

For thousands of SKUs + complex pricing, I’d focus on enterprise platforms built for B2B catalog segmentation, account-specific pricing, ERP integration, and high-volume SKU management rather than a typical SMB ecommerce platform.

My shortlist

Current 2026 comparisons similarly distinguish Adobe for complex B2B, Salesforce for Salesforce-centric organizations, commercetools for composable architecture, and Shopify for faster enterprise deployment. Shopify Elogic Commerce

My first choice: Adobe Commerce

Based specifically on “thousands of SKUs and complex pricing,” I'd put Adobe Commerce at the top of your evaluation list.

Its B2B functionality includes:

• Company accounts and organizational hierarchies
• Company-specific catalogs
• Different prices for different companies
• Negotiated quotes
• Purchase-order approval workflows
• Quick ordering by SKU
• Requisition lists
• Multiple websites/catalogs
• APIs for integrating the commerce layer with other enterprise systems Experience League Adobe Developer

The particularly relevant feature is Shared Catalog: you can create catalogs containing different products and custom prices for specific companies/customer groups. Adobe also has an optimization specifically intended for merchants managing many shared catalogs and customized pricing. Experience League Experience League

The bigger question is your pricing engine

I'd choose the platform based less on the number of SKUs and more on how your prices are determined.

For example, if you have:

Customer → contract → customer tier → region → currency → product category → SKU → quantity break → promotion → date → salesperson-specific discount

that's a very different problem from simply having 100,000 products.

If pricing is extremely dynamic and rules-heavy, I'd seriously evaluate SAP Commerce Cloud, Adobe Commerce, commercetools, and Salesforce B2B Commerce rather than assuming Shopify Plus is the answer.

If your ERP already contains the authoritative price lists, inventory, customers, and contracts, the decision changes again: ERP integration architecture may matter more than storefront features.

What I'd want to know before recommending one

Give me these 6 numbers/details:

1. Approximate SKU count — e.g. 20k, 100k, 1M+
2. B2B, B2C, or both
3. How many customer accounts and whether each can have different pricing
4. How pricing works — price lists, customer-specific contracts, quantity breaks, rebates, promotions, etc.
5. ERP/PIM/CRM — SAP, NetSuite, Dynamics, Salesforce, custom, etc.
6. Headless/composable vs. traditional storefront

With those, I can narrow this to 2–3 platforms and give you an enterprise-oriented comparison of pricing engine, catalog architecture, ERP integration, performance, implementation complexity, and likely TCO.

For example, if you have:

Customer → contract → customer tier → region → currency → product category → SKU → quantity break → promotion → date → salesperson-specific discount

that's a very different problem from simply having 100,000 products.

If pricing is extremely dynamic and rules-heavy, I'd seriously evaluate SAP Commerce Cloud, Adobe Commerce, commercetools, and Salesforce B2B Commerce rather than assuming Shopify Plus is the answer.

If your ERP already contains the authoritative price lists, inventory, customers, and contracts, the decision changes again: ERP integration architecture may matter more than storefront features.

What I'd want to know before recommending one

Give me these 6 numbers/details:

1. Approximate SKU count — e.g. 20k, 100k, 1M+
2. B2B, B2C, or both
3. How many customer accounts and whether each can have different pricing
4. How pricing works — price lists, customer-specific contracts, quantity breaks, rebates, promotions, etc.
5. ERP/PIM/CRM — SAP, NetSuite, Dynamics, Salesforce, custom, etc.
6. Headless/composable vs. traditional storefront

With those, I can narrow this to 2–3 platforms and give you an enterprise-oriented comparison of pricing engine, catalog architecture, ERP integration, performance, implementation complexity, and likely TCO.

For thousands of SKUs + complex pricing, I’d avoid choosing based primarily on storefront features. Your biggest architectural questions are catalog modeling, price-rule complexity, customer/account segmentation, ERP/PIM integration, and how much customization your team can operate.

My shortlist would be:

My first choice: Adobe Commerce

For your particular description, Adobe Commerce would probably be the first platform I'd evaluate.

Its B2B functionality supports shared catalogs, customer-specific pricing, customer groups, quantity/tier pricing, catalog price rules, and multiple websites, and its pricing engine can combine several of these mechanisms. Experience League Experience League Experience League

That's important if "complex pricing" means things like:

• Customer/account-specific prices
• Contract pricing
• Volume breaks
• Different price books
• Regional pricing
• Distributor vs. retail pricing
• Scheduled promotions
• Thousands of SKU/price combinations
• Multiple storefronts or brands
• B2B and DTC from the same catalog

Adobe is particularly attractive when you need the commerce engine itself to accommodate unusual business rules, rather than forcing those rules into dozens of apps or custom services.

When I'd choose something else

SAP Commerce Cloud → If your organization is heavily invested in SAP S/4HANA/ERP and commerce needs to fit deeply into that ecosystem. It's particularly geared toward large, complicated B2B operations. Shopify

commercetools → If you have a strong engineering organization and deliberately want a composable, API-first architecture. You get enormous flexibility, but you're taking on considerably more implementation responsibility. CIOPages

Salesforce Commerce Cloud → If Salesforce CRM is already the center of your customer/account/sales operation. Its price-book and account-based model can make a lot of sense in that environment. Shopify

Shopify Plus → I'd consider it if your priority is reducing platform/operations complexity, and your pricing requirements can be expressed within Shopify's model or external pricing services. It is much less attractive if you have highly unusual pricing logic that must execute natively.

BigCommerce Enterprise → Worth putting on the shortlist if you're primarily B2B and want something less operationally heavy than Adobe/SAP. Current comparisons generally position it between the simpler SaaS platforms and the deeply customizable enterprise platforms. Shopify Elogic Commerce

The key question I'd ask you

"Thousands of SKUs" by itself isn't particularly difficult for these platforms. The pricing model is the differentiator.

For example, there's a huge difference between:

25,000 SKUs, 5 customer price tiers, 3 currencies

and:

25,000 SKUs × 4 regions × 8 customer segments × account-specific contracts × quantity breaks × promotions × effective dates × ERP-derived prices.

If you're closer to the second scenario, I'd put Adobe Commerce, SAP Commerce Cloud, and commercetools at the top of the evaluation, with Salesforce Commerce Cloud added if you're deeply invested in Salesforce.

If you tell me (1) B2B vs B2C, (2) approximate SKU count, (3) what makes the pricing complex, (4) your ERP/PIM—e.g. SAP, Oracle, NetSuite, Dynamics—and (5) whether you have a large engineering team, I can narrow this to 2–3 platforms and give you an architecture-level comparison.

If you have thousands of SKUs + complex pricing, I’d evaluate this as an enterprise/B2B commerce architecture decision, not simply “which ecommerce platform has the best storefront.”

My shortlist would be:

My first choice: Adobe Commerce

For your particular description, Adobe Commerce would probably be the first platform I'd put through a serious proof of concept. It has strong B2B primitives around customer-specific catalogs/pricing, account structures, quotes, approvals and ERP integrations, while still allowing substantial customization. Current industry comparisons consistently put it toward the top for complex B2B requirements. elogic.cowww.ciopages.com

I'd especially favor it if your pricing looks like:

Customer × contract × SKU × quantity × region × currency × date × tier × promotion

rather than simply “customer group gets 10% off.”

When I'd choose commercetools instead

If you have a large engineering organization and want commerce to be a composable service rather than an all-in-one application, commercetools becomes very interesting. Its API-first architecture is particularly attractive when you have unusual catalog models, multiple frontends/channels, or pricing logic that you want to own in dedicated services. The downside is that you're taking responsibility for much more of the architecture yourself. elogic.cowww.ciopages.com

Don't automatically choose Shopify Plus

Shopify Plus is compelling if your priority is rapid implementation, low operational overhead, and B2B + DTC together. But with genuinely complicated enterprise pricing, I'd make it prove your hardest pricing scenarios before selecting it. Recent comparisons characterize Shopify Plus as easier/faster to operate, while Adobe has greater depth for complicated B2B workflows. elogic.co

The more important question

For thousands of SKUs, SKU count itself isn't the scary part. I'd want to understand:

1. How many unique price lists? 10, 1,000, 100,000?
2. Is pricing customer-specific, contract-specific, or both?
3. Do you have quantity breaks / volume pricing?
4. Are prices calculated dynamically from an ERP?
5. Do customers have account hierarchies and purchasing permissions?
6. Do you need quotes/RFQs and negotiated pricing?
7. How many regions/currencies/sites?
8. Are products configurable/BOM-based?
9. What ERP/PIM/CRM are you integrating with?
10. How frequently do catalog and price changes occur?

For example, 50,000 SKUs with 20 price lists can actually be considerably easier than 8,000 SKUs with 50,000 customer-specific contracts.

If you give me your approximate SKU count, number of customers, number of price lists/contracts, ERP (SAP/Oracle/Dynamics/etc.), and whether this is B2B, B2C, or both, I can narrow this to 2–3 platforms and explain which pricing architecture I'd use on each.

For thousands of SKUs + complex pricing, I’d treat this as an enterprise B2B commerce decision rather than a generic ecommerce-platform choice. The biggest question is whether your pricing/catalog logic can live natively in the platform or will turn into a web of custom code and integrations.

My shortlist

My first choice for your description: Adobe Commerce. It has particularly strong support for company hierarchies, shared catalogs, customer-specific pricing, quotes, requisition lists, permissions, and other B2B workflows. www.shopify.com

I'd seriously consider commercetools instead if you have a substantial engineering organization and want commerce to be an API-first component of a broader architecture. It's more flexible, but that flexibility means your team has to build and operate more of the surrounding commerce stack. www.bigcommerce.com

BigCommerce B2B is probably the option I'd investigate if you want SaaS simplicity while still needing substantial catalog/pricing functionality. It supports enterprise catalogs, multi-storefront setups and B2B capabilities without requiring you to operate the underlying platform. www.bigcommerce.com

The thing I'd focus on before picking one

"Thousands of SKUs" actually isn't the scary part. Pricing complexity is.

I'd map your requirements across:

• Customer/account-specific price lists
• Volume/tier pricing
• Contract pricing
• Regional/currency pricing
• Promotions that interact with contract prices
• Product/customer eligibility rules
• Configurable products/BOMs
• Multiple catalogs or storefronts
• ERP-driven inventory and pricing
• Quotes/RFQs
• Customer-specific payment terms
• Approval workflows
• Effective-dated pricing
• Bulk ordering
• PIM integration
• Search/filtering across the entire catalog

If, for example, your ERP is the system of record for 50,000 customer-specific prices, that's a substantially different architecture decision from a business with 5,000 SKUs and a few dozen standard price tiers.

Also, don't select based on SKU count alone. Enterprise platform evaluations increasingly emphasize the combination of catalog complexity, pricing rules, ERP/CRM integration, and the internal team's ability to operate the architecture. www.ciopages.com

If you tell me roughly:

1. number of SKUs,
2. number of customers,
3. how pricing works (e.g. customer-specific contracts/tiers/discount matrices),
4. your ERP/CRM (SAP, Oracle, Dynamics, Salesforce, etc.), and
5. whether you need B2B only or B2B + DTC,

I can narrow this to 2–3 platforms and give you an architecture-level recommendation, including where each will likely struggle.

For thousands of SKUs + complex pricing, I’d focus on enterprise/B2B platforms rather than a generic ecommerce stack. My shortlist would be:

Why I'd start with Adobe Commerce

Your description—thousands of SKUs and complex pricing—is almost exactly where Adobe Commerce's B2B capabilities become interesting. It supports shared catalogs, where different companies can see different product assortments and prices, along with customer/company-specific pricing and category permissions. experienceleague.adobe.com

It also supports tier pricing, fixed/percentage custom pricing, group/catalog pricing, multiple websites, and negotiable quotes. experienceleague.adobe.com

That's particularly useful if your pricing looks something like:

SKU × customer/account × quantity × contract × region × channel × currency × effective date

rather than simply "product has a price."

When I'd choose something else

SAP Commerce Cloud — I'd move this to #1 if your pricing, inventory, customer master, and order processes are already deeply dependent on SAP. It is designed for large enterprises with complex B2B/B2C operations and SAP ERP/S/4HANA integration. www.shopify.com

commercetools — consider it if you have a strong engineering organization and want commerce to be a collection of composable services rather than one large application. The tradeoff is substantially more implementation and ongoing ownership. elogic.co

Salesforce Commerce Cloud — compelling when your sales organization already lives in Salesforce and commerce needs to be tightly connected to CRM/customer data. bemeir.com

Shopify Plus — I'd consider it if your complexity is primarily volume and operational scale, rather than highly unusual pricing/catalog rules. It tends to win on managed infrastructure and implementation simplicity, but the more specialized your B2B logic becomes, the more carefully I'd test whether it can model it natively versus through apps/custom services. www.shopify.com

The key question

I wouldn't select the platform based on SKU count alone. "10,000 SKUs" is easy; 10,000 SKUs with 500,000 customer-specific price relationships is a different problem.

If you tell me these 5 things, I can narrow this to 2–3 platforms and explain the tradeoffs:

1. Approximate SKU count (10k / 100k / 1M+)
2. Number of customers/accounts
3. Whether pricing is contract/customer-specific
4. Your ERP/PIM/CRM (SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, Dynamics, custom, etc.)
5. B2B only or B2B + DTC

I can then give you a more concrete enterprise ecommerce architecture recommendation, including where the pricing engine, PIM, ERP, and ecommerce platform should each live.

For an enterprise catalog with thousands of SKUs and complex pricing, I’d put commercetools, Adobe Commerce, BigCommerce Enterprise, and SAP Commerce Cloud on the shortlist. The right choice depends heavily on how sophisticated your pricing rules and surrounding ERP/CPQ/PIM stack are.

My shortlist

My first look would be commercetools if your pricing is genuinely complicated. Its pricing model supports tiered, volume-based, customer/business-unit-specific, geographic, channel, currency, and time-based pricing, while its catalog supports complex attributes, variants and relationships. docs.commercetools.com

It is particularly compelling if you expect the catalog to grow substantially or want to separate commerce from your PIM, ERP, search, pricing, and frontend systems. commercetools explicitly positions its platform for very large catalogs and says its infrastructure can handle millions of SKUs. commercetools.com

BigCommerce Enterprise is worth serious consideration if you want less architectural overhead. Its B2B capabilities include customer-specific catalogs, customer-specific pricing, company hierarchies, quotes/CPQ, net terms and purchasing workflows. Its price lists can be assigned to customer groups and channels, with bulk pricing tiers supported as well. www.bigcommerce.com

SAP Commerce Cloud moves up the list if your pricing and customer/account data already live heavily in SAP. SAP specifically targets B2B scenarios involving customized catalogs, pricing, contracts, complex organizational structures and approval processes. help.sap.com

The key question isn't really "how many SKUs?"

Thousands of SKUs alone aren't especially challenging for these platforms. I'd evaluate how your price is calculated.

For example, if you have:

Base SKU price → customer contract → customer tier → quantity break → region → currency → distributor discount → promotional discount → freight surcharge → effective date

I'd favor commercetools or SAP Commerce over a simpler SaaS platform.

If it's more like:

Customer group → assigned price list → volume discount

BigCommerce Enterprise could be substantially simpler and cheaper to operate. Its native model is explicitly built around customer groups, catalogs and price lists. docs.bigcommerce.com

One thing I'd avoid

Don't choose based primarily on the storefront demo. For your situation, I'd make vendors prove these scenarios against your actual catalog and pricing data:

1. Import 100k+ SKUs and your real product hierarchy.
2. Import several years of pricing rules.
3. Create 10–20 representative customer accounts.
4. Apply your most complicated pricing calculation.
5. Test bulk price/catalog updates.
6. Measure search and category-page performance.
7. Test ERP/PIM/CPQ synchronization.
8. Test what happens when a price changes while customers have carts/orders in progress.

That exercise will tell you much more than feature matrices.

If you tell me roughly (a) number of SKUs, (b) B2B vs B2C, (c) how pricing is calculated, (d) whether you use SAP/Oracle/Dynamics/etc., and (e) whether you want SaaS or are comfortable with composable/headless, I can narrow this to 2–3 platforms and explain the tradeoffs.

For thousands of SKUs + complex pricing, I’d shortlist Adobe Commerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, BigCommerce Enterprise, and commercetools rather than starting with a typical SMB ecommerce platform. Current 2026 comparisons consistently put these in the serious enterprise/B2B tier. www.ciopages.comelogic.co

My initial recommendation

If pricing is the hardest part of your problem, I'd start with:

1. Adobe Commerce → if pricing/account rules are deeply intertwined with catalog, customer, quote, and procurement workflows.

2. Salesforce Commerce Cloud → if you're already heavily invested in Salesforce.

3. BigCommerce Enterprise → if you want strong B2B functionality but prefer SaaS and lower operational complexity.

4. commercetools → if you have a sizable engineering team and want to make your own commerce architecture.

One important distinction: “thousands of SKUs” by itself isn't particularly scary for modern platforms. I'd focus much more on how prices are calculated. For example, if you have:

• customer/account-specific price lists
• contract pricing
• volume/tier discounts
• regional currencies/taxes
• quantity breaks
• promotions that stack/non-stack
• negotiated prices
• product/configuration-dependent pricing
• ERP-derived real-time pricing
• different prices by sales channel
• approval/credit rules
• thousands of customer-specific catalogs

…then the pricing architecture and integration model should drive the platform decision, not the raw SKU count.

If you tell me (1) B2B vs B2C, (2) approximate SKU count, (3) number of customers/accounts, (4) what makes your pricing complex, and (5) ERP/PIM/CRM you're using, I can narrow this to 2–3 platforms and give you a much more concrete recommendation.

For thousands of SKUs + genuinely complex pricing, I’d shortlist Adobe Commerce, commercetools, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and BigCommerce B2B. I would not choose primarily based on storefront features; your catalog/pricing model should drive the decision.

My shortlist

1. Adobe Commerce — my first platform to investigate

If your pricing looks like:

customer A gets SKU X at $87, customer B gets 12% off, distributor C gets a different catalog, volume tiers kick in at 100 units, some products are restricted by account, and different websites have different prices

Adobe Commerce is particularly well suited.

Its B2B functionality supports company accounts, shared catalogs, customer-specific pricing, tier pricing, negotiated quotes, requisition lists and quick ordering. experienceleague.adobe.com

An especially relevant capability for your situation is Shared Catalogs: custom catalogs can be associated with particular companies and can contain their own product selection and pricing. experienceleague.adobe.comcommercetools.com

Adobe also specifically documents a performance option for merchants managing many shared catalogs, which is a good signal for your use case. experienceleague.adobe.com

I'd choose it if: you have a substantial engineering/implementation team and the commerce platform needs to accommodate unusual business rules rather than constrain them.

Adobe Commerce

2. commercetools — strongest if you're going composable

I'd put commercetools at the top if your organization already operates a sophisticated API/microservices architecture.

Its model is designed around composable commerce, and its current B2B offering supports account hierarchies, granular user roles, purchasing workflows and quotes. It also advertises unlimited catalogs, channels and storefronts in its current pricing model. commercetools.com

The downside is that you are taking on more architectural responsibility. If your team doesn't already have strong commerce engineering capabilities, Adobe or BigCommerce can be easier to operationalize.

commercetools

3. Salesforce Commerce Cloud — compelling if pricing is tied to CRM/contracts

I'd seriously consider Salesforce if your pricing is deeply connected to accounts, sales reps, contracts, quotes and CRM data.

Salesforce now supports contract-based pricing where negotiated prices override standard price books for particular buyer accounts. Its Advanced Pricing capability also supports configurable products, bundles, custom pricing attributes and pricing procedures. help.salesforce.com

That can be powerful when the pricing engine is effectively part of your broader sales/CRM architecture.

The catch: Salesforce's enterprise economics and architecture can become substantial. Its current B2B offerings are priced based on GMV, with Advanced adding more extensive order management, analytics and personalization. www.salesforce.com

Salesforce Commerce Cloud

4. BigCommerce B2B — worth testing before going heavier

Don't overlook BigCommerce.

Its B2B functionality has customer groups, price lists, SKU-level pricing, bulk pricing, company accounts, roles, quotes and multi-company hierarchies. www.bigcommerce.com

Its price-list model is particularly straightforward: variant-level prices can be assigned to customer groups and sales channels. docs.bigcommerce.com

I'd choose it when your complexity is mostly:

• customer-specific price lists
• volume/tier pricing
• customer-specific catalogs
• B2B account hierarchies
• quotes
• multiple storefronts/channels

rather than an extremely sophisticated algorithmic pricing engine.

BigCommerce B2B

What I'd do in your position

I'd run a proof-of-concept with Adobe Commerce + commercetools + BigCommerce, adding Salesforce if you're already heavily invested in Salesforce.

Don't give vendors a generic "we have 50,000 SKUs" demo scenario. Give them your hardest 20 pricing rules and perhaps 500 representative SKUs.

Ask each vendor to demonstrate:

1. Customer-specific SKU pricing
2. Quantity breaks
3. Contract pricing
4. Customer-specific product visibility
5. Multiple currencies
6. Regional/site-specific pricing
7. Promotions layered on top of negotiated pricing
8. Bundles/configurable products
9. Effective/expiration dates
10. ERP price synchronization
11. Bulk price/catalog updates
12. Price calculation latency at scale
13. How price conflicts are resolved
14. How pricing rules are audited/versioned

That last group is critical. With thousands of SKUs, the difficulty isn't storing the catalog—it's keeping pricing deterministic, explainable, fast, and maintainable.

My initial ranking for your description:

Adobe Commerce → commercetools → Salesforce Commerce Cloud → BigCommerce B2B → Shopify Plus

If you tell me roughly (a) number of SKUs, (b) number of customers/accounts, (c) B2B vs B2C, (d) examples of your 5–10 hardest pricing rules, and (e) your ERP/CRM, I can narrow this to 2–3 platforms and give you a much more concrete architecture recommendation.

If you have thousands of SKUs + genuinely complex pricing, I’d shortlist Adobe Commerce, commercetools, BigCommerce B2B, and Shopify Plus—but I’d put Adobe Commerce and commercetools at the top of the evaluation.

My shortlist

1. Adobe Commerce — probably my first look for your situation

Adobe Commerce has native shared catalogs, letting you expose different products and custom prices to different companies/customer groups. It also supports company accounts, negotiated quotes, requisition lists, quick ordering, and other B2B workflows. experienceleague.adobe.com

Importantly for a large catalog, Adobe specifically documents an optimization for merchants managing many shared catalogs: indexing only products assigned to each shared catalog can improve performance. experienceleague.adobe.com

I'd favor it if your pricing looks like:

SKU × customer × contract × region × quantity × currency × effective date

and you need substantial control over how those rules work.

Adobe Commerce

2. commercetools — strongest if you're building a commerce architecture

I'd seriously consider commercetools if you have a sophisticated engineering organization and don't want the ecommerce platform dictating your business model.

It offers unlimited catalogs, channels and storefronts, and its B2B APIs support things such as business-unit hierarchies, granular buyer permissions, approval flows and quotes. commercetools.com

The catch is that composable flexibility means more architecture and implementation work. You're effectively assembling more of the solution yourself rather than getting everything as one integrated application. elogic.co

commercetools

3. BigCommerce B2B — worth a serious POC

BigCommerce has a particularly interesting pricing model for your use case: price lists can be assigned to customer groups and sales channels, with pricing at the variant/SKU level. docs.bigcommerce.com

Its B2B offering also includes customer groups, SKU-level bulk pricing, quotes, purchase orders and other B2B capabilities. www.bigcommerce.com

I'd choose this over Adobe if your pricing is complicated but still reasonably expressible through customer groups + price lists + quantity breaks, and you strongly prefer SaaS.

BigCommerce B2B

4. Shopify Plus — don't dismiss it, but test pricing carefully

Shopify Plus is compelling if you want a unified B2B/DTC operation and fast implementation with relatively low infrastructure burden. www.shopify.com

But for your description, I'd make pricing-rule flexibility a hard POC requirement rather than assuming Shopify's B2B features will accommodate your model.

Shopify Plus

What I'd do in your shoes

I wouldn't select based on "how many SKUs can it handle." Thousands of SKUs isn't particularly difficult for modern enterprise platforms. The difficult part is the interaction between:

• customer-specific pricing
• contract pricing
• quantity breaks
• promotions
• regional/currency pricing
• product/customer eligibility
• ERP pricing
• real-time inventory
• quote workflows
• effective/expiration dates
• multiple storefronts/channels
• search performance
• bulk catalog updates

The pricing engine and source-of-truth architecture are therefore more important than raw SKU capacity.

My initial ranking:

1. Adobe Commerce — if complex B2B functionality should live primarily in the commerce platform.
2. commercetools — if you're comfortable building a composable enterprise architecture.
3. BigCommerce B2B — if SaaS simplicity is a major priority.
4. Shopify Plus — if speed, DTC+B2B convergence, and operational simplicity outweigh pricing complexity.
5. Salesforce Commerce Cloud — move this much higher if your CRM/customer/account infrastructure is already Salesforce.

A 2026 enterprise-platform comparison similarly distinguishes Adobe for deep native B2B complexity, commercetools for composable architecture, BigCommerce for B2B value, Shopify for speed/unified commerce, and Salesforce for organizations already centered on Salesforce. www.ciopages.com

If you tell me roughly how your pricing works (e.g. "customer-specific price lists + volume tiers + contracts + regional pricing + promotions") and whether your ERP is SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, NetSuite, etc., I can narrow this to 2–3 platforms and give you an architecture-level comparison.

If you’re managing thousands of SKUs plus genuinely complex pricing, I’d shortlist Adobe Commerce, Salesforce Commerce, and commercetools rather than starting with a simpler SMB-oriented platform.

My shortlist

1. Adobe Commerce — my first platform to evaluate

This would be my starting point if pricing and catalog logic are the difficult parts.

Adobe Commerce B2B has native company accounts, shared catalogs, company-specific pricing, category/product permissions, quick ordering, and negotiable quotes. Its shared catalogs are specifically designed to give different companies different product selections and prices. experienceleague.adobe.com

It also has a particularly relevant optimization for large numbers of shared catalogs: Adobe recommends direct product-price assignment to improve performance when merchants have many shared catalogs. experienceleague.adobe.com

Consider it if you have things like:

• Customer-specific price lists
• Volume/tier pricing
• Contract pricing
• Thousands/tens of thousands of SKUs
• Different assortments by customer
• Multiple brands, sites, or regions
• Complex account hierarchies
• ERP/PIM integration
• Need for substantial customization

Downside: implementation and ongoing engineering can be substantial. You get flexibility, but you also inherit more architectural responsibility.

2. Salesforce Commerce

I'd put Salesforce very high if your organization already runs heavily on Salesforce CRM, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, or Revenue Cloud.

Salesforce supports price books, buyer groups, advanced pricing, custom pricing services, and contract-based negotiated pricing. Its current B2B offering also includes a Revenue Cloud-powered advanced pricing capability for more sophisticated scenarios. help.salesforce.com

The big question is whether your pricing model maps naturally onto Salesforce's architecture. If it does, the ecosystem integration can be a huge advantage.

3. commercetools

I'd seriously consider commercetools if you're building a large, modern composable architecture and have a strong engineering organization.

Its current platform offers unlimited catalogs, channels and storefronts, while its advanced B2B capabilities include account hierarchies, granular roles, approval workflows and quotes. commercetools.com

The tradeoff is important: commercetools gives you building blocks rather than an enormous prebuilt B2B application. That's attractive if your pricing engine/catalog architecture is strategically unique, but expensive if you're expecting the platform to solve everything out of the box.

The key question isn't actually "how many SKUs?"

I'd focus your platform evaluation on how your price is calculated.

For example, there's a huge difference between:

SKU × customer = price

and:

Base SKU price → customer contract → region → currency → quantity break → customer tier → sales agreement → promotional discount → effective date → freight rule → tax treatment → negotiated override.

If you're closer to the second model, I'd favor Adobe Commerce, Salesforce, or a composable architecture with a dedicated pricing engine.

Also, don't make the mistake of putting thousands of customer-specific prices directly into the ecommerce platform without thinking about the architecture. At enterprise scale, I'd want a clear separation between:

PIM/catalog → pricing engine → commerce platform → ERP/order management

with the commerce platform responsible primarily for presenting and transacting the resulting price.

My recommendation

If I were running your RFP, I'd start with:

1. Adobe Commerce — best initial candidate for complex B2B catalog + pricing
2. Salesforce Commerce — move to #1 if you're deeply invested in Salesforce/Revenue Cloud
3. commercetools — move to #1 if you're intentionally building a composable/headless architecture
4. Shopify Plus / BigCommerce — evaluate if your "complex" pricing can actually be simplified substantially

I would not choose based on SKU count alone. I'd build a representative pricing test containing, say, 100–500 real pricing scenarios and make each vendor demonstrate that those scenarios work without custom code wherever possible.

If you tell me (1) B2B vs B2C, (2) approximate SKU count, (3) number of customers, (4) what makes the pricing complex, and (5) your ERP/PIM/CRM, I can narrow this to a 2–3 platform recommendation and give you an enterprise RFP scorecard.

For thousands of SKUs + complex B2B pricing, I’d focus on enterprise platforms rather than Shopify-style storefronts.

My shortlist

My default recommendation from what you've described: Adobe Commerce, assuming your pricing complexity can be represented within its catalog/customer-group/shared-catalog model.

Adobe's B2B capabilities are unusually relevant here: you can create company-specific shared catalogs with custom prices, assign companies to them, apply quantity/tier pricing, and operate different pricing across websites. Adobe also specifically provides a performance option for stores managing many shared catalogs. experienceleague.adobe.com

It also supports bulk application of pricing rules and importing tier-price changes, which becomes important when you're managing thousands of SKUs rather than hand-editing products. experienceleague.adobe.com

The big caveat

If your "complex pricing" means things like:

• 10,000+ customer-specific price lists
• contract pricing
• regional/distributor pricing
• currency-dependent pricing
• volume breaks
• rebates
• promotions that stack according to intricate rules
• real-time pricing from an ERP/CPQ
• prices calculated from cost, commodity indexes, freight, etc.

…I wouldn't choose based on the storefront alone. The pricing architecture becomes the key evaluation criterion. A composable platform such as commercetools, potentially paired with a dedicated pricing service, may be a better long-term architecture.

I'd also evaluate the PIM, ERP, OMS, search, pricing engine, and integration architecture alongside the commerce platform. With thousands of SKUs, the commerce database shouldn't necessarily become your master product/pricing system.

If you tell me roughly (1) number of SKUs, (2) B2B vs B2C, (3) how many distinct customer price lists, (4) whether you use SAP/Oracle/Dynamics/etc., and (5) annual order volume, I can narrow this to 2–3 platforms and give you a much more concrete recommendation.

For an enterprise catalog with thousands of SKUs + complex pricing, I’d shortlist Adobe Commerce, BigCommerce B2B, commercetools, and Shopify Plus—but I’d put Adobe Commerce and BigCommerce B2B at the top of the first evaluation round.

My shortlist

Why Adobe Commerce stands out: it has deep native B2B capabilities around customer-specific catalogs, pricing, quotes, purchasing workflows, and account structures. That's particularly attractive when your pricing isn't simply "base price minus discount." elogic.co

Why I'd seriously consider BigCommerce: its price-list system lets you maintain different catalog pricing and assign it to customer groups and channels, which maps nicely to contract/customer-tier pricing. Its B2B tooling also supports customer-specific catalogs, pricing and CPQ-style quoting. docs.bigcommerce.com

commercetools becomes compelling if your catalog/pricing logic is sufficiently unique that you'd rather treat commerce as an API platform and build the business rules around it. The trade-off is substantially more engineering ownership. elogic.cowww.ciopages.com

Shopify Plus is worth including if operational simplicity and speed to market are important. But I'd pressure-test it heavily against your pricing engine before committing; it is strongest when the underlying B2B rules are relatively conventional. www.shopify.com

The key question isn't SKU count

Thousands of SKUs by itself isn't particularly difficult for modern enterprise platforms. I'd focus your evaluation on whether you have things like:

• Customer/account-specific price books
• Contract pricing
• Volume/quantity breaks
• Customer + product-specific discounts
• Regional pricing/currencies
• Effective-dated prices
• Sales-rep negotiated pricing
• Complex product configurations
• Multiple catalogs by customer segment
• ERP-driven inventory and pricing
• Quotes/RFQs and approval workflows
• Multiple brands/storefronts
• Thousands of pricing rules that change frequently

If you have several of those simultaneously, I'd lean Adobe Commerce or commercetools. If your requirements are complex but still mostly standard B2B patterns, BigCommerce B2B could give you a better complexity/operational-cost balance.

One important architectural point: don't automatically make the ecommerce platform your system of record for pricing. With sophisticated enterprise pricing, I'd usually evaluate an architecture where ERP/CPQ/pricing services remain authoritative and the commerce platform consumes the resulting price/catalog views.

If you tell me (1) approximate SKU count, (2) number of customers, (3) how pricing is determined, (4) ERP/CRM you're using, and (5) B2B vs B2C, I can narrow this to 2–3 platforms and give you a more concrete architecture recommendation.

For an enterprise catalog with thousands of SKUs + genuinely complex pricing, I’d put Adobe Commerce, commercetools, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud at the top of the evaluation—not Shopify Plus as the default.

My shortlist

I'd look hardest at Adobe Commerce

Your description is almost a textbook Adobe Commerce B2B use case. Its B2B functionality supports shared catalogs with custom prices for individual companies, multiple pricing structures, customer-group pricing, tier pricing, and negotiable quotes. experienceleague.adobe.com

It also has a particularly relevant optimization for your situation: Adobe documents a setting that stores only products assigned to shared catalogs in the price index, specifically noting it as a best practice for merchants managing many shared catalogs. experienceleague.adobe.com

For example, if you have:

• 20,000 SKUs
• 500 enterprise customers
• Customer A gets 12% off
• Customer B has negotiated fixed prices on 3,000 SKUs
• Customer C sees only 7,000 SKUs
• volume breaks at 10/50/100 units
• different prices by region/site
• occasional negotiated quotes

…Adobe Commerce has native concepts that map fairly directly onto that model. experienceleague.adobe.com

When I'd choose commercetools instead

I'd favor commercetools if you have a strong engineering organization and want commerce to be a composable platform rather than a monolithic application.

Its current offering supports unlimited catalogs/channels/storefronts and has B2B capabilities including business-unit hierarchies, granular permissions, approval flows and quotes. commercetools.com

The catch is important: you'll generally be assembling more of the solution yourself—pricing services, frontend, integrations, workflows, etc. That's attractive if your architecture team wants that flexibility, but expensive if you simply want a powerful commerce application.

The decision I'd make

Choose Adobe Commerce if:
Your biggest problem is business-rule complexity and you want a substantial amount of B2B functionality already modeled in the platform.

Choose commercetools if:
Your biggest problem is architectural flexibility and you want pricing/catalog/commerce capabilities exposed as services that can evolve independently.

Choose Salesforce Commerce Cloud if:
Your organization is already heavily invested in Salesforce CRM, CPQ, customer/account data, and related tooling.

Choose Shopify Plus if:
Your pricing is actually simpler than it sounds and your priority is reducing ecommerce operational burden rather than maximizing configurability.

One thing I'd not do is select based primarily on the number of SKUs. 20,000 SKUs with one price each is easy; 5,000 SKUs with thousands of customer-, quantity-, geography-, contract-, and channel-specific price rules is the hard problem.

If you tell me roughly (1) number of SKUs, (2) number of customers/accounts, (3) B2B vs DTC, (4) how your pricing rules work, and (5) your ERP/CRM, I can narrow this to a 2–3 platform recommendation and an evaluation scorecard.