How can manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors better manage spending and ensure compliance over purchasing decisions? Here’s how automated buyer approval flows for orders by commercetools helps you achieve all that.
What are buyer approval flows?
Buyer approval flows are structured processes that govern how buyers and admins within an organization can review and approve order requests. These flows are essential for maintaining control over spending, ensuring compliance with internal policies and reducing the risk of unauthorized purchases.
These flows typically define the rules and conditions for an order to be approved, such as purchase amounts above certain monetary thresholds or specific categories. In addition, defining clear approval sequences is a core requirement for organizations to maintain control and accountability throughout purchasing processes.
Buyer approval flows are critical for B2B purchasing journeys for three main reasons:
Approval workflows ensure purchases align with budgets, internal policies and regulatory standards, reducing the risk of unauthorized spend or manual errors. Built-in checks and multi-level approvals help catch errors early and ensure compliance, minimizing financial and operational risk.
Every approval leaves a clear audit trail, making it easy to see who approved what and when, strengthening financial oversight. Additionally, this transparency simplifies the three-way matching process for the buyer’s organization throughout accounting, finance and procurement teams — a critical step to ensure timely payments to suppliers and vendors.
By clearly linking purchase orders (items ordered and their prices), packing slips (confirmation of items received) and invoices (final billed amounts), teams can quickly verify everything aligns before releasing payment. This reduces delays and errors, improves cash flow management and ensures smoother, faster payment processing.
Smart rule setting and automated notifications help eliminate bottlenecks, ensuring that the right people review and approve purchases quickly in a multi-stakeholder collaborative buying environment.
Buyer approval flows have existed for some time in B2B sales, though they have traditionally resided within ERP systems. However, B2B organizations modernizing their digital infrastructure are increasingly shifting these workflows into their commerce platforms to bring approval logic closer to the point of purchase. This helps improve user experience, accelerate decision-making and reduce friction in the buying process for business customers.
For buyer approval flows to deliver their full value, they must be tightly integrated across the broader B2B tech ecosystem, including other critical business systems of record like the ERP, CRM and Punchout. Interoperability ensures seamless data exchange, prevents duplicated efforts and enables a unified view of the purchasing journey.
An overview of buyer approval flows with commercetools
Buyer approval flows with commercetools Composable Commerce for B2B offer an OOTB flexible way to manage order approvals based on buying companies’ organizational structure (departments, subsidiaries or locations). At commercetools, this is called Business Units.
Within Business Units, you can set approval rules across different levels of your organization, ensuring that the right people review and authorize purchases. These rules can be based on a wide range of conditions, known as cart predicates, giving you complete control to customize approval criteria that mirror real-world approval chains. For example, you can trigger an approval flow if:
The total order value exceeds a certain amount.
The shipping cost is above a defined threshold.
Specific items or product categories are in the cart.
In more detail, buyer approval flows contain the following elements:
Approval rules encapsulate the conditions an order must follow to be approved. Structured hierarchically, approval rules allow for complex workflows with multiple tiers and conditions. Examples of rules include defining who has the authority to approve orders for specific products and/or orders above a certain financial threshold. Within commercetools, these rules are highly flexible, as there are virtually no limits to their complexity or logic layers. Thanks to support for custom fields, organizations can define approval logic tailored to their exact business requirements, allowing them to implement even the most nuanced and detailed workflows.
Approval hierarchies establish structured approval workflows based on Associate Roles and granular permissions, which define exactly what each user is allowed to buy and approve. For example, an administrator might configure roles like admin, buyer or approver to approve orders. This flexible setup removes the dependency on specific individuals by allowing approval rules to be assigned to entire roles or groups. This means approvals don’t get bottlenecked by a single person’s availability; anyone within the designated role or layer can step in to keep workflows moving.
For B2B businesses that need a faster time to market, a great option to configure approval flows is to use the Store Launchpad for B2B Manufacturing. This commercetools Frontend template helps you create a B2B commerce website based on the best practices of digital commerce UX and UI. Using the native capabilities for buyer approval flows, you can create an approval rule, configure up to five tiers of approvers and see the pending orders in this easy-to-use UI.
In addition, you can make approval processes even more efficient and faster with the message subscription capabilities supported by commercetools’ event-based architecture. Notifications ensure approvers are promptly informed about orders awaiting their approval.
When building such a flow, you can also add time limits for approval steps. This information could be set in the custom fields of the approval rule and even be dynamically defined by the buyer for each of their approval rules.
Use cases and real-life situations of buyer approval flows
There are many use cases in which configuring buyer approval flows can help maximize efficiency and ensure compliance. Our native capabilities support multiple scenarios:
Single approval: When buyers need one approval from a supervisor to complete an order.
Multi-approval (linear/sequenced): This is when buyers need approvals from multiple supervisors, and those approvals must follow a linear order, with one approver following the next.
Multi-approval (without sequence): Occurs when multiple approvers can accept an order request simultaneously, so it doesn’t matter which supervisor approves first.
Partial or conditional approvals: Buyers need approvals from multiple supervisors based on different rules. For example, one must approve the product type the buyer is ordering, and the second is entitled to approve based on the monetary value.
In real-life situations, you can decide how to apply sequential, non-linear and/or multi-layered approvals that fully match your customer’s organizational processes. Here are a few examples:
This is the classic case of adding scrutiny to purchases that exceed a certain monetary value to control high-value spending, prevent unauthorized large purchases and align spending with budgetary constraints. You can define approval flows based on the total order amount, e.g.:
Orders under $1,000: Automatically approved.
Orders between $1,000 and $5,000: Require approval from a department manager.
Orders over $5,000: Need approval from a director and potentially a VP.
Orders over $10,000: Need approval from all the aforementioned roles AND the CFO.
Certain goods or services (e.g., IT equipment, marketing services, legal consultations) require specialized review due to their nature or associated risks. This ensures subject matter experts review relevant purchases, mitigating risks and ensuring quality or compliance. Approval workflows can be triggered based on the product categories selected in the purchase request, such as:
Software purchases require an IT security review.
Marketing expenditures need approval from the Marketing Director.
Legal services require sign-off from the Legal Department.
Purchases must adhere to pre-negotiated contracts with specific vendors, and when deviations occur, procurement or legal teams require additional authorization. In this case, you can implement approval steps that verify if the purchase aligns with existing contract terms (e.g., pricing, quantity limits). This ensures adherence to contractual agreements, maximizes negotiated benefits and avoids potential legal or financial issues.
This is also where commercetools’ Business Unit-specific product catalogs, pricing and promotions come into play. Using those APIs, contractual entitlements, such as approved vendors, pricing or product restrictions, can be pre-configured. Approval flows then act as an additional safeguard, verifying that purchases align with these predefined terms. This helps ensure that only authorized items are purchased (e.g., an organizational policy might require that test tubes can only be bought from a specific vendor), maximizing negotiated benefits and reducing legal or financial risk.
Getting started with buyer approval flows
Whether managing approvals for multiple business units or customizing workflows for different purchase types, the flexibility of composable commerce allows you to tailor every detail to reflect your organizational workflows. You can always modify these approval flows according to your business, adapting to increasing complexity and larger organizational structures.
This unparalleled flexibility enables you to easily integrate cutting-edge technologies like AI to automate certain approval steps. For instance, agentic AI — a new subset of artificial intelligence — could be used to make decisions and execute tasks without constant human guidance. With APIs, subscription messages and robust data integrations, composable commerce provides the ideal infrastructure to support these intelligent workflows, so your business can drive operational efficiency, compliance and tighter spending control even further.
To build smarter, more adaptable approval workflows that elevate your operations, get started with commercetools Composable Commerce for B2B to streamline approvals — and a lot more.
Want to experience buyer approval flows in action — without strings attached? Get started with our 60-day free trial.
With more than a decade of experience managing product across commerce vendors, Alistair leads the team delivering core commerce functionality at commercetools. He has worked with B2B and B2C companies across industry verticals understand their needs and help them on their journeys. Alistair has always had a strong focus on helping companies deliver great experiences for their customers, building better long-term relationships.
Nils is a Senior Product Manager at commercetools. After 10+ years of building digital products in companies of all sizes, he now drives the development of commercetools B2B offering.