B2B product spotlight: A beginner’s guide to automated Quote Management with commercetools

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Why automated B2B quote management is so important 

B2B commerce has long been characterized by complex transactions, pricing negotiations, entitlements and tailored contracts. Unlike B2C sales, where standardized pricing models dominate, B2B interactions often involve custom terms, bulk discounts and long sales cycles. Historically, managing this complexity was done manually — a process prone to errors, inefficiencies and delays.

In fact, a survey indicates that B2B manufacturers are losing revenue due to outdated, manual quoting and sales processes, costing their companies an average of 5% of their revenue each year, with 88% of respondents reporting lost deals. The main culprits for this negative business impact include: incompatibility with complex approval processes, manual quoting that prevents sales reps from providing sufficient pricing flexibility, and data entry errors.

The good news is that the quoting process is ripe for automation, and even more so with the rise of agentic AI. For instance, Forrester Research predicted that 20% of B2B sellers will be forced to engage in agent-led quote negotiations in 2026, enabling B2B sellers to accelerate the sales cycle by reducing response times, ensuring consistency and accuracy in pricing, handling custom requirements and negotiating deals that enhance customer satisfaction. 

B2B organizations often rely on a quoting-based process for a variety of purchasing scenarios:

• For lightly customizable products like electronics, quotes ensure accurate pricing based on specifications. 
• When buying made-to-order (MTO) products such as jewelry or high-end furniture, quotes help align customization options with costs. 
• For complex, capital-intensive purchases like boats, machinery or microscopes, detailed quotes are essential to address specific technical and financial considerations. 
• Bulk purchasing, such as ordering customized track jackets for an entire company, also benefits from volume discounts reflected in quotes. 

Enabling automated quoting processes for these use cases brings a range of benefits: 

• Businesses can negotiate discounts for committing to specific quantities or minimum order amounts from the start, generating more predictable revenue. 
• The quoting process gets even easier when it’s possible to convert an accepted quote into an order automatically. 
• Frees up the seller’s time to focus on value-adding activities.
• Greater operational efficiency from the digitization of manual overhead. 
• Faster negotiations and faster time-to-transaction, especially when automated quoting works hand in hand with automated approval flows. 
• Finally, frictionless customer experiences, loyalty and retention. 

commercetools empowers your business to automate quoting management in different ways, including the Quotes API and the B2B Intake Agent.‍

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An overview of the commercetools’ Quotes API 

Whether your business sells complex, custom or costly products and services, the Quotes API by commercetools B2B Commerce can support the automation of the quoting process between buyers and sellers without friction. Here’s an overview of an intended workflow using Quotes: 

• Quote request: This is the starting point of the negotiation process between a buyer and the seller. The buyer selects items to purchase and requests a quote, expressing interest in receiving an offer from the seller. 
• Staged quote: After receiving the buyer’s quote request, the seller prepares an initial offer and sends it to the buyer. At this point, the seller can provide discounts at the line item level or to the quote as a whole, adjust the quantity, add new products, add comments and provide an expiration date. 
• Quote: Upon receiving the offer (the quote), the buyer can accept, decline or renegotiate it. Once the quote is accepted, it’s the legally binding result of the negotiation process between a buyer and a seller. Based on that agreement, an order is created.

The commercetools Quotes API provides a wide range of capabilities that take your automated quotation management further, including:  

1. Dynamic quote creation
The Quotes API allows businesses to create quotes tailored to specific customer requests. Whether it’s a bulk order or a request for customized products, the API can handle it all.

2. Flexible and extensible quote management
Model and reflect your existing sales and quoting processes, including generation, negotiation and acceptance, in accordance with your unique business requirements. 

3. Seamless integration
Designed to integrate with existing systems, the API works effortlessly with other commercetools services, such as product data or inventory availability. This ensures that quotes are always based on accurate, up-to-date information.

4. Approval workflows
The Quotes API supports customizable approval workflows, ensuring compliance with company purchasing policies and enhancing control over pricing decisions. 

In other words, you can implement purchasing checks and balances, align with required accounting processes, and ensure authorized purchases based on specific criteria, e.g., order total, shipping costs, product SKU, etc. 

5. Notifications
Through commercetools subscription capabilities, you can create event-based notifications for each stage of the quote lifecycle, for example, when the quote is generated, edited, accepted or approved. By leveraging subscriptions, you can integrate workflows like email notifications, ensuring both the seller and the buyer are promptly informed about important quote updates, streamlining communication and expediting decision-making processes. 

6. Versioning and audit trails
Every change to a quote is tracked, providing complete visibility and an audit trail of its status. With the capabilities of Audit Log, you can track changes made on quotes, quote requests and staged quotes. You also get real-time insights into pending and accepted offers.

This feature is invaluable for industries with strict regulatory requirements or for resolving disputes.

7. Customer-specific pricing and discounts
The feature supports personalized pricing based on customer contracts, volume discounts or other negotiated terms. This ensures that each quote reflects the unique relationship between the business and its client. 

For example, say a Business Unit of your company has specific prices, which is visible in your buyer portal. An associate can request a quote, and the seller can provide an additional discount on the staged quote based on existing entitlements, e.g., orders placed over US$500 receive free shipping.   

8. Scalability and performance
Built on a modern, cloud-native infrastructure, the Quotes API can handle large volumes of requests without compromising performance. This scalability makes it ideal for enterprises that must process large SKU counts and order volumes.

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Managing quotes in the Merchant Center 

The commercetools Merchant Center — our command center for all things commerce — offers a user-friendly interface for managing quotes, enabling your sales representatives to harness automated quote management without extensive technical expertise. Here are the main actions in a quote process supported by the Merchant Center:

Your sales representatives can create quotes, selecting the customer or account for which the request is being created. They can add products, quantities and pricing details; the system automatically fetches pricing information based on pre-configured rules or customer-specific contracts. Moreover, they can edit, review and finalize the quote. 

If the buyer wants to renegotiate a quote, sales representatives can edit quotes in the Merchant Center. They can change the quote, adding line items, adjusting quantities, applying discounts and even adding a note to the buyer. Each version of the quote is saved, ensuring that there’s a complete history of changes for your reference.

In conclusion, the commercetools Merchant Center streamlines the entire quote management process, empowering sales representatives to efficiently create, edit and track quotes while maintaining a clear history of all interactions. This ensures a seamless and professional experience for both your team and your buyers.

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An overview of the commercetools’ B2B Intake Agent

Many B2B organizations get quote requests from buyers through email, PDFs, spreadsheets and other unstructured formats. For sales reps, this means they have to spend time manually entering data across different systems, leading to operational inefficiencies, error-prone data entry, and, ultimately, longer sales cycles and friction in the buying journey. 

The B2B Intake Agent solves this problem with an AI assistant that converts unstructured buyer requests into  quotes across any channel, from HTTP API to Zendesk, Slack or a storefront portal, all via API-based integrations. In other words, the Intake Agent: 

• Ingests data from multiple formats, from emails to CSV files.
• Extracts the SKUs and quantities and maps them to the commercetools product catalog. 
• Matches sender email addresses to specific Business Units already recorded in the system. 
• Initiates quotes for sales reps with a fully editable draft, so they can finalize and communicate quotes to the buyer. 
• Allows for real-time integration and synchronization with upstream or downstream processes and systems of record, such as ERP or CRM systems.

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Why choose commercetools to automate your B2B quoting

commercetools is built for the next era of agentic B2B commerce, where quoting is no longer a manual process but an intelligent, automated workflow spanning systems, channels and touchpoints:

From complex workflows to streamlined execution: The Quotes API enables end-to-end quote management — from request to negotiation to acceptance — supporting discounts, approvals, and pricing adjustments at every stage. This helps businesses handle even highly complex sales cycles with speed, consistency and control.

Seamless integration across your commerce ecosystem
Quotes are connected to your broader commerce stack. The Quotes API integrates with product data, pricing, inventory, ERP and CRM systems, ensuring every quote is based on accurate, real-time business data.

Built for agentic B2B commerce
B2B quoting is shifting from manual coordination and data entry to AI-assisted and increasingly autonomous workflows. With commercetools, businesses can automate key steps in the quote lifecycle while still supporting complex negotiations, approvals and pricing logic that require human input.

Empowering sales teams, not replacing them
Sales representatives can create, manage, edit and renegotiate quotes efficiently through intuitive tools like the Merchant Center. Automated workflows reduce manual effort, so teams can focus on customer relationships, pricing strategy and closing deals.

Frictionless experience across every touchpoint
Whether initiated via storefront, sales rep or external channels, buyers can move through even complex purchasing processes faster and with less friction, while maintaining flexibility for negotiation and customization.

commercetools is trusted by global manufacturers, distributors, and wholesalers, including stationery manufacturer BIC and sustainability company Treedom, to modernize and scale their commerce operations, providing the foundation for a shift from manual, fragmented quoting processes to increasingly autonomous B2B commerce.

To learn more about automating your quote management process with commercetools, get started with our 60-day free trial.