B2B buying is not a solo act — and it has become increasingly more multi-layered and complex. Whether between buyer and seller teams, cross-functional buying groups or procurement and associates within an organization, collaborative buying capabilities are gaining traction not only for automation and efficiency but also to break purchasing gridlock. Here’s how commercetools enables collaborative buying for the B2B customers of manufacturers, distributors and wholesalers.
What’s collaborative buying?
Collaborative buying is the process in which multiple individuals or teams select, approve and purchase products or services within the B2B sector. In digital commerce, collaborative buying enables B2B professionals from both the buyer and seller sides to coordinate tasks, including (but not limited to) assembling purchasing lists and obtaining approvals from supervisors and/or procurement teams.
While collaborative buying isn’t new, its importance has grown in recent years. Sellers now face longer sales cycles due to the multilayered B2B buyer journeys that have become commonplace across large-scale manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors. This shift has highlighted the need for more integrated and automated processes that enhance collaboration between sellers and buyers, as well as among multiple B2B buying groups within a single organization.
The increasing challenge of multi-layered B2B purchasing processes
Source: Gartner
Although automating and digitizing the purchasing process significantly reduces sales cycles, adopting a collaborative approach further enables organizations to streamline workflows, leading to faster decision-making and quicker deal closures.
The foundation of collaborative buying: Granular roles and permissions
In B2B commerce, buying decisions are typically made deliberately and through collective effort — not by a single individual with an impulse, but by teams that span procurement, operations, finance and compliance with a mandate. Coordinating these decisions can be challenging, especially when managing the buying workflows manually.
Using eCommerce usually helps coordinate these processes, but there’s a catch: Only when you can accurately apply access rights and set roles and responsibilities within the system that align with the nuances of the buying process can your business unlock collaboration at every stage.
For instance, a lab technician might have permission to add items to a shared shopping list, but only the regional procurement lead can finalize and submit the order. In another scenario, a centralized procurement team might aggregate purchase requests from multiple departments to optimize shipping and negotiate pricing. By embedding these permissions throughout the purchasing workflow, you can determine which roles can access and perform which actions, automating and controlling the entire process. The result: Increased efficiency and speed.
With commercetools, collaboration is built on a flexible and secure permissions model that gives enterprises full control over who can do what and where. This is powered by four core elements: Business Units, Associates, Associate Roles and Approval Flows.
Business Units represent a buying organization’s structure, such as departments, subsidiaries or locations. Each unit can manage its own resources like orders, carts and shopping lists. In other words, you can map business customers and their divisions into the data model, enabling sellers and business associates to place orders, quotes and more on behalf of their Business Units.
Associates are the users assigned to Business Units. They could include procurement officers, office managers, lab coordinators, finance approvers or anyone involved in the buying process — each tied to one or multiple Business Units depending on their responsibilities.
Associate roles and granular permissions define exactly what each user is allowed to do. For instance, when you assign roles to team members, you define permissions associated with specific actions, e.g., approving a quote. Furthermore, you can assign multiple roles to a single associate to reflect real-world workflows and access needs.
Approval flows enable B2B buyers to define approval rules for orders created by their organization so that only approved orders are processed. With buyer approvals, you can determine conditions that necessitate the requirement for an order to be approved, making it easier to structure multi-tiered approval processes for B2B ordering.
In addition to improving and speeding up operational efficiency, this level of granular permissions allows organizations to reduce risk and ensure compliance — critical factors in high-stakes, complex purchasing environments.
Defining granular roles and permissions is the first step, but what makes these features truly powerful is the ability to provide API endpoints that validate whether a user has access or permission to perform specific actions. Automating this process within your commerce backend is vital, as it allows the system to grant or deny access based on predefined permissions.
Moreover, commercetools offers an Audit Log Premium service, providing full visibility into who performed what action and when. This transparency supports compliance policies and fosters accountability across collaborative teams.
Real-world use cases of collaborative buying
By combining flexible roles with a structured approach to permissions and Business Units, commercetools makes collaborative buying secure, scalable and compliant so teams on both sides of the purchasing journey can work together with confidence and control. It’s this foundation that powers the advanced B2B buying workflows seen in the four use cases that follow.
Predefined shopping lists are powerful tools for streamlining B2B reordering for frequently used products. Buyers can reuse a purchasing list, such as a Bill of Materials (BOMs), that contains all the individual products required for specific workflows or processes, from diagnostics kits to ingredients required for recipes.
A great example comes from the food supply industry: Dawn Foods, an American bakery and baked goods company. Imagine a bakery customer regularly ordering the same ingredients — flour, sugar, cocoa powder — for a signature chocolate cake. By using a shopping list that functions like a preconfigured kit, the buyer can add all to the cart in one click, adjust quantities if needed and proceed directly to checkout.
A collaborative buying approach ensures clarity around which individuals or teams can create, edit and approve these shopping lists. For instance, while department managers might edit their own lists, a centralized procurement officer could be responsible for consolidating those lists into a single large cart.
This structured model optimizes shipping and supports bulk purchasing. As orders grow in complexity — e.g., a Bill of Materials with 100+ items — teams across departments can contribute effectively without stepping on each other’s toes.
B2B organizations rely on a consistent set of materials that must be regularly restocked to keep operations running smoothly. By creating a standardized list of essential consumables, businesses can streamline reordering, maintain inventory levels and adjust quantities with ease.
This not only reduces decision-making time and manual effort but also simplifies the recurring purchase cycle. Features like “quick add to cart” and flexible shipping options allow buyers to centralize procurement while distributing products across multiple locations, enhancing both convenience and cost efficiency.
Granular permissions prevent unauthorized changes and allow visibility across all team members, ensuring everyone is working with the most up-to-date and accurate information. For example, lab technicians can add new reagents they require to the list, but the procurement manager must approve the final order, ensuring compliance and reducing risk.
Centralized procurement offers significant advantages, from cost savings to logistical efficiency. By aggregating purchasing lists across departments into a centralized cart, businesses can optimize delivery, leverage bulk pricing and simplify internal approval workflows.
For example, individual office or lab managers may create their own shopping lists — whether for consumables, equipment or standardized materials — based on their location’s needs. A centralized procurement officer or team then aggregates these lists, streamlining them into a single order. This consolidated request then moves through an approval flow designed to ensure budget oversight and compliance before the final order is placed.
In this setup, both local teams and the centralized buyer benefit. Local managers can quickly select their required products from predefined shopping lists, reducing the time spent on repetitive purchasing tasks. They can also adjust quantities based on their current needs, ensuring accurate and up-to-date orders. The procurement officer, on the other hand, retains oversight of the entire process and ensures that each purchase meets organizational standards, compliance and budget guidelines.
While certain user roles are originally designed for the buyer side, many B2B enterprises are taking it a step further by supporting seller-side collaboration.
A common example is the use of a “super admin” role on the seller side, granting broad access that mirrors customer-side buyer permissions. This enables sellers to step in and assist buyers directly by adding items to carts, adjusting orders or troubleshooting in real-time. It’s a powerful way to support hybrid sales models, where digital and human-assisted selling work hand in hand to drive conversion and customer satisfaction.
At the same time, granular roles and permissions are crucial to ensure sellers have permissions only for their assigned clients, preventing unauthorized access and protecting customer data. The ability to “act on behalf” of a buyer, within clearly defined boundaries, has become an essential tool for B2B sellers looking to deliver high-touch, high-trust commerce experiences at scale.
Getting started with collaborative buying
commercetools makes it easy to help you infuse collaborative buying — especially for buyer-side collaboration — by reflecting your customers’ organizational structure into your purchasing journeys. You can control who has access to what by assigning granular roles and permissions to associates within your customers’ organizations. This allows your customers to decide which of their associates can access and perform specific actions, such as creating carts and placing orders.
commercetools gives you the flexibility to shape your commerce operations your way, empowering both buyers and sellers to collaborate more efficiently, make decisions faster and deliver better outcomes.
Want to experience collaborative buying in action — without strings attached? Get started with our 60-day free trial.
Julia is a Senior B2B Product Expert at commercetools. With over a decade of experience across product and marketing teams in the tech world, she is an expert at creating innovative, customer-first strategies, and excelling in cross-functional growth & GTM initiatives.
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.