eCommerce B2B Marketplace Platform — UK Industrial Supplies

B2B Pricing Engine

Customer-specific pricing: 3,400 accounts × 84,000 SKUs = potential 285 million price points.

Architecture

pricing rules engine rather than stored price matrix.

Rules

customer tier (platinum/gold/silver/bronze), product category discount, quantity break pricing, and promotional overrides.

Cache

Redis product catalogue with customer-specific price decoration per session (computed on-demand, cached 60 minutes).

Price display

authenticated customer sees their negotiated price — unauthenticated visitors see RRP.

Credit accounts

£5,000–£500,000 credit limits per account (set by sales team).

PO workflow

• buyer submits order with PO number → credit check (available credit vs order value) → auto-approve or refer to credit controller → invoice generated on despatch.
• Multi-buyer accounts: multiple users per account with different permissions (buyer, approver, viewer).

Approval workflow

orders above £5,000 require account admin approval before processing.

HMRC CIS

construction industry customers are CIS contractors — they must have materials purchases separated from labour for CIS reporting.

B2B marketplace CIS feature

customer flags account as CIS, VAT invoice separates materials and delivery charges, CIS monthly return data export (CSV in HMRC CIS return format).

HMRC CIS verification

supplier verifies subcontractor registration status via HMRC CIS API before first payment.

VAT invoice requirements

customer VAT number, supplier VAT number, invoice number (sequential), VAT breakdown by rate (0%, 5%, 20%), supply date.

Xero integration

invoices automatically synced to Xero (Xero API) on despatch — no double-entry.

Customer VAT validation

HMRC Check a UK VAT Number API — verify customer VAT registration at account creation.

Making Tax Digital

Xero handles MTD VAT return submission from synced invoice data.