There may be some people who are new to these concepts.

If you're asking yourself, what is B2B pricing exactly and how is it different from the general concept of pricing that everyone is already familiar with, then you're in luck! We're going to explain it. Pricing on its own is just the basic idea of deciding what things will cost. Simple, right?

However, B2B pricing strategy is a different beast altogether. B2B pricing stands for business-to-business pricing, meaning the process of determining the cost of products and services that businesses sell specifically to other businesses as opposed to B2C pricing which would be setting prices for things that businesses sell to customers.

For that reason, B2B pricing strategies need to be more complex and flexible than a B2C pricing strategy. B2C customers typically go through a simple eCommerce process, pay the same price as everyone else, and provide their payment via debit or credit card number at checkout. This is much simpler than the B2B process.

In B2B eCommerce, customers don't usually pay when they order. They may submit orders in various ways other than the standard checkout process, so the system needs to accommodate them. Many B2B customers don't have permission to make purchases without authorization either. Even after a price is agreed to by both parties, B2B customers don't pay at the time of purchase, an invoice is sent to them.

Also, B2B customers typically don't all pay the same price. That's why B2B pricing strategies often include various methods like dynamic pricing for custom-configured goods, negotiated pricing for contract clients, deal pricing for large volume orders, prestige pricing for luxury products, and so on. If you want to learn about any of this in more detail, B2B marketing strategy PDFs can easily be found online.

B2B pricing tools are how businesses can automate features like presenting dynamic pricing and discounts,

turning their B2B pricing strategies and customer selections into tangible orders that can be filled, and creating BOLs, quotes, and invoices to send to the customer. CPQ software is a great example of a useful B2B pricing tool.

Pricing solutions software isn't always a perfect fit that fills all of a business's needs exactly. However, it can be leveraged alongside plugins like B2B pricing calculators or whatever extension best fits your needs. The McKinsey pricing strategy is a method of using five modules to analyze conditions in real time and generate price change recommendations in response to real-world factors as they happen.

Due to the way it incorporates multiple factors into its analysis, including omnichannel pricing, competitor prices, and how the price affects demand and consumer perceptions, using the McKinsey pricing strategy can actually impact the larger market as a whole and then respond to the changes it caused in real-time. For that reason, this strategy should be considered a B2B pricing tool in and of itself.

B2B pricing can be extremely complex and difficult to understand at first.

This is especially true due to the fact that an item's B2B price can—and should—fluctuate in response to numerous factors. The McKinsey pricing strategy is a great example of this and shines some light on a number of the variables. It also provides a wonderful demonstration of how the process plays out.

Seasonal pricing is also something that can have a huge effect on B2B pricing trends. Pricing trends that may go unnoticed by businesses can be illuminated by B2B pricing analytics. That's why B2B pricing analytics are so important. They can detect patterns that people can't and analyze massive amounts of data in a fraction of the time.  

All of this complexity makes the topic rather dense and difficult to digest. B2B pricing examples can provide a lot of insight into these nuanced issues. There are also great resources like B2B pricing strategy PDF guides to help break everything down into easier and more detailed explanations. They often contain great B2B pricing examples to help people understand how these concepts work in practice.

While we went over the very basic differences between B2B vs B2C pricing, there's a lot more to it.

The topic contains a great deal of nuance and can often depend on the industry in question. That's why there's even specialized B2B pricing software for particular industries like business services, manufacturing, technology, and medical devices.

All the factors that go into B2B pricing strategies and how different they are from B2C methods also make it necessary for B2B pricing software to have solutions that work in those scenarios. As we covered earlier, it's also necessary to understand all the factors that go into different B2B pricing trends and the best practices for responding to them.

This is a lot of information that contains a ton of subtle distinctions. It can be very helpful to look over more detailed resources on the subject. There are guides meant to help people understand the difference between B2B and B2C with examples. You can even go into specific guides for topics like what is B2B and B2C collections in eCommerce businesses. There's a lot of helpful information out there.

B2C pricing strategies exist to set the cost of products and services sold to individual customers all generally paying the same price.

Since B2C customers provide their payment at checkout, B2C systems don't need the same variation as B2B ones. Plus, B2C transactions only allow a few of the most common payment methods.

All that standardization makes the subject of B2C pricing a much simpler one than that of B2B pricing strategies. In addition to that, the B2C pricing strategies themselves are also much simpler. If you look at some B2B pricing strategy examples, you'll notice that many of them leverage a simple competition-based pricing method. It doesn't have nearly as many variables as B2B pricing strategies can.

Researching some competitive pricing company examples can give you a better idea of the types of businesses that use this approach. Competition-based pricing is quite common, so it shouldn't be hard to find plenty of specific competitive pricing examples to illustrate the point further. All of these reasons highlight why B2B pricing strategies require specialized B2B pricing software solutions that have systems in place to handle the unique needs of B2B eCommerce businesses.