"It Depends Who's Asking": Why Complex Pricing Breaks Most E-Commerce Platforms

Here's a question that sounds simple: how much is this product?

For a retail customer, €12.99. For a trade customer with a negotiated discount, €11.50. For a volume buyer on tiered pricing, €9.80. Same product, same shelf, three prices - and that's before VAT rules get involved.

Customer-specific pricing. Tiered discounts based on volume. Trade accounts with negotiated rates. Pricing that lives in the ERP, not the website. For B2B and hybrid B2B/B2C businesses this isn't exotic. It's how Wednesday works. And it's one of the most reliable reasons mid-market businesses outgrow templated platforms.

The tubing that broke the matrix

Primasil are a silicone manufacturer. They sell tubing. Sounds simple enough.

Except the tubing comes in different sizes. Different colours. Different hardnesses. Already you've got a matrix. Then there are discounts for length (buy more metres, pay less per metre) and discounts for quantity (buy more units, the price drops), and those stack. Then layer in customer price groups, as trade customers have negotiated rates that differ from retail.

So the price of a single SKU depends on size, colour, hardness, how much you're buying, how long the lengths are, and who you are. The price matrix had more dimensions than a sci-fi film.

Try doing that with a templated platform's pricing engine. You end up with ten thousand variants, or a tangle of marketplace apps that don't talk to each other and each take a monthly fee for the privilege.

With Umbraco, we built exactly what Primasil needed. The pricing logic lives in the website, pulls from the ERP periodically, and just works. That's the flexibility you get when you're not fighting a platform's assumptions about how pricing should behave.

One platform, two experiences

Closely related: a lot of mid-market businesses aren't purely B2C or purely B2B. They're both. Same products, different prices, different checkout flows, different account features.

Templated platforms tend to solve this by pretending B2B doesn't exist, or by bolting on a half-baked answer through plugins. Enterprise platforms solve it by selling you two platforms. Neither is a great look.

The flexible answer is one product catalogue with two customer experiences on top: proper trade accounts with negotiated pricing and approval workflows, and a public retail checkout alongside. Same data, same stock, same orders flowing into the same ERP.

If you're a business hitting this wall

If you've been contorting your pricing to fit your platform (collapsing trade tiers, maintaining duplicate products, emailing spreadsheets to your best customers because the website can't show them their price), the platform is the problem, not your pricing.

And when you brief a new project, lead with the pricing complexity rather than burying it. It's not embarrassing, it's a signal that you've got real trade relationships. Any agency worth talking to will hear "we need trade login with account pricing AND a public shop" and lean in, not wince.

If you're an agency or Umbraco partner

When a prospect starts describing complex pricing, your ears should prick up. It's a qualification signal: this is a business with genuine requirements and genuine budget, sitting squarely in the mid-market sweet spot.

It's also a scoping signal. Complex pricing usually means real-time or near-real-time lookups against the ERP, customer authentication before prices display, and careful caching to keep the site fast. None of that is frightening, but all of it needs pricing into the quote. Which is exactly why "where does pricing live?" made our discovery shortlist last week.

The takeaway

If your pricing depends on who's asking, you've outgrown templated commerce. That complexity isn't a problem to apologise for - it's a sign of a real trading business, and the platforms and partners that handle it well are the ones built for the mid-market. Lead with it in discovery, scope it properly, and it becomes a strength rather than a workaround.

Next week: the warning signs. Four phrases that should make everyone in an e-commerce project slow down, told from both sides of the table.

Tim Gaunt is the founder and CEO of TSD, a UK e-commerce agency that's been designing, building and supporting complex commerce platforms for over 20 years. This post is part of a series based on his Codegarden 2026 talk, The €200k Sweet Spot.